Rethinking Leadership Education: Why Roles Matter More Than Rank – Michael Linville and Mark Rennaker

Welcome to lead and follow a podcast that explores how great collaboration actually happens. I’m your host, Sharna Fabiano, author of the book, lead and follow the dance of inspired teamwork. And I’m pleased to bring you the latest research insights and learning methods to help you work together better with the people around you. I help founders, solopreneurs and new leaders become great at collaborating because I’ve seen how much more becomes possible when people integrate their ideas, perspectives, and strengths in a practical way.

To learn more about coaching with me and for a one-time discount on your first session, go to Sharna Fabiano. com slash coaching and enter the promo code podcast. The link is in the show notes. And now here’s the episode.

Today, I’m very excited to be speaking with Michael Linville and Mark Reniker, coauthors of Essentials of Followership, Rethinking the Leadership Paradigm with Purpose. This is a new textbook on followership, which I have to say is only about 40 years overdue. So Mike and Mark, thank you so much for filling in this gaping hole in the literature. This textbook is an absolute game changer.

Every leadership education program in the country needs this book. But before we get into that, let me share just a little bit about my guests. Michael Linville is professor in Indiana Wesleyan University’s PhD in Organizational Leadership Program. He holds several certifications in areas such as leadership, emotional intelligence, and personality typology.

And he was awarded Jagamanath University’s Silver Medallion Award in 2009 for his service and contribution to education in Ukraine. Mark Reniker is chair of the Division of Leadership and Followership Studies at Indiana Wesleyan University. He served 30 years in faith-based and nonprofit leadership roles at local, regional, and national levels. And he has also served in a variety of leadership roles during his 15 years in higher education.

Mike and Mark, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Sharna. Great to be here. Thank you.

Absolutely. Pleasure. Likewise. I have loads of questions for you both, but let’s start with the book.

Why did you write this textbook? Well, let me start here real quick, and then I’ll turn it over to Mark. We have a master’s program in organizational leadership. It’s been around for nearly a dozen years now.

And that program has included a followership course. But from the very beginning, our search for a text or for resources that pulled together the various followership models, as well as the progression of thought in the followership space was, well, rather fruitless, to be honest. And so our goal was to try to write a book that would be both scholarly as well as remaining accessible to practitioners and undergrad students. We’ve recently started a bachelor’s program in organizational leadership and, like the master’s program, also included a followership course.

We really weren’t quite sure that we could pull off a book that would do both, be scholarly and also suitable for undergrads and for people who really didn’t have any concept of what the discipline has to say about followership. When we received our very first endorsement, which happened to come from Ron Regio, he actually addressed that very issue when he wrote, and I’ll quote him, the novice student will gain a complete understanding of the leadership followership paradigm, while more experienced scholars will appreciate the deep dive into the multifaceted world of followership. In fact, we completed the book before we had any idea as to how it might be received. Only after receiving feedback from Ron and from Ira Chalif, Barbara Kellerman, Mark Hurwitz and others, did we discover that the book actually was generating high praise.

Well, congratulations. And I think it’s actually so crucial, not only that you’ve written such a book like this, like to fill the gap, but that you’ve written it in a way that has that broad appeal and broad access. I think a lot of times things emerge within research and it takes a while to get out into the ether, but this is partly why it’s so valuable is because it’s so accessible. So I really appreciate that coming from the practitioner’s side.

Thank you. Yeah. I think you said it probably well, Sharna. It’s 40 years overdue.

That’s why we wrote it. As Mike said, we’ve had followership interest and followership courses in our programs for some of our programs are close to two decades old at this point. Ira, in his most recent publication, calls out that we were one of the early adopters of followership and are glad for that. I don’t know how it ever came about.

Neither Mike or Ira, I think way back in those days, but somebody somewhere decided followership was worth inclusion in our model or thinking about leadership. And then we’ve added it as specific courses. Mike and I have had this conversation in academic life about what do we research? What do we publish?

There’s that pressure. There’s a lot of leadership that I might say sort of been there, done that. I sometimes somewhat tongue in cheek say, I don’t know how much more we really know about leadership than we’ve known for the last decade, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. We still talk about the Michigan State, Ohio State task and relationship.

We’re just kind of teasing out those things. But followership, our conversation three or four years ago was like, there’s still a lot of ground to do in followership. There’s a frontier here that we might have the opportunity to do something of substance, even significance. We’ve had this conversation about what that would look like.

