Assume Responsibility

Sometimes an organization isn’t ready to address a deficiency or try a better way of doing things. Other needs seem more pressing. This can be frustrating to a follower who feels strongly about an issue. Throwing up our hands and giving up is not assuming responsibility. Our challenge is to find a way to test [...]

Processes are the chains of activity through which an organization fulfills its needs and the needs of the individuals and groups with which it interacts. Core processes are what permit the organization to achieve its purpose, and other processes support these. One danger in a group is that each member vaguely thinks someone else should [...]

Sometimes, it is not just rules that need to be broken but the organization’s whole mindset. The pursuit of the common purpose may be hampered by the group’s assumptions about the world. These assumptions are lenses through which the group filters information. Sometimes, the lenses also filter out important possibilities. It is a great challenge [...]

Effective followers assume responsibility for learning the rules of the system in which they operate. Rules are created as guidelines for using the group’s resources, as methods for orderly decision making, as assurances of fairness, as clarification and guarantees of expected standards. Rules are the agreements by which the group maintains its identity, expresses its [...]

Every group has a distinctive culture: a set of norms for behaving and a way of looking at the world. Successful leaders and followers must learn the norms and respect the power of an existing culture. The stories of political appointees disregarding the culture of a bureaucracy and then being defeated by it are legion. [...]

Willingness to initiate action without being instructed to do so is a distinguishing characteristic of the courageous follower. Courageous followers assume responsibility for events in their vicinity-whether it be a customer service complaint or an opportunity that, if seized, can produce a quantum leap forward for the organization. If we are to strengthen our capacity [...]

Successful followers care passionately about their work and the people it serves. They have a sense of ownership, of stewardship. If something happens, it is happening to what they are responsible for. When followers and leaders share a passion for the work, they can be full partners in it. Unless we match a leader’s passion, [...]

Management of our life and health are even more fundamental than management of our work if we are to be reliable team members and a source of support for our leaders. The more passionately we feel about a leader or cause the more we are at risk of not taking care of ourselves, sacrificing our [...]

We are also responsible for self-management. Our success at self-management creates both the credibility and resources to initiate changes that will improve the organization. A key to self-management is personal organization. A follower who is not well organized will too often be unprepared, miss deadlines, submit faulty work, or otherwise fail to meet the leader’s [...]

Self-assessment and feedback help us determine in what ways it would be desirable for us to change, to grow. Growth requires courage; it is a continuous process of exposing our vulnerable areas, areas where we have not developed mastery. Growth also requires exploring what the Jungians call our “dark” side. This is uncomfortable to do. [...]

While self-assessment is important, finding out how others see us is equally vital. Courageous followers overcome their reticence to hear “criticism”; they learn to encourage honest feedback. Though we have experiences or images of “bosses” giving us streams of criticism about specific tasks, in fact many do not provide feedback on the more fundamental issues [...]

While these tendencies can be measured, you probably already have a sense of how you tend to operate, at least in relationship to the current leaders with whom you interact. As you read further, keep in mind this self-assessment and the direction in which you feel you would like to grow. You can then consider [...]

There are different ways to represent our individual style of relating to leaders. Useful models for doing this can be found in the works by Robert Kelley and Gene Boccialetti, cited in the bibliography. In my workshops I use a two-axis representation derived from the core of the Courageous Follower model that participants in workshops [...]

Assuming responsibility for our personal development begins with self- examination. We cannot know in which direction we need to grow until we first know where we are. Courageous followers do not wait for performance reviews (strained events that these usually are anyway); they assess their own performance. In addition to evaluating their job “competencies,” courageous [...]

The most frequent complaint I hear from leaders is that they would like their staff members to assume more responsibility for the organization and initiate ideas and action on their own. While there are often very good reasons the staff members don’t do this, embedded either in the leader’s style or the organizational culture, it [...]