3-Minute Read
Walk into any school, gymnasium, workplace, or search education, business, or coaching on Twitter, and odds are you’ll quickly encounter messages and quotes extolling the virtues of leadership. As coaches, we seek leaders to stabilize our teams in pressure situations, to shoulder the responsibility of making plays, and for setting the competitive tone at practice. Hence, we designate captains and form leadership councils. But, as much as we want to develop great leaders, success and maximum growth truly lie with our followers, in the form of followership.
With our team, we define followership as the ability to recognize successful ideas and behaviors outside of ourselves and willingly follow them for the greater interest of the group or team. Followership requires humility to accept that someone else’s idea or method may be more valuable and essential towards achieving the group’s mission than our own. Successful followership also requires discipline to wholeheartedly act in concert with the current leader.
