The next meditation on courageous followership from Ira Chaleff’s excellent book “The Courageous Follower” is: If I abuse power, I can learn from others and change my behavior. Keep in mind, this is an encouragement for us in our roles as followers.
There are a number of ways followers can abuse power. Many of them are associated with our proximity and access to leaders with power. If we are a gatekeeper for our leader, we can grant access to the leader to those we favor and restrict access to those we don’t like. We can filter the information we pass to our leaders, distort it with our biased opinions, or totally withhold important information in an attempt to blindside our leaders. And we can pretend to represent a request or position was authorized by our leader when in fact we are acting in our own self-interest.
Power can be intoxicating, and it does not take much power for good people to do uncharacteristically bad things. We need to develop the skills to recognize and confront our own weaknesses with power before we become powerful enough to do real damage to ourselves and others.
We need to surround ourselves with people we can trust to tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear. When these courageous peers help us see the integrity gaps in our behavior, we should thank them and encourage them to continue to help us stay true to our shared purpose.
Change is hell, and it hurts to admit to ourselves and others that our behavior is not what it needs to be. With the help of others, we can learn to keep our personal power demons subservient to the better angels of our nature.
Related Posts:
The hardest thing I have to do as a leader
ACT change: Develop a vision for the common good
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Bret,
You are so very right! When you don’t have courageous followers around you, it is very hard to not only stay the course with respect to the shared purpose but even be effective as a leader and as group/department overall.
And, thanks for braving the cold and snow to do this video post. Your viewing public appreciates your effort!
Sharon
http://www.sharonmarkovsky.com
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
January 22nd, 2010 at 7:55 am
the cold and snow don’t bother me, but the wind makes is hard on the audio! Effective followers are so very important – thanks for sharing, Sharon! Bret
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What a great post, Bret. This one combined with yesterdays create some definite food for thought for followers. We don’t often think of followers as having power, or being able to help a leader change their behavior. They so often think they are powerless.
Thanks for bloging about the role of followers. I’m wondering if we might be able to make a change in the state of leadership (when it needs to change) by helping followers to understand their role. Your thoughts?
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
January 22nd, 2010 at 7:54 am
Strongly agree, MJ, which is why I have blogged so much about followers. Better to mold leaders from followers than to try to change ingrained behaviors. As you know that approach works, but a focus on followership is I think more fruitful. Thanks! Bret
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Love this post. It empowers all of us, and also makes us think about our responsibility to use this power wisely and for good.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:23 am
Welcome, Kim! No person or organization can empower us, only we can empower ourselves, and we have much more power than we realize. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Bret
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Dr. Bret,
Great topic, great video, great post. I haven’t really placed much thought on the power of the follower so this was quite insightful.
The video quality and length was also great.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
January 24th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
Welcome, Tam! I appreciate your kind words and am glad you are finding this helpful. Stay tuned, I have a few more posts to go to finish this series. Thanks! Bret
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