Followership, defined as the process of individuals willingly accepting the influence of others to achieve a shared objective, is often overshadowed by the study of leadership. However, understanding followership is crucial because effective leadership *requires* effective followers and increasingly, organizations are recognizing that strong followership can be as impactful as strong leadership. Barbara Kellerman's decades of research demonstrates this, revealing the hidden power dynamics inherent in the relationship between those who lead and those who follow.
The setting is a lecture hall, a faculty meeting, or perhaps simply a page anywhere the conversation about power begins with a leader and stays there. Kellerman's contribution, built across seven books and more than two decades at the Harvard Kennedy School, was to ask a question that sounds almost too obvious once voiced: what if we studied the other side?
The answer, it turns out, rewires everything.
The Hierarchy Question
Before Kellerman's work became a unified body of scholarship, it began with a puzzle. Leadership studies in the early twenty-first century had settled into an comfortable assumption: the leader mattered most. The follower was background noise, a necessary audience, someone to motivate or manage but not someone worth understanding in their own right.
Kellerman saw this as a fundamental distortion. In her lexicon, followers are defined not by their behavior but by their rank by where they fit into whatever hierarchy applies, whether social, political, economic, organizational, educational, cultural, religious, or military. This distinction matters enormously. It means that followers do not always follow. Sometimes they do, mostly they do but sometimes they do not.
"Which is why," she wrote in a 2025 post on her personal blog, "it would be correct to say that within the organization you are, simultaneously, a leader and a follower."
This reframing that the same person can hold both roles depending on context is one of Kellerman's most quietly radical contributions. A CEO is a leader to her employees but a follower to her board. A colonel commands soldiers but reports to a general. Hierarchy, Kellerman argued, is not a fixed ladder so much as a lattice of overlapping positions, each one defining a different relationship to power.
Her academic path reflects this layered career. Kellerman served as the Founding Executive Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a position she held for over five years as a Fellow while also maintaining her faculty appointment for more than two decades. Before and after Harvard, she held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, and Uppsala Universities, as well as at Dartmouth and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also directed the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.
Her education credentials reinforced this breadth: an MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University, supported by a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. The fellowships took her abroad; the professorships kept her grounded in the institutional mechanics of power. She was, in her own way, studying the ladder from the inside.
Thinkers50 ranked her #48 in 2009 and noted her as a prolific contributor to the subject of public leadership. The International Leadership Association awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award. Global Gurus named her one of the World's Top 30 Management Professionals from 2015 through 2021. These recognitions arrived not because she had built a new leadership theory, but because she had built something rarer: a serious scholarly infrastructure for understanding the people leadership theories had long ignored.
Bad Leadership and the Problem Nobody Wanted
The first major pivot in Kellerman's work came in the early 2000s, when she published two books that forced the field to confront its blind spots. The first was Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, released in 2004 by Harvard Business Review Press. The second was Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders, published in 2008.
Warren Bennis, writing in a Thinkers50 profile, noted that "Kellerman invades a contested terrain few dare to think about, and fewer understand: destructive leadership and its consequences." The terrain was indeed contested. Leadership studies had grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry classes, programs, conferences, certifications but the industry assumed its subject was inherently positive. Leadership meant good leadership. To study leadership was to study improvement, influence, success.
Kellerman refused this assumption. Bad leadership existed. Destructive leadership existed. And understanding it required the same analytical rigor applied to its positive counterpart. The book argued for embracing a more honest, holistic view of leadership that acknowledged the dark side of the human condition not as a counsel of despair, but as a prerequisite for actually addressing the problem.
The companion volume, Followership, took the argument further. If leadership had a dark side, so did the relationship that made leadership possible. Followers were not passive recipients of leadership influence; they were active participants in every leadership scenario, shaping outcomes in ways the existing literature had failed to recognize.
A summary on Scribd of Kellerman's Followership work captures the scope: she analyzed how followers, who have traditionally had less power than leaders, are now having more of an impact. She defined different types of followers based on their level of engagement, from isolates to activists. The book discussed how followers have played important roles throughout history such as during the American and French Revolutions and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Civil Rights movement arguing that leaders depend on followers and the relationship between the two is interdependent, with changes in technology giving followers more importance than ever before.
The Taxonomy of Following
One of Kellerman's most practical contributions was her classification system for followers. more than moralizing about good followers and bad followers, she mapped engagement. Her five-type taxonomy isolate, bystander, participant, activist, diehard described levels of involvement without making judgments about which level was correct or desirable.
The isolate is as far from engagement as possible: present in the organization but contributing nothing to its direction. The bystander watches but does not act. The participant takes a moderate role, doing what is asked and sometimes more. The activist pushes back, advocates, organizes. The diehard is fully committed to the leader's vision, whatever that vision might be.
What makes this taxonomy useful is its neutrality. An activist follower is not automatically better than a bystander; the context determines what kind of following serves the situation. A whistleblower might be an activist. An enabler might be a diehard. The framework allows for complexity.
