Followership: The Other Half of the Equation

There's an entire industry devoted to making better leaders. There is almost nothing devoted to the people they're leading - which is strange, because that's where most of the work happens. This episode is about followership: the underdeveloped half of the leadership equation, and arguably the half that decides whether anything actually gets done. Host Michael Morand sits down with Jyoti Chopra, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Hertz, where she's responsible for more than 25,000 team members across 11,000+ customer-facing locations. Before Hertz, Jyoti held senior roles at MGM Resorts, Bank of New York, Pearson, Deloitte, and Merrill Lynch - a career spanning Wall Street, hospitality, and mobility, and a rare vantage point on what actually travels about how teams work. Across the conversation, Jyoti reframes followership as something active rather than passive: the discipline of choosing who to follow, seeking feedback before it's offered, and holding a team together when the manager doesn't have the answer. She makes the case for the most overlooked layer in most organizations. The teams that hold up under pressure usually aren't the ones with the strongest leader in the room. They're the ones who know how to follow well. This episode is about how that actually works.