Leadership research, throughout the vast majority of the last century, has been narrowly concerned with the leaders themselves, neglecting the other half of the equation, the art of following, which is under-examined [1,5]. However, an extensive body of research initiated by the groundbreaking research of Robert Kelley has established that good followers think critically and participate actively, while passive followers are doomed to be complicit in groupthink and organisational failure [1,2]. The current paper reviews the main theoretical concepts of followership theory, namely the followership styles by Kelley, the courageous follower concept by Chaleff, the followership theory by Kellerman based on engagement, and the followership theory by Uhl-Bien et al., and applies them to the problem of traditional corporate hierarchies where lower-level employees seldom dare to challenge their superior managers. Applying knowledge from the literature on organisational silence and employee voice, and taking into account the documented organisational climate of fear that characterised the corporate culture preceding the Volkswagen emissions scandal, this paper demonstrates that many so-called failures of leadership are actually the lack of followership infrastructure, namely psychological safety, training, and reward systems necessary for productive dissent. In the paper's concluding section, there is a set of recommendations to HR as to how to train and reward proactive followers to change the perception of preventing silence in the workplace from being the failure of leaders only to be a shared responsibility of leaders and followers alike. The present literature review as a conceptual paper does not include any original data.