Followership Quotes

Co-leadership should permeate every organization at every level.

The ability to make hard truths palatable is one that every long-lived co-leader has mastered.

Learning the secrets and skill of great No.2s remains the surest path to becoming No. 1.

No one really wants to follow you per se.  They really don’t.  They want to know that, by following you, they are really following a higher principle, a transcendent truth.  In spiritual followership, people want to know whether they are being led and influenced by God.

If you are guided by opinion polls, you are not practicing leadership -- you are practicing followership.

Leadership requires followership and following is an act of trust, faith in the course of the leader, and that faith can be generated only if leaders act with integrity.

You're gonna have to serve somebody.

A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

True leadership must have follower-ship. Management styles can vary, but even an autocrat needs people who believe and simply don't follow from fear.

If I had to reduce the responsibilities of a good follower to a single rule, it would be to speak truth to power.

The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.

My name should not be made prominent. It is my ideas that I want to see realized. The disciples of all the prophets have always inextricably mixed up the ideas of the Master with person, and at last killed the ideas for the person. The disciples of Sri Ramakrishna must guard against doing the same thing. Work for the idea, not the person.

We don't have a crisis of leadership in Washington. We have a crisis of followership.

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined brand,- as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.

Never give an order that can't be obeyed.

I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.

There goes my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.

You don't lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.

If a man aspires to the highest place, it is no dishonor to him to halt at the second, or even at the third.

From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.

No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.