I think it really picked up. As Mike mentioned, we launched a bachelor’s in leadership program three years ago or so and created a specific course for that. And in that process of how do we decide what textbook to use, we found ourselves in this very sort of awkward space of, there’s Ira’s model, there’s Kelly’s model, there’s Kelly’s model, all are excellent. But I might liken that to transformational leadership versus servant leadership versus authentic leadership.

Each has some worth, but just to focus on one, you miss some of the complexity and the beauty of the entire idea. And so we started talking about this idea, what we need is a primer. What we need is this, what became known as essentials. And you take a look at Peter Northouse or Gary Uckel or even Craig Johnson, what they’ve done in leadership studies and writing this gift of pulling together the entire field in this accessible way, that’s good content on each piece of it, but helps us see the whole in a different way.

And that felt to us like what was missing. We need a framework. We need something that helps us all see it so we know where the gaps are and gives us a common language to talk about. And so that kind of was our effort and why we decided to write it.

Fabulous. And I think from the endorsement so far, we can say safely, wildly successful. I feel like what happens with this textbook is, as you’re saying, there have been various models and actually quite a bit of work in followership over the past couple of decades. But if for someone coming in or a student or a practitioner or really anyone who’s like, what is this followership thing?

Being able to hand them this primer and say, here, look, catch up on the last 30 years. You could do it in one textbook. And then it just speeds up all of our progress, everything that we’re all trying to do in this. That was our hope.

I mean, not to replace anything that’s there. I might describe it as we needed a grammar. We needed a vocabulary. We needed to begin to construct sentences and paragraphs and to be able to do that in a common language.

And we won’t propose that ours is the absolute best language, but it’s something that can bring it together. And you never know when we send out those first requests to review and would you be willing to endorse this? You never know what you’re going to get back. This is the worst thing I’ve ever read.

And so we were quite humbled to get those back. In fact, I was actually on vacation with my wife at a park when Mike texted me the first one that came back. I had to sit down. I remember thinking, we might have done it.

We might have hit a target that we were aiming for here. So we are deeply grateful to all those voices that provided good feedback, but also such a positive endorsement to what we’ve created. Yeah, absolutely. I want to kind of pull out one thing from the book, which I found super interesting because of my dance background.

In social dance, we use the term improvisation to kind of bring together leadership and followership. And that doesn’t resonate at all off the dance floor, but that’s our term. What it means is improvisation equals lead and follow. And so you’ve kind of taken a stab at this in your book with this term purpose ship.

So I wonder if you want to speak a little bit about how you arrived at that and how that term is functioning in the book. It’s a great question, Sharna. And it was a very poignant moment, I think, at least for me, in the process. We did not set out to create the term purpose ship.

But as we began to assemble the pieces, if you will, or try to see how it all fit, looking at the competing definitions, I think is the place where it really struck me. And how do we even define followership? And there’s a variety of ways out there. But this sort of dominant idea as if it’s almost like just a part of leadership, or a poor copy of leadership, or at best, maybe a parallel topic to leadership.

And none of that struck a deep and satisfying place with us. It was framed in this idea of leadership system. I think Barbara Kellerman has talked about that you can’t just talk about leader in isolation. To have a leader means you have to have a follower, you have to have a context, you have to have some common purpose.

Iris says a lot about that as well. And as we began to sort of work that backwards from a follower perspective, it’s like these things really work together in concert. Leadership without followership is meaningless. And we’ve used a phrase that’s become a bit of a catchphrase in a way that if you’re only studying leadership, you’re only halfway there.

You’re missing an essential part. And that they must be part of something bigger. What is that something bigger? And purpose seems to be that unifying piece.

And so we leverage the term purpose ship. I don’t know whether it’s the right one, the best one, or one that will endure, but at least we hope it communicates what we tried to this dance, to use your term, this relationship, this fluidic motion, the shifting of the roles, this harmony that has to exist between those things. If we’re going to accomplish what we want to accomplish, there’s a fundamental question. Why are we even together as leaders and followers?

It’s not for no reason, but it is for purpose. Therefore, purpose must be what defines, refines us, and drives us. And purpose ship even takes us beyond the idea of meeting organizational goals. Those goals may be financial in nature.

They may be growth oriented. And those are important to organizations. But when we look at the motivations of followers, often there needs to be more than just meeting an organizational goal. When one is met, there’s another goal that’s established.

