PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION

WHEN THE CONCEPT OF COURAGEOUS followership began its journey fifteen years ago through the first edition of this book, the landscape across which it traveled was almost barren. Today, a growing body of scholarly research and practitioner experience exists on followership. No serious student of leadership can any longer ignore its essential counterpart.

Even more heartening is the application of courageous followership, and related models of exemplary followership, dynamic followership, or followership of conscience, in a wide range of disciplines. You will find these referenced and taught in fields ranging from education to law enforcement, in the private and public sectors, among clergy and military officers and many others. The twin competencies of comfort with speaking candidly to leaders and of leaders developing cultures that foster candor are increasingly recognized as desirable at all levels and critical at the most senior levels of organizations.

The need for a second edition of the book was driven at the time by a pair of developments. “The Courage to Leave,” discussed in the first edition, was recognized as a subset of “The Courage to Take Moral Action.” I amended the model to reflect this and explored the range of available moral choices. The other significant amendment sprang from a spate of catastrophic organizational failures that materialized despite attempts by courageous followers to alert leaders to their likely occurrence. I added a new chapter, “The Courage to Listen to Followers,” as a vital complement to courageous follower behaviors.

There are two major reasons for offering a third edition of this book. They may at first sound mutually exclusive but on examination are clearly not.

The first is the emerging power of electronically connected networks of people who form “communities of interest” to share information and organize for action. These are fundamentally changing the traditional power balance between formal leaders and informally organized followers. On the political stage we have seen mass movements electronically mobilize to sweep leaders in and out of office. In the social and economic sectors, followers have found the power to individually and collectively convey persuasive endorsements or register serious discontent about products, services, or organizations to large communities of like-minded people. Leaders can no longer ignore the efforts of internal or external stakeholders to draw their attention through established communication channels to issues they consider important. If leaders do ignore these attempts, they will find themselves dealing with issues in the much larger and unforgiving electronic public square.

At the same time that networks have become more powerful, the upper levels of hierarchies in large and global institutions are often more impermeable. Like their counterparts at all levels, senior leaders are struggling to stay on top of the punishing pace of change, the massive increases in electronic communication, and the continuous need for on-site and virtual meetings to coordinate complex systems in volatile conditions. The amount of information they can process and the number of issues they can address are limited. To manage the workload, many filters are placed between them and the hundreds or thousands of staff who share responsibility for the organization’s mission. Technically, it is possible for anyone in the organization to reach senior leaders electronically, but doing so is often impractical, disapproved of, or ineffective. At times, it is also vital. How do we reconcile such competing needs?

To address these critical dimensions of contemporary follower-leader relations, I have added a new chapter in this edition: “The Courage to Speak to the Hierarchy.” The observations and strategies you will find here reflect hundreds of hours of work with individuals at every level of midsized and large hierarchies. Without altering the original courageous follower model, which has now been the subject of several doctoral dissertations, this chapter adds a layer of perspective and strategy that supports the five core behaviors of courageous followership. It will help new generations find and navigate the boundaries between their informally networked power and the formal hierarchies they encounter.

This is the boundary at which the success or failure of leaders and organizations will often be determined. Courageous followers can contribute to the outcome, at times decisively.

Ira Chaleff
Washington DC,
May 2009