Followership: An Essential Component of Leadership Development

By Marc and Samantha Hurwitz

Almost 35 years ago, Robert Kelley wrote a seminal Harvard Business Review article on the importance of followership to organizations noting that about 80% of team success is attributable to the skill of followers. In 2009, Austin Agho published a survey of 300 C-suite leaders where nearly 100% stated followership was important to organizational success but only 4% believed people knew how to follow. Another research paper, which is noted in our book, “Leadership is Half the Story: A Fresh Look at Followership, Leadership, and Collaboration,” identified that improved followership had a whopping 17% to 43% impact on every metric important to organizations — top line, bottom line, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, quality, etc. We know from research that about 30% of performance appraisals are related to followership behaviors. Put all these facts together and you can see just how important it is that we train people of followership.