There still has to be more. For most followers, there has to be another larger reason for getting up in the morning and going to work. And we think that’s purpose ship. Although it was with some fear and trembling, do we really need another ship?

Right. You know, when I first heard it, I actually kind of pictured like a big vehicle, like a spaceship or a big arc or something. Like we’re all on the purpose ship together. That’s good.

Sounds like we need a theme song then to go. Oh, we definitely need a theme song. Yeah, definitely. Well, and a dance and a dance.

Of course. Of course. You mentioned the followership courses first in the master’s program and then in the bachelor’s program as well. I’d love to hear a bit more about those because these are some of the only ones in the country.

And of course, if you’re me, you think everyone needs a followership course. So I’d love to hear about how those were designed or how they’ve evolved over the years. Sure. Yeah.

I’ve been involved in teaching the master’s program followership course for the last 10 years. And it’s been so interesting over the years to hear from students who complete that program when they’re asking their capstone course. What was the course that stood out to you the most or what were the concepts that really you’re taking away from this program? Far and away, the followership course is what they identify.

The sort of epiphany that they have about, hey, wait a minute. I didn’t understand what follower meant and I didn’t understand how important it was to the whole leadership space. You know, we really go back to this idea, as we all know, the term follower is perceived in a lot of different ways. Traditionally, it’s been sort of viewed as antithetical to the leader.

There’s some literature to support the idea that at least here in the US, maybe our individualistic Western culture sort of leads to the notion of putting leaders on a pedestal, even though oftentimes they don’t belong there. And then conversely, followers end up being, you know, not on the pedestal. They’re down here somewhere in this lower space that, you know, many students even express the idea that when they were young, their parents would tell them to be a leader, not a follower. You know, so they bring that into the course.

They bring that into the program. The same has really been true in our bachelor’s program. Some of the same comments. When we ask those students to share with us common synonyms that they associate with the word follower, they often respond with words like flunky, pawn, gopher, underling.

Lovely. Yeah. And they often also report perceptions of characteristics of followers as submissive, unmotivated, low self-confidence. But those synonyms and characteristics reflect an understanding of a follower as rank.

And we certainly didn’t come up with that idea. That’s been in the followership literature for some time now. But once our students begin to learn that a proper understanding of the follower in an organizational context is a role rather than a rank, and a role, quite frankly, that’s every bit as important as the role of the leader, then their perspectives begin to shift. One of my favorite student comments written by an undergrad student not long ago in a discussion forum was this, and I’ll quote her.

I think leadership is emphasized because it is sexy. Leaders win the awards. Leaders draw you in. Leaders make a name for themselves and the organization they lead.

But leadership is moot if no one can execute. Absolutely. Well said. Well said.

To echo what Mike said in some of those program-ending comments, they’ll even say things like, this was the course that taught me the most about leadership. Amazing. That’s pretty powerful to unpack because it rewires or creates figure-ground reversals. What often happens, let me say that a lot of our students are working adults, so they come by these preconceived notions or what we might use technically implied theories about followers because it’s what they’ve experienced in their working life and career.

What we often find at the beginning of a class is exercises, whether it’s discussions, survey responses that we have them to do, reflection. Let’s just speak the truth. How do you really think about this idea of follower? I think Mike has asked a few times, so what did you think when you even saw a followership class on the course list and we get a wide variety of responses from shock or surprise to, well, I guess that makes sense.

You need to learn about followers too. He’s asked students, so how many of you, if this had been a program, a Master of Arts in Organizational Followership, still would have enrolled? I don’t think he’s had any hands raised. At this point, through these surveys, conversations such as what are some synonyms for follower?

Be truthful. What do you really think? What have been your experiences about what it means to be a follower? We get them to speak the truth of what they really think.

It is by and large this negative bias that’s bound in this idea of rank or an identity, a follower identity that is fixed, a social status that is fixed, and that’s the way in which their mind works. Once we’ve created that baseline canvas, now we can begin to do something with it. Well, what if it’s not a rank or at least not just a rank? Are there other ways that we could think about it?

Because we’re tied to organizational hierarchies. Certainly, we have to have those, but you can ask a simple question such, are you a leader or a follower? What that usually brings people to is a bit of stasis of, well, it’s not that simple. You’re right.

