Project Followership: Projects for the Rest of Us

Project management is a relatively young discipline (barely 50 years old) which is constantly evolving, and has proved able to respond concretely to the needs of modern companies. Its popularity has consequently grown, and so has its weight in the economic literature.
If we wanted to assess the wealth of public knowledge on the subject, the situation could thus be summarized: a very strong presence of publications on the general aspects of project management, typically management by teams; a good presence of articles on particular methodological or organizational aspects, such as project leadership; verticalization on sectors such information systems or construction; a few articles in depth about neighboring disciplines such as project portfolio management, program management, or multi-project management.
What's most worrying is that the near totality of publications are oriented toward the project manager. The team is always considered in the top-down version: the project manager must select the team, he/she must coordinate it, motivate it, deal with internal conflicts, etc.
These are often high-quality contributions, but if you look at the discipline from perspective of collaborators, and not coordinators, you could find reasons for despair. In fact, nobody has so far dealt with project management, by taking into account the knowledge, skills, behavior that a collaborator must have to participate in a project as team member. Hence the idea of looking at project management bottom-up, in order to supply collaborators with useful knowledge in order to perform their tasks well. Too often, projects are passively accepted rather than actively participated in.It's not so much that the birth of a project is not shared, but the fact that many people feel lost, since they don't have the right knowledge to understand the dynamics of the project. So project meetings often turn into failed affairs where irrelevant questions are posed (and this decreases participation and increases conflicts), the kick-off meeting is considered a waste of time where you can get free sandwiches, and planning meetings turn into technical summits where everybody speaks in impenetrable jargon, creating mutual dissatisfaction.
Reinterpreting the project according to a bottom-up logic seeks to address these problems by equipping each participant with right tools. Mirroring the fledgling study of followership, complement to the more heralded leadership, this new approach to project management goes under the name of project followership. The term should not be considered negatively, as inferior to or dependent from leadership. It just stresses the need of augmenting the knowledge of followership skills, needed to support full integration with the leadership function entrusted to the project manager.