Followership: A Classroom Exercise to Introduce the Concept

Abstract

Followership is valuable for personal and organizational success, whether success is measured by satisfaction with work, improved team relationships, obtaining promotions, or quality and quantity of work output. Furthermore, senior executives and coaches recognize it as a critical skill. Despite this, creating effective followership training in the classroom is challenging because of media messages that preference leadership, internal schemas held by students that ignore followership, and cultural biases against it. This article presents a memorable kinaesthetic, visual classroom activity that introduces followership in a theory-agnostic way. The exercise begins with students introducing each other as leaders or followers, and then debriefing that activity using the Describe, Analyze, and Evaluate methodology from multicultural training. Over a 10-year period, the exercise has successfully engaged undergraduate and graduate students, MBA candidates, and working professionals from frontline to senior management.