It’s not that simple. We can lean into that. I know, Sharna, you’ve probably heard me, heard us. It’s in the book.

We’ve done it in webinars, just a day in my life. Am I a leader or a follower? I walk in in the morning, the whole thing. I walk in the morning and I can check in with the sign on my door.

Okay, I’m a leader. I’m the division here. Then I go down, I get my cup of coffee, I check in with the department coordinator or the school coordinator and what’s on tap for the day, what issues have come up. I guess I’m leading in those moments.

I think I probably better learn. I just need to do what she tells me to do and my day will go a little better, but I’m leading, she’s following. Then I walk down to the dean’s office and now that role reverses because now he’s leading, I’m following and on and on we can go. In the middle of a conversation, my relationship with Mike where he’s one of my faculty, well, that is until he’s chairing a dissertation.

I’m on the committee. We can just, how many times in a single day does rank not really clearly communicate who I am, what I do. It’s probably countless in single conversations I can ship. We can take students into that space, again, to speak the reality of their organizational existence.

There’s this sort of eureka moment. It is the moment when they do this 180 of stopping to think about, stopping thinking about follower or followership as a rank, as a personality type, as a social status, but as a role they feel just as leader is a role they feel and everything changes at that moment. I mean, over and over we see it. It is a predictable point in a course where they’ve now opened themselves up to this possibility of growth and development they were resistant to when they came in.

To the end of the program, what are they saying? This is the one that changed me the most. You know, there’s just so much in that rank to role transition. I often think about those negative synonyms of followership as indicators of a kind of unconscious bias.

Not that we want to or even can get rid of hierarchies, but it’s when we start thinking that those with higher rank titles are better, smarter, more valuable people than we are, or conversely, that those with lower rank titles are somehow less smart, less valuable people than us. That’s a really dangerous problem. This switch to thinking in roles rather than ranks is just such a powerful antidote to that kind of bias that we know causes so many problems in our relationships, both at work and elsewhere. Very well said.

I think what you’ve described is we began to separate there’s a person, there’s a role, there’s a process. They all sort of happen at the same time. When life, you know, we aren’t necessarily distinguishing at the moment, but for thinking about it, for studying, for learning, we can begin to separate those things out. As we do that, we can develop fresh and new insights that when it all goes back together in the daily life, it just works better.

I think a similar, you know, we look at what makes a good leader. Northouse would say, you know, there’s key characteristics that emerge from determination to care, to character, integrity, and, you know, five or six of those. And so there’s another moment that we sometimes use. We’ll list that out and those things out.

So, okay, that’s what makes a leader. Which one of those do you not want your followers to be? If that’s what determines the difference, is it integrity? Yeah.

Determination? I mean, right. Which one of those really? And the answer is no, we want those same things because as a person, that should be who I am.

I just leverage those things a little differently for the role I may be filling at the moment. Absolutely. And thank you for voicing that so eloquently, Mark. So often when I’m reading leadership material, I’m thinking to myself, this is not just for quote, ranking leaders.

This is for people. This is for everyone, which reminds me of a favorite exercise of mine, which I’ll just briefly share her for listeners in case anyone is looking for a quick homework assignment. It’s a variation of the values exercise, except in this case, you choose two or three core values that are important to you. Maybe courage, maybe service, maybe creativity.

And you write out three ways that you can express those more fully when you’re in a leadership role, but then also when you’re in a followership role. And when I’ve done this with clients, they always find it very revealing. Well, and we even, you know, Sharna, we can actually expand this even beyond a single organization or the workplace. When we leave the workplace, we find ourselves in some other context in an organization, be that a faith-based institution, be it a volunteer organization or whatever.

And that fluidity of roles continues. We don’t necessarily recognize it, but we live our lives with the constant interchangeability of those roles. Well said. Which leads to the idea of relationships, right?

So in the book, we move from rank to roles to relational understanding. These roles point us towards the rich context of relationships in which we live in and out of organizations. Yeah, very much so. So Mark, when I read your bio at the top, I was, of course, so thrilled to be able to read for the first time ever the division of leadership and followership studies.

Very exciting for me. And I look forward to the day when every university has one. So at the same time, imagine that name change didn’t happen overnight. I wonder if you could tell us a little about how that evolved at Indiana Wesleyan.

