Leadership and Followership: Free OpenLearn Course

A team needs more than someone with a leadership title. It also needs people who can recognise a challenge, understand their contribution and support others effectively. Leadership and followership, from The Open University, explores both sides of that relationship through a free OpenLearn course.

The course gives you a structured way to examine leadership styles, reflect on experience and identify capabilities to develop. Its value is especially clear when you bring a real question from a work team, student project or volunteer group: why did an interaction work, and what might you handle differently next time?

Course at a glance

What you’ll learn

• Compare leadership approaches: consider different styles and how they relate to your preferences and context.
• Assess your starting point: identify leadership skills and examine your own experience and capabilities.
• Understand followership: explore the relationship from the perspectives of both leaders and followers.
• Recognise common challenges: examine poor leadership and consider ways to respond more effectively.
• Plan development: reflect in a leadership journal and build an action plan for further experience.

Skills you’ll gain

• Leadership awareness
• Followership
• Personal reflection
• Leadership styles
• Team relationships
• Development planning

Leadership through the lens of everyday teams

The opening material asks you to consider your experience before moving into leadership styles, skills, difficulties and followership. Later study brings those ideas together in a development plan. This sequence gives your reflections a direction: first understand where you are, then decide what deserves deliberate practice.

You can approach the course without supervising employees. Contributing to a group involves choices about communication, responsibility and support, even when another person makes the final decision. Thinking about those choices makes the leadership and followership connection more concrete than treating them as separate job descriptions.

Choose one manageable situation to keep in mind as you learn. A project handover or a meeting without a clear decision can be enough. Describe the interaction without using colleagues’ names or private information, and distinguish what you observed from what you assumed about their intentions.

Build a development plan you can actually use

For an optional reflection exercise, keep three brief notes after a relevant interaction: what happened, what you noticed about your own response and one change worth trying. Paper or a plain text document is sufficient. You do not need a paid leadership assessment or planning application.

Make the proposed change specific. “Become a better leader” leaves you little to review; “confirm who owns the next step before closing the meeting” gives you something observable. After trying it, record what changed and what remained uncertain. A mixed result can still help you refine the question.

Use your journal to connect ideas across the weeks. Compare an early reflection with a later one and look for a clearer explanation, not just a more positive description of yourself. That record can also help you choose which experience or feedback you need after finishing the course.

Free access and completion recognition

You can start reading the public course without signing up. Create a free OpenLearn account and enrol to track progress, access all quizzes and activities, and receive the free Statement of Participation after completion. The suggested eight-week pattern is flexible; you can work at your own pace.

To earn the free digital badge, read every week and score at least 50% in both the Week 4 and Week 8 badge quizzes. Answering every question correctly after repeated attempts does not necessarily produce the required score, so read the quiz instructions. An unsuccessful whole badge quiz can be attempted again after 24 hours.

The Statement of Participation and badge document your learning activity; they do not carry formal qualification credit. Pair them with your own reflections and a realistic next action. Completion can mark the end of this course while your development continues through experience and feedback.

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Frequently asked questions