Followers: The Rest of the Leadership Process

For every leader there are many non-leaders-followers-who benefit the organization's competitive position. While leaders seem to dominate management research, management thinking, and management practice, in reality, followers permeate all organizations and make them effective. While the many are ignored, the few receive attention. Chaleff has developed a model describing key behaviors of effective followers in an organizational setting. This paper describes refinement of a survey instrument developed to assess Chaleff's model as a measuring tool for the follower behaviors within organizations. The results indicate that the instrument, The Follower Profile, is robust across populations in discriminating follower behaviors. The paper also recommends some innovative leadership development implications and concludes by introducing a new paradigm for thinking about the leadership process.