Yeah, sure. I think there’s several contributing factors and not the least of which is this longer history that our university or department has had with followership as courses and as a focal point. That is, it is not necessarily an alien concept or a negative concept or one to be avoided. It’s been part of our conversation for well over a decade at this point.

So I don’t want to too quickly dismiss that, that there’s a foundation or a history where it’s at least been present and talked about. We have dissertations that are beginning to emerge on our PhD program, focusing more and more on followership. So when those things come out in graduation programs, here’s the title of these dissertations or they’re being announced. Again, that term is out there.

And so there’s been this exposure to it over time to give it some legitimacy. This is a relevant topic for us to be studying. Certainly the book that Mike and I wrote is a substantive contributor to being able to have some leverage or influence to make such a shift. I think when we were writing it, there weren’t necessarily a lot of people who knew specifically what we were writing or that we were writing.

People are all the time saying, well, I’m working on this article. I’m working on that book. It may or may not come to fruition. But the day we’re standing there with book in hand, all of a sudden something’s different.

And then they flip open the pages and they’re seeing all those positive endorsements. Well, wait, I’ve heard of those people. They’re saying this is good. So it must be good.

I think that has given us a bit of personal credibility in this space such that sometimes it’s just about fortuity of timing. If those elements had not necessarily been in place, maybe we don’t get the name shift. But the organization, the institution has been going through a series of restructuring moves. Lots of higher ed institutions are as we try to deal with the realities of the changes in the higher education landscape.

And so that has included some breaking apart some schools, dividing them out elsewhere, trying to create richer and more healthy patterns for what the future of higher ed looks like. And so that meant new org charts were being created and some shifts at the time we were department. But we’ve gone from just a couple of degree programs to eight degree programs under house. And so I was making this shift to division.

I just happened to one day say, well, if we’re going to make the change, the division of leadership studies anyway from department, could we toss another word in there? Could we make it division of leadership and followership studies? I say as I’m standing holding the book. This does matter.

Yeah, wonderful. I want to commend Indiana Wesleyan not only for this shift, but it’s long history with this work, really holding the vision, I think, for the future for us. Well, I think, you know, it’s great. We’ve got the division name and grateful to the leaders who got in the conversation with us and sometimes with some hesitancy said, yeah, let’s do this.

But I think this is a start, right? You said it earlier. I believe that every leadership program ought to have a followership course or maybe we’d start at the lowest level. Every leadership course needs to address followership.

If you don’t, you’re missing something. You cannot understand fully the nature of leadership, but also considering followership. So I think it starts there. So if getting a whole division name in your institution is, you know, a little bit of a fantasy at this point, even getting a course on followership.

Many of us have heard Barbara Kellerman talk about the challenges even she has had getting a followership course, even though she’s one of the, you know, the shining lights of the followership studies. Well, then tuck it into a leadership course somewhere. I mean, it’s okay. And then from there are courses possible.

But, you know, I have this, where are we headed? Well, I’m looking forward to the day where we now have a followership minor, a followership major, and looking forward to that day that instead of asking people, would you have joined this program if it had been called? No, we actually have a Master of Arts in Organizational Followership because we’ve reached that level of people understanding the nature of importance, that this is equally as important as leadership. Absolutely.

I know both of you work, you know, well beyond the academy, and you have experience in industry and the social sphere and internationally even. So I wonder about, you know, since we’re kind of dreaming a little bit about the future, any larger goals or observations around followership in, you know, in those other spheres and how the book might serve those audiences, especially for listeners who might not be operating within a university? Well, one of the challenges that Mark and I have talked about that’s not unique to those of us who’ve been, you know, following the followership space for a while is just how do we change the sort of societal perception of the notion of follower? It’s been talked about by a lot of people for a long time.

How do we move past this notion of leaders’ perceptions of followers? Not just how people view followers is almost a pejorative word, but how do we move leaders past this idea of why won’t they just do what I tell them to do? I think it’s one of the things about our book that may actually surprise some leaders because there are expectations and, frankly, requirements of leaders to provide opportunities for followers to function effectively in a role as follower. This is not a one-sided conversation.

This is not about, okay, you’re a follower. Here’s what you need to do. It’s also just as important that the leaders recognize that they have a stake in this and it’s going to affect how they lead in order to facilitate effective followership. I think one of the ways that’s going to change, we’re already starting to see even among our students, the younger generations are demanding this change.

