Within this book, you will discover many of the skills you will need to be an effective leader, such as the skills of delegation and empowerment and communication (Learn to Listen, How to Speak Assertively, Communicating Up, Down, and Sideways, and How to Speak without Words). But in this chapter you will learn about a skill critical to leading your staff—called followership—and how you can use this quality to transform your group into a top-notch team.
In Managing Meetings on meeting management, I use the term team to refer to groups that meet over time to complete a project (e.g., crossfunctional teams) or staff that come together in meetings for either a single purpose or to review ongoing operations. In this chapter, the term is used solely to describe a staff of employees that operate together to achieve a common goal. They achieve that objective through teamwork and exhibit a team spirit like that of a football, baseball, or volleyball team. Your employees have measurable goals and a visible purpose around which they unite. They also have a leader—you.
Every work unit has the potential to think and act like a team, but whether or not that happens depends upon you and how you lead your group—your followership (or leadership) capability. As John Adair, a British leadership guru, has observed, “Leaders must be ratified in the hearts and the minds of those who work for them.”