Nancy Lublin at Fast Company just nailed a thought I’ve been having lately. We push and push people to aspire to be great leaders, we give so much time and attention to the CEO’s, when we should be inspiring people to be the best piece of the puzzle possible. Our attention and energy needs to go to the people actually pulling the job off, the followers. Here are some quotes:

We’re obsessed with leadership. Bookstores have entire sections devoted to leadership. Corporations spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on leadership retreats. At some universities, you can even major in leadership. Venture-capital money flows like water into the hands of founders who are labeled “visionary” and “at the vanguard.” And what’s sexier these days than the words “I started my own blah blah blah”?

I think we’ve got it wrong. We’ve overdone this whole leadership/founder/entrepreneur thing. And we’re not spending nearly enough time crediting the folks who turn all that visionary stuff into tangible reality: the chief operating officers, the midlevel managers, the staffers. If the word didn’t have a pejorative tinge to it, I guess you’d call them followers.

Another great thought:

The underappreciation of followers has a major bottom-line consequence: crazy redundancy. You can see it in the not-for-profit sector, which has a gazillion little organizations replicating one another. We all want to run our own thing, so not-for-profits never die. As a result, we have huge inefficiency and ridiculous amounts of overlap in the sector. This is wasteful, and this is fundamentally bad business.

Honoring good followers isn’t just a nice thing — it’s necessary. It’s the sanest, smartest way to run your company, for-profit or not. We have to recognize that your bright ideas — and mine — would go nowhere without the doers. Failing to do so will make us collectively poorer, not just in spirit but in money.