They simply refuse to work for supervisors who are more directive or autocratic. I think those of us who are baby boomers like myself, we tolerated it. We did it. Whether we were working for the gold watch or whatever it was, we just did it.

But the new young generations coming up, they’re not really interested in working for leaders who just expect them to show up, shut up, and do what they’re told. They walk. They go find an organization where they can be innovative. They can share their ideas and make a contribution that contributes to purpose shift.

Yeah. I think you’re really hitting on something there with this concept of followership changing leadership. It’s something, again, I saw in dance all the time. I would come in and I feel like I taught this same lesson hundreds of times where the person in the leader role, usually a man in social dance, was like, oh, I can’t get it to work.

I can’t get her to move over there. I’m like, oh, get her to do something. That doesn’t sound very inspiring. Then the woman usually in social dance, usually it’s a woman, would be staring off into the window and be like, well, I’m here.

What else is there for me to do? I go, all right, this is clearly something. I need to reset the roles here. It’s the same thing.

They both came in with this cultural assumption. I almost don’t blame anybody for this because we just swim in it. Once I said, all right, let’s redefine what the roles are here. What’s your job as a leader?

What’s your job as a follower? Once I said, actually, when you’re leading, there’s that language again that I was experimenting with. You don’t have to do everything and control everything. That’s actually not the definition of leadership you need to have.

You can, but it sounds stressful. It looks stressful. Let’s see if we can redefine that and make the leader more like, I don’t know, in this case, it was something like create the framework or give clear signals or hold a straight center with your spine. It’s all the good dance technique and create space for your follower, language like that.

Then the follower would redefine that role as well. Actually, your job is not to just do what you’re told. Your job is to move comfortably, is to maintain your own balance, is to maintain the relationship as you go around the circle. Express yourself within the bounds, like Mark and Samantha Hurwitz say, the leader creates the frame, the follower creates within the frame.

Even in dance, when it’s such a physical thing, I saw over and over again, redefining those roles or even redefining one of them changed the other. I’m curious if you have any examples of that from either your work as educators or in industry where this redefinition of followership as a participant, as a partner changed the understanding and operation of leadership? A couple of things come to mind. One, I think illustrates both what you’ve said and some of what Mike said that I’ve had conversations with leaders.

Again, I’m standing there holding the book, if you will. That’s great. Yeah, we need books on followership. You’re right.

I don’t think they mean the same thing as what I mean most of the time or what Mike and I have written. That is my perception based upon their body language, inflectional voices. What they mean is, it is so good that we’ve got books. You’re going to tell followers to get in line, do what they’re supposed to do.

That seems to be the implication. I’m standing there thinking, you don’t realize that in our book, we tell followers they need to constructively challenge you as a leader. You want them to read this book. But I think to your point, a book on followership is probably written mostly to leaders to start with.

If leaders don’t create that space to allow followers to constructively challenge, to accept it, to expect it, it is going to be very, very difficult for followers to be able to do that. Followers have things they need to do, but leaders hold the key to creating that space, creating that context, which is going to imply a lot of humility, a lot of release of the control issue, a lot of their own understanding that they also operate in follower roles a lot of the time. We’ve talked about this rank to role shift in higher education. Every time Mike and I go to do a webinar or seminar or something, and particularly in organizational context, we have this conversation around, oh, that’s too simplistic to talk about in the organization.

Well, as to date, it has not been too simplistic. We see the same sort of eureka moments in organizations with leaders and followers as they understand that role shift. They need to see that too. I simply say at this point, we’ve got a long way to go, I think, in understanding how to do followership development and not just leadership development in disguise.

I think our book, as well as the others, gives some cues to that. Those eureka moments are so important, and leaders have to have them. If leaders have them, we’ve created the context by which then followers can have them, and we can move more towards the purpose shift. To Mark’s latter comment, another goal I would just comment on would be this idea that leadership and followership courses should be part of every academic program in higher education institutions.

By the same token, in industry, so much is invested in both human and financial resources to do leadership development. But go out there and look for a followership development program. You won’t find many. I actually believe that acquiring leadership and followership skills merit the same priorities that critical thinking and communication skills, all of these other things that industry says they most value in a college graduate, for example.

I think sometimes followership skills sneak their way in there under professional development or communication or something. But without the label, without the language, without saying, no, this is a role, it’s called followership, and it corresponds to leadership in these ways, and they’re two sides of a coin. As you say, without that framework, I think that even the good training on communication or negotiation or whatever it might be, it’s always going to be not completely as robust as it could be. I totally agree.

