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Leadership and followership
Leadership and followership

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Leadership and followership

Introduction and guidance

Leadership and followership is a free badged course which lasts 8 weeks with approximately 3 hours’ study time each week. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete another week’s study.

You’ll start this course by considering your own leadership experience and learning more about different leadership styles. As you progress, you’ll focus on key leadership skills and how you might develop them yourself, exploring elements of both good and bad leadership and looking at possible solutions to problems that can arise. Followership has an important connection with leadership and you’ll find out more about what makes a good follower and how leaders can develop their followers to create more productive relationships and encourage them to consider leadership roles in the future. You’ll look at common leadership challenges and the future of leadership in this changing world. Finally, you’ll identify how you want to develop your own leadership skills and devise a plan to build your experience.

After completing this course, you should be able to:

  • describe a variety of leadership styles and approaches and analyse how they fit with personal preferences
  • recognise the skills required for leadership and assess personal experience and capability
  • define followership, from the perspectives of both the leader and the follower
  • identify how effective leadership can overcome a variety of common challenges
  • reflect on personal experience, start a leadership journal and devise an appropriate plan of action to develop leadership skills.

Moving around the course

In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you can find a link to the next week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course. Alternatively, use the week links at the top of every page of the course.

It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.

Get careers guidance

This course has been included in the National Careers Service [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] to help you develop new skills.