Team Leadership development: nurture good followers
Stumble It!John Austin, writing in his excellent blog, Tag your Team, references research by Robert Kelley on ‘followership’ which examines two different traits of behaviour in team members: critical thinking and pro-activity.
By analysing these on two independent axes Kelley was able to identify 5 stereotype followers – sheep, alienated, survivors, effectives and yes-people.
The research showed that effective followers add value, focus on goals and take initiative: in other words the best followers are those people that could be leaders.
“Teams in which every team member has the skills to lead have great potential to excel”.
This resonates very well with the bioteam's cornerstone of distributed leadership and every member a leader (in different domains).
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Bioteams Books Reviews
What teams can learn from wolves
If you think that there is not much human teams can learn from nature think again! Temple Grandin in her amazing book Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (p303-307) puts forward the incredible theory that early humans only became today’s successful homo sapiens because they learned to act and think like the wolves they co-habited with.
Buy it now from:
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Related Team Leadership Development Articles
Self managed teams: OSS and Toyota compared
Harvard Business Review identifies unexpected similarities between Open Source Software (OSS) and the Toyota Production System
Good collaboration: the critical unspoken question
When a group reviews how well they are collaborating they usually discuss two questions: Is it working for us? and Is it working for me? I suggest they have missed a third totally crucial question, Does it feel fair?
Good leaders clarify their teams values
At a lunch for business leaders a couple of years back Jack Welch, once voted the most respected business leader of all time, was asked about the relative importance of right values versus making the numbers.
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