“When I talk to my students, and I do that in my second lecture, followership, it's like “Oh, we never thought about that. It's not just about leaders? I thought leadership was just about leaders.” And then it's like “Oh wow.” But then I say, however, a lot of this post-heroic literature doesn't look at questions of power and identity in the way that we need to do. We have to understand that not always, but in many, many contexts there is an asymmetry, that there's not an equality between leaders and followers that post-heroic perspectives often seem to presuppose.”

“But don't think that when we're talking about followership, we're not also talking about leadership. They're interconnected dimensions, and it's the interconnections that I want you to really explore as well as the distinctions.”

““Then you've got a post-heroic perspective that says, no, no, no, it's not just about leaders, it's about relationships. It's about context. Distributed leadership happens at all stages of the organization. It's not just individuals. So that emphasizes relations. … It's not focusing on the individual. It's saying there's more to it than that. And followership obviously.””

“There's a hierarchy and there's a legitimization of power, and power can be applied in positive and disruptive ways. And we need to embrace that and not say, as Burns said yesterday, well we've got leaders and then we've got power wielders. For me, that's a total false dichotomy. Then I got into this thing of, well actually, the more I look at the leadership literature, it's full of these dichotomies, whether it's leaders and followers, whether it's transformational leadership and transactional, theory X, theory Y. They're creating distinctions all the time but then over… They're exaggerating them, creating a false choice and not seeing, yeah there are distinctions but there are also overlaps and relationships between these concepts. And it's in those overlaps where the interesting dynamics often are in organizations. You distinguish between, well, there's leaders and then there's managers. As we discussed yesterday, in order to be a good leader, you need to be able to manage and vice versa.”

“Wow, well I mean, the importance of etiquette, the importance of honesty I think, because there is room for dishonest golfers and then we do hear…They call it the leather wedge when the boot just knocks the ball a few feet, or you miscalculate, “How many shots did you have there?” “Four?” “No, I think you had five.” So there is room for issues there. Oh, and particularly how to manage, A, anxiety. If you're in a competition and you're on the first tee and you really want to hit a good shot, and how do you cope with that? But equally, how do you cope with a bad shot? Do you start throwing your clubs and what we call throwing a wobbler in the north of England, getting really angry.”

“I don't want to romanticize leaders, and I don't want to romanticize followers either. I think we have to be very cautious and cognizant of the potential for doing that, elevating leaders as the superheroes or from a mainstream leadership perspective, which I think has blighted the discipline for many years.”