Welcome to Followership with Ryan Leak, a podcast designed to help followers follow their leaders, and to help leaders understand their followers. While leadership is often a more popular discussion and billions are spent every year consuming leadership resources, most of us will spend most of our careers doing more following than leading and we need help to do it.
Take some of the the largest employers in the world like Walmart, who employs roughly 2.3 million people around the world. How many of those people would we say are leaders?
Kroger reportedly has 453,000 employees with 2700 stores spread across 35 states. How many leaders does it take to run each Kroger grocery store? Let’s say 15. That’s generous, but let’s go with it. That’s 40,500 leaders which is less than 10% leaving the majority of their workforce… following.
Amazon has 840,000 plus employees. Let's say 80,000 of them are leaders. That still leaves 79,999 people following Jeff Bezos and his leadership.
And how many people do you know that can say they work for a GREAT leader? In fact, working for a GREAT Leader is pretty rare. But just because you may not work for a great leader doesn’t mean you can’t be a great follower.
Everyone has grandiose ideas of what a leader should and shouldn’t be and should and shouldn’t do and should and shouldn’t say. But most of us live with a lot of opinions about leadership with virtually zero control over how they actually lead. This is a podcast to help you do your part well.