INTRODUCTION [pic]

There is no leader without at least one follower. Yet the modern leadership industry, now a quarter-century old, is built on the proposition that leaders matter a great deal and followers hardly at all.
Good leadership is the stuff of countless courses, workshops, books, and articles. Everyone wants to understand just what makes leaders tick—the charismatic ones, the retiring ones, and even the crooked ones. Good followership, by contrast, is the stuff of nearly nothing. Most of the limited research and writing on subordinates has tended to either explain their behavior in the context of leaders’ development rather than followers’ or mistakenly assume that followers are amorphous, all one and the same. As a result, we hardly notice, for example, that followers who tag along mindlessly are altogether different from those who are deeply devoted.
In reality, the distinctions among followers in groups and organizations are every bit as consequential as those among leaders. This is particularly true in business: In an era of flatter, networked organizations and cross-cutting teams of knowledge workers, it’s not always obvious who exactly is following (or, for that matter, who exactly is leading) and how they are going about it. Reporting relationships are shifting, and new talent-management tools and approaches are constantly emerging. A confluence of changes—cultural and technological ones in particular—have influenced what subordinates want and how they behave, especially in relation to their ostensible bosses.
It’s long overdue for leaders to acknowledge the importance of understanding their followers better. In these next pages, I explore the evolving dynamic between leaders and followers and offer a new typology for determining and appreciating the differences among subordinates. These distinctions have critical implications for how