The Courageous Follower - Ira Chaleff

This is the best book on followership ever written; even better than Robert Kelley's groundbreaking treatment! Aside from perhaps the Bible, this is the most thorough and helpful textbook on followership in print. While I'll admit the pickings are currently slim when it comes the subject of followership, it is easy to see why this book is now in its second edition. [Update: Just discovered The Courageous Follower is going into a 3rd Edition!] This was a real pleasure to read and easy to broadly apply.

Ira Chaleff focuses his entire perspective on followership around the theme of courage. This allows him to speak positively and constructively, even while dealing with painful issues of personal safety, conflict and admittedly evil leadership. Chaleff's perspective, at many points in the book, is simply inspirational. He not only helps the reader understand what good followership looks like, he makes followership feel like a pretty good choice. A real breath of fresh air...

The outline of Chaleff's work is simple, after a thorough discussion of leader and follower dynamics, he then breaks followership into five dimensions of courage (and a sixth dimension tossed in for the leaders just so they won't get pouty!). He believes these five (plus 1) dimensions are foundational to any discussion of good followership. Those dimensions are:

* The Courage to Assume Responsibility
* The Courage to Serve
* The Courage to Challenge
* The Courage to Participate in Transformation
* The Courage to Take Moral Action
* The Courage to Listen To Followers

Chaleff's discussion model of the leader/follower dynamic is also very simple. He argues leadership and followership are little more than people in different roles swimming around the same purpose or objective. Followers do not orbit around the leader! We orbit around our shared cause or purpose. This is a critically important distinction.

Chaleff also offers another four-quadrant model of followership style, describing four different types of followers. I don't find this particular model as helpful (and easy to use) as Kelley's model of follower styles. The categories of Kelley's model are clearer to distinguish and easier to explain.

In almost every area of the book, Chaleff includes bold faced lists of application comments, maxims or questions on the area under discussion. This saved me an awful lot of highlighter ink!

This is simply a super textbook on followership. There is something worthwhile on every single page.

Thanks Ira!