Leadership That Matters

Chapter

FIVE

Leaders, Followers, and Power

Good leaders serve followers, just as good followers serve.A relationship of service goes both ways and benefits both. But to truly be of service is even more difficult for the leader than for the follower.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 61

We concluded Chapter Three by mentioning the start of a search for some elusive factor that might explain the success of transformational leaders. Some call this factor “charisma.”¹ However, using charisma to explain leaders’ success is merely another way of saying that we don’t know why they succeed. That is, we saw in Chapter Two that research of the early twentieth century failed to identify any clear leadership traits. And in Chapter Three we concluded that behavioral ...