GEL Lecture 3 - Leadership and Followership

Join GEL for a talk from guest speaker Marc Hurwitz from the University of Waterloo on Leadership and Followership.

Without followers, there are no leaders. And if everyone tried to lead all the time, chaos would ensue.

These two statements are obvious, and yet leadership theory has spent over a century lauding the role of leadership while ignoring the equally important role of followership. It would be like teaching about levers without fulcrums - absurd. Indeed, no discipline is more acquainted with systems thinking than Engineering, but despite that, there is little explicit understanding of how leadership-followership systems work and their importance to the discipline. For example, engineers are often in situations where they need to lead because of their technical expertise but also need to follow the requirements of the community or business. How can they do both excellently?

In this talk, the foundations of leadership-followership systems thinking will be shared. Examples will be drawn from the natural world, human systems, and engineering. It represents a radical reappraisal of leadership that, if successful, might change your ideas about leadership (and followership) forever.