Last week’s entry introduced Ira Chaleff’s work and his book, The Courageous Follower.

Today’s entry is an interview with Ira.

Welcome, Ira. In your book, you provide a fresh new perspective on leaders and followers. You reframe followers as strong, active participants in the leader-follower relationship, instead of as weak, passive or submissive members of an organization. You appreciate their abilities to stand up for and stand up to leaders and show them how to forge new relationships to build better organizations.

What sparked you to write this book?

Ira: The book is an outgrowth of my lifelong moral interest in the use and abuse of power. Some with positional power have historically accomplished amazing things and others have wreaked havoc. In my own childhood I was exposed to the survivors of Nazi concentration camps who bore the dehumanizing numbered tatoos on their arms for the rest of their lives. Those numbers haunted me. As I read about the horrors of that period, and of the acts of bravery by some towards their fellow human beings despite the risk to their own lives, I formed a purpose to help alleviate unnecessary suffering caused by the abuse of power.

We are no closer today than at any time in the past to resolving the abuse of power directly by addressing the positional leader. What's left then is the follower end of the equation. The follower role has been a vastly understudied field. I saw an opportunity to make a contribution by focusing attention on it. My work holds the follower more empowered and more accountable than the culture has generally done. The reaction to this has been very positive.

Carol: Where do people find the courage to stand up to and for leaders? Sometimes that's a challenge.

Ira: That's a question each individual must answer. Sometimes it does take courage to stand up FOR leaders, when our peers are carping about their failures. More often it takes APPRECIATING what our humanly fallible leaders are trying to do and CARING enough about them and the mission to give them terrific proactive support.

Standing up TO our leaders when they are doing things that are violating the values of decency or endangering the mission clearly takes courage. It often takes more courage to engage them directly in the spirit of constructive feedback and correction than to blow the whistle on them. But in most cases it's the right thing to do for many reasons. Where does the courage to do so come from? There are many sources including religious and moral upbringing, role models, professional pride, having the support of others, etc. It's a useful question for us each to ask and answer for ourselves.

A more important question might be "What is blocking our natural instinct to do the right thing?”. I think that will often come down to the conditioning we have received from an early age on how to relate to authority. This is very powerful for most people. And it's important to reexamine this conditioning or one day we may find ourselves obediently following those in authority only to find that both we and the mission of the organization are in deep trouble as a result.

Carol: What is the single most important thing for anyone to do to be a more courageous follower?