Obviously, I’m one of those people trying to promote leadership and followership training side by side. Because again, just to underscore for listeners, it’s effective. It’s good development. It’s good professional development, regardless of your discipline.

I want to keep coming back to the idea that we all play both roles. Being in the follower role is not something to be embarrassed about. It in itself is honorable. The focus in many organizations, even if it is potentially good followership development, seems to have this implied to make you a leader, as opposed to make you a better follower in the way that we’re talking about.

Not a follower who’s just passive, but one who’s engaged, collaborative, constructively challenging it as needed. I think organizations that figure this out will accelerate their development, their competitive advantage in geometric or exponential ways. Absolutely. People will want to work there, and talent always wins.

If you can attract the talent and have the best talent, you’re going to win. Get the followership development right, and you might find your organization flourishing. I totally agree. I want to give a shout out here to Mark and Samantha Hurwitz at Flip University.

I’ll put them in the show notes. They have some great online courses in leadership and followership that can give you a head start. I wonder if either of you have other thoughts floating to the top of the mind right now about either favorite stories about epiphanies that your students have had or favorite ways you’ve introduced this into conversation. Any other tips or guidance you want to offer other trainers or educators?

Well, one I would share with you, Sharna, quite frankly, for many years now, one of the most impactful moments in teaching followership has been the use of the Tango video that you and I wrote about. Not only does it teach such a valuable set of principles, but it’s done with humor. I often have been in the classroom with students who chuckle and laugh, but when it’s over, there’s a really rich discussion about the way you bring that to life in that video. That’s been such a valuable contribution to helping students better understand followership.

Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. That video, you know, it’s really made their rounds. But yeah, it’s wonderful, I think, to see it, you know, because so often these dynamics are invisible, but dance is a realm where you can actually see it visually. Thank you for that.

I’ve had some conversations with students or even just inside organizations where it suddenly becomes clear that this is more than just about a role in an organization. The epiphany they have is, you know, there are some ontological, the nature of humans, our human worth and dignity that began to surface. There is a, I think, followership, well-done followership study more so than leadership has a freeing component to it because of that breaking out of the psychic prison of this rank sort of thing. And so that’s some of my favorite moments with our students who can come from a variety of intersected diversity sort of backgrounds to see that freeing that’s, it’s much bigger than leadership and followership.

This is about us as human beings and developing healthier belongingness and our connectedness. Leadership alone is only half of it. It can’t get us there. But leadership and followership together can create a conversation, a tango, a relationship that can be freeing at multiple levels.

And that has to be a good thing. It’s so true. And that’s such a powerful point to end on. Thank you.

I really encourage listeners to take this to heart and to share this episode with your colleagues and your friends. The human element of working together is the lived experience of purpose ship. Dancers would say it’s in the dance or even that it is the dance. That experience of belonging, connection, purpose is what happens when you lead and follow well.

And the language of freedom and togetherness, it’s the very same language that dancers use to describe their experience of well-matched leadership and followership. So I’m really excited to hear that coming from you both as well. Lastly, I’ll also point listeners to the three-part series I recorded on CNU, Christopher Newport University’s leadership program, which includes a followership course as well. And those conversations echo in many ways, these same sentiments of freedom and the fluidity of the two roles and the freedom and the followership role in particular.

The word purpose ship then really comes to the surface as we think about what we’ve been talking about these last few minutes about freedom, about belonging, about being, you know, purpose ship isn’t just what happens in organizations. It’s why are we on this planet? Purpose ship. Beautiful.

Mike, please share with listeners where they can learn more and get a copy of Essentials of Followership. Learn more at our website. We have a website PurposeShipMatters. com and we’ve started a blog there recently.

There are links to availability of the book, both at the publisher’s side as well as Amazon. I believe Barnes & Noble is also carrying it now. Perfect. I’ll place those links in the show notes for sure.

Mark and Mike, thank you so much for sharing your insights and your stories today about the evolution of leadership and followership education at Indiana Wesleyan and beyond. I look forward to watching this work develop in the coming years and to many more conversations like this. Thank you again so much. Thank you, Sharna.

Thanks, Sharna. You have been listening to the Lead & Follow podcast. Special thanks to Glover Gill for composing our music and a huge thank you to all of you who support the show. It really means a lot.

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