Indeed, Kellerman's later work on the whistleblower-to-enabler spectrum made this complexity explicit. In a post updated in September 2025 on her blog titled Followers - the Spectrum, from Whistleblower to Enabler, she described how these two follower types occupy opposite ends of the same axis.
Whistleblowers are followers who try to stop their leaders from being bad by publicly exposing their noxious as in illegal, abusive, or unsafe behaviors. Enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive.
The spectrum forces a disquieting symmetry. Both whistleblowers and enablers are followers. Both are reacting to leadership behavior. Both are defined by their relationship to power more than by independent moral choices. The whistleblower who exposes corruption is acting on the same structural logic as the subordinate who stays silent while it happens each is positioned relative to a leader, and each position produces consequences.
Kellerman's 2021 book The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, published by Cambridge University Press, applied this framework directly to a contemporary case study. The book testified to the importance of speaking truth to power and, implicitly, to the consequences when followers fail to do so.
The End of Leadership and What Came After
Four years after Followership, Kellerman published The End of Leadership in 2012. The title was provocative but the argument was precise: the traditional conception of leadership that one person at the top directs everyone else was becoming untenable in a world where hierarchies were flatter, information was more democratic, and followers had more ways to make their influence felt.
This was not a prediction that leadership would disappear. It was a claim that the old leader-centric model had outlived its usefulness as an analytical frame. In a networked world, power flowed in multiple directions simultaneously. The leader-follower relationship was becoming genuinely reciprocal.
Her 2018 book Professionalizing Leadership, published by Oxford University Press, continued this thread by examining what it would mean to take leadership seriously as a profession with standards, accountability, and defined competencies. And Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy, co-authored with Todd L. Pittinsky and published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, explored the psychological dimensions of leadership ambition.
Throughout these publications, the followership thread persisted. In a July 2023 article reprinted by the International Leadership Association, Kellerman reflected on the relationship between leadership and followership in contemporary American politics, noting how public opinion data revealed a gap between presidential performance and public perception a gap that could only be understood by examining the followers, not just the leader.
Why This Matters for Anyone Studying Power
The practical payoff of Kellerman's work is not a five-step program for becoming a better follower. It is, instead, a more accurate map of how power actually operates in organizations and societies. Her framework asks anyone who occupies a position of relative power to ask a different question: not just "how do I lead better?" but "what are the followers around me actually doing, and why?"
For readers researching leadership and authority, this reframing has immediate implications. It means that organizational failures are never solely leadership failures; they are also follower failures. The enabler who stays silent, the bystander who watches without acting, the isolate who opts out entirely each contributes to the conditions that allow bad leadership to persist.
It also means that leadership development programs that focus exclusively on the person at the top are addressing only half the problem. If followers shape outcomes and Kellerman's evidence from revolutions, civil rights movements, and corporate scandals suggests they do then developing follower capacity is equally urgent.
The temporal dimension of her work has aged particularly well. When she began writing about followership in the early 2000s, social media was in its infancy and hierarchical organizations still dominated most sectors. By the time she published The End of Leadership, the internet had already begun flattening traditional authority structures. In 2025, with artificial intelligence reshaping knowledge work and distributed teams becoming the norm, her argument that followers have more importance than ever before reads less like a prediction and more like a description of the present.
Her updated blog posts some as recent as September 2025 suggest she continues to refine and defend this framework, applying it to current events with the same analytical consistency she brought to her earliest scholarship.
What This Means for NiftyWebs Readers
Readers coming to NiftyWebs for insights into leadership and authority research will find in Kellerman's work a foundational correction. The dominant narrative of leadership that it flows from the top down, that the leader determines outcomes, that followers are context has obscured the actual mechanics of power for decades. Kellerman's career represents a sustained effort to restore that balance.
Her framework does not require readers to abandon their existing leadership models. It requires only that they add a second lens: one that watches the followers as carefully as the leaders. In that addition lies the practical value. An organization that understands its whistleblowers and its enablers, its activists and its isolates, its bystanders and its diehards, has a much fuller picture of its own dynamics than one that tracks only the executive suite.
For researchers, practitioners, and students of leadership, this is not a peripheral insight. It is a redesign of the research question itself.
Where to Read Further
Those interested in exploring Kellerman's work directly can begin with her personal blog at Barbara Kellerman's Language of Leadership - and Followership, where she continues to publish commentary on contemporary leadership and followership dynamics. Her 2025 post on Followers - the Spectrum, from Whistleblower to Enabler provides a concise overview of the taxonomy she has developed over decades of scholarship.
For a broader biographical and credentialed overview, the Thinkers50 profile of Barbara Kellerman details her institutional affiliations, publication record, and ranking within global leadership thought leadership.
The International Leadership Association's collection of Kellerman's writings on followership offers additional context, including her reflections on contemporary American leadership and followership dynamics.
Her books remain the most comprehensive expression of her ideas: Bad Leadership, Followership, The End of Leadership, Professionalizing Leadership, Leaders Who Lust, and The Enablers each building on the same foundational argument that followers are not peripheral to leadership but central to it.