About Ira Chaleff
Ira Chaleff is an author, speaker, workshop presenter and innovative thinker on the beneficial use of power between those who are leading and those who are following in any given situation.
Ira has been named one of the “100 best minds on leadership” by Leadership Excellence magazine. He was cited in the Harvard Business Review as one of the three pioneers in the growing field of followership studies.
Ira Chaleff Authorship
Ira has watched with pride as the concept of followership has moved from one of obscurity into a topic of study in major universities, conferences and leadership development programs. He has published and has been quoted in numerous articles on Followership and its emergence as a newly recognized field of study and practice.
His latest book (2021), A Celebration of Followership: The Story in Documents of Courageous Followership and the Followership Community, is an unique retrospective, with over three hundred rarely seen documents that traces the impact of Ira Chaleff’s work that conceives of followership as the indispensable complement to leadership. Building on this record, it introduces the work of the community of followership educators and practitioners that has flourished in tandem with those initiatives.
Ira’s groundbreaking book, The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders, was first published in 1995 by Berrett-Koehler and is now its third edition. The book is widely acclaimed as a classic in its field, has been published in multiple languages and is in use in institutions around the globe including educational, corporate, government and military organizations.
The second expanded edition was published in 2002 and was the “Silver Winner of the Best Business Book of the Year award in 2002” from ForeWord Magazine. A third, updated edition, published in 2009, includes a new chapter, “The Courage to Speak to the Hierarchy.”
Ira is coeditor of The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Make Great Leaders and Organizations, part of the highly regarded Warren Bennis Leadership Series.
With Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told To Do Is Wrong, he is once again breaking new ground by exploring the deep cultural roots of obedience and how to equip individuals of all ages to resist inappropriate orders and find better ways and ethical means of achieving legitimate goals.
Ira has also written on the appropriate use of power in non-traditional settings in his creative non-fiction work, The Limits of Violence: Lessons of a Revolutionary Life. He has also ventured into the field of poetry through four collections of poems, the last of which, Falling Apart Into Wholeness, was published in 2020
Ira Chaleff Profile
Ira holds a degree in Applied Behavioral Science and is a Board Certified Coach from the Center for Credentialing and Education.
He has recently completed two terms of service as member of the Board of Directors of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is founder of its Followership Learning Community.
Ira is also the founder and president of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates, which provides coaching, consulting and facilitation to companies, associations and agencies throughout the Washington, DC, area.
He is chairman emeritus of the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation and has provided facilitation to nearly one hundred congressional offices to improve their service to constituents.
Ira is Adjunct Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute where he teaches a week long elective workshop on “Courageous Followers, Courageous Leaders” in the “Leadership in a Democratic Society” program.
He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Moller Institute, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, England.
Training & Consulting
Ira has conducted top-to-bottom organization assessments for diverse domestic and international organizations or their key divisions. Among these are the Credit Union National Association, The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency of the World Bank, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, National Public Radio, the Nuclear Energy Institute and others.
Ira designs and conducts leadership team development programs for organizations such as Federal Executive Institute; The Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Facilities, Engingeering and Operations; The Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian; and Biotechnology Regulatory Services at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of United States Department of Agriculture.
He offers individual executive coaching for senior and mid-level managers at privately held and newly public hi-tech companies, law and lobbying firms, corporations, federal agencies and trade associations.
Ira conducts workload management coaching and training for managers and professionals at private sector firms that have included Kraft Foods, Capital One, AARP, Volvo, American Management Systems, Glaxo-SmithKline and BlackBoard Inc.
Ira also delivers the bilingual Courageous Follower class as with Cuestamoras managers in Costa Rica (2016).
International Work
Ira has hosted delegations of legislators from other countries interested in studying the mechanisms through which the United States Legislative Branch has developed the capacity to balance the power of the Executive Branch. He has facilitated in-country retreats for this purpose for the Senate of Nigeria and has conducted similar work for the parliament of Sierra Leone.
He has facilitated strategic planning efforts for international organizations such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Club of Madrid, both of which are dedicated to supporting the viability of emerging democracies.
Ira was invited to India to conduct workshops on Building Organizational Excellence through Leader-Follower Collaboration. He conducted three Open Enrollment Programs attended by a wide cross section of private and state owned companies, two programs for individual corporate clients and a special half day workshop for Organization Development professionals. His partner in India, Strategic Human Resource Services, has continued to offer Courageous Followership training.
Two workshops on Courageous Followership were presented at the European Union School of Public Administration (2017, Brussels), one for the most senior level of civil servants and the other for the mid level managers of the European Commission, which is the largest of the EU institutions.
