The 16th annual Kravis-de Roulet Leadership Conference will take a slight detour from its customary agenda this year, looking at leadership from the other side of the equation, with the first national conference dedicated to the new field of study: “followership.”
Rethinking Followership: New Paradigms, Perspectives, and Practices, will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 24 and Saturday, Feb. 25 in Pickford Auditorium, with plans to not only better define followership, but also outline its role in effecting change. BusinessWeek has already featured the event, and C-SPAN plans coverage as well.
“We are receiving requests for participation from some of the best thinkers on leadership and followership around the country,” says Ron Riggio, director of the Kravis Leadership Institute at CMC. “One gets the sense that people are saying, At last someone is paying attention to the other side of the equation.”
Among the guests for the two-day conference, sponsored by the Kravis Leadership Institute, in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Leadership at the Peter F. Drucker and Matsatoshi Graduate School of Management at CGU, will be keynote speaker Barbara Kellerman, a research director for the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government. Kellerman, who teaches a course on followership at Harvard, told BusinessWeekin its Feb. 13 mention of the KLI conferencethat followership has "lots of negative connotations, like being sheep and being herded." But in pooling scholars on the topic, the conference seeks to present followership as an active, ethical, creative, and effective enterprise, and also explore the dynamic between followers/constituents and leaders.
Speaker Ira Chaleff, whose book The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders, is helping organize the two-day conference as well as introducing a number of practitioners, like Kellerman, who have pioneered the concepts of courageous followership in their organizational cultures. "There's a dynamic that plays out between leaders and their followers," Chaleff told BusinessWeek. "Instead of being a balancing force, they [followers] often become a colluding [one]."
"Placing followers in the foreground allows us to examine their multiple roles," KLI organizers says. "This strategy emphasizes their potential contributions, rights, and responsibilities to the leader, to the group, to society, and to themselves."
As such, the conference is designed to answer the question of, Why followership? with bold, new thinking on how exemplary followership keeps leaders both honest and effective. Through keynote addresses, panel discussions and paper sessions, it also will address such questions as Can followers help leaders resist the tendency to abuse power? How do they develop the needed skills for successfully raising sensitive issues?
Students, staff, and faculty of The Claremont Colleges may attend the conference for free. Registration and a continental breakfast will be offered Friday and Saturday mornings, beginning at 8:30 in Bauer Forum.
More information, including a complete itinerary, is available at: http://kli.claremontmckenna.edu/conference/deroulet.asp.
As an extension of the KLI programming, Joseph Rost, author and scholar in leadership studies, will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Friday, Feb. 24 for a lunchtime discussion on Followership: An Outmoded Concept. Rost, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and currently working on a second edition of Leadership for the Twenty-First Centuryone of the most quoted books on leadershipsays that thinking of followership as a separate process from leadership is essentially an industrial concept that is outmoded and unacceptable in a postindustrial age.
For more information about Rost's discussion, visit: http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/mmca/temp_fn.asp?volumeFN=21&issueFN=06&typeFN=f#article16