Dr. Barbara Kellerman

Dr. Barbara Kellerman, expert on leadership and followership and author of numerous books including, "Bad Leadership: What it is, How it happens, Why it matters", spent her day at SNC lecturing involved faculty and students on her developed perspective and experiences of leadership. Dr. Kellerman is very educated on the subject of 'Leadership' and has traveled around not only the United States but also around the world teaching the world about the knowledge she has on two very important subjects: Leadership and Followership. She has studied leadership for several years and received her PhD from Yale University in Political Science. Although Dr. Kellerman has a broad understanding of Leadership she chose to focus on the negative aspects of Leadership in her half hour lecture she presented at SNC. She began her presentation by introducing herself and informing us that "the leadership that we know and love is changing". Is this a statement that you would agree with? I personally agree with it because just like everything else, things change with time. Everything changes with time and there is no way of stopping it. However, I believe that the leadership changes are headed in a positive direction because the study of Leadership is a more recent study that is only going become more developed over time as our knowledge on this subject expands. Dr. Kellerman started a new blog called "Lame Leaders / Fed Up Followers", in her blog she likes to highlight a leader for each blog and criticize their failures. Through her examples of "Lame Leaders" I thought about times where maybe I didn't reach up to my full potential as a leader. Through these experiences, I was able to learn and grow from them which I think has given me a better perspective of Leadership. Do you think that a leader can fail in certain ways and learn from the experiences and grow into an even stronger leader? Can you think of a time where you failed at being a leader and turned your weaknesses into strengths? In her lecture she stated that, "we cant have good leaders with out good followership and we can't have a bad leader without bad followership". What do you think she meant by this statement? I think that I am just going to have to partially agree with this statement. I think that you can have a good leader and good followers but I don't agree with when she says that you can't have a bad leader without bad followership. In a group I am involved with at SNC, I have noticed throughout the three years I have been involved that the leadership is not as strong as it used to be, but because it is not as strong as it was I don't think that it is because of bad followership. I think that a good leader promotes good followership and it is easier to be strong with a strong leader, but if there is a bad leader in place, I don't think that it necessarily means that there is bad followership. I think that it puts the followers in a bind where it is not as easy to succeed but I don't think it automatically leads to bad followership. Can you share any experiences of good or bad leadership/followership that you have had throughout your life? Although I didn't agree with the negative style she used while talking about leadership, and I personally prefer focusing on good leaders to highlight good leadership I still think that it was important that we did focus on a lot of bad things within the leadership content. We can focus on good leaders and learn from many of their experiences and strategies but it is also important to study the negative parts of leadership for educational purposes as well. P.S. I dont know why it didn't space out my paragraphs, I cant figure it out so I'm sticking to one big paragraph!