Followership: How Followers are creating Change and Changing Leaders?
Vs
Switch: How to Change things when change is hard?
First of all I would like to mention one Experiment which was done by University of Leeds, one of the best universities in UK and world. Scientist of this university proved that only 5% of the people can manage the rest 95% of the people just due to “gregarious” instinct.
These Followers may take a decision or choice without thinking if they see that other people do the same. In one of the experiments people were suggested to move around of big premises: some were directed with a path, some were free to move in any random direction. Later it was noticed that those people who were not instructed to move to any specific direction, started to follow the ones, who had specific path.
This kind of behavior scientists call “gregarious” instinct , which we have from the first days of our life and it influences on our development during childhood. But later on this ability to imitate may lead to some negative characteristics of our personality, such as exposure of majority, inability to take decisions by his/her own, etc.
We can recall our own behavior: it is so difficult to say NO when everybody says YES. And if even you are able to say NO, you will be alien person for the society.
Here we can bind “Followership” book with “Switch” to understand “How Followers are creating Change and Changing Leaders” we shall understand firstly “How to Change things when change is hard?”. For this purpose we gonna use tips from our previous book:
1. Direct the Rider (our Leader from “Followership”)
2. Motivate the Elephant (our Followers from “Followership”)
3. Shape the Path
Have a nice weekend,
Tatiana
Interesting comparison.
ReplyDeleteOrtenca
We may briefly sum up the social operation of the Gregarious Instinct by saying that, in early times when population was scanty, it must have played an important part in social evolution by keeping men together and thereby occasioning the need for social laws and institutions; as well as by providing the conditions of aggregation in which alone the higher evolution of the social attributes was possible ; but that in highly civilised societies its functions are less important, because the density of population ensures a sufficient aggregation of the people; and that, facilities for aggregation being so greatly increased among modern nations, its direct operation is apt to produce anomalous and even injurious social results.
ReplyDeleteDear Tatiana,
ReplyDeleteI would like to link your example about Experiment of University of Leeds the Gregarious Instinct with “positive deviance” …. I think that the group that was not told any direction followed also because they thought that the direction that was told was a safer way and they did not have to take the risk and try another direction. They thought that it was the positive deviance and they could be protected, secure.