Chapter 1: When Leaders Are at Their Best PDF

Chapter 1 When Leaders Are at Their Best For Brian Alink, the digital revolution is as profound as the Industrial Revolution.1 The way organizations solve problems, drive innovation, and scale those innovations to millions of people so quickly and efficiently is massively changing the workplace, the...

Chapter 1 When Leaders Are at Their Best For Brian Alink, the digital revolution is as profound as the Industrial Revolution.1 The way organizations solve problems, drive innovation, and scale those innovations to millions of people so quickly and efficiently is massively changing the workplace, the marketplace, and the community. But as exciting as all this is, something else energizes him even more: the chance to learn how to be an even more effective leader in this new context.2 The opportunity to do just that came when Brian was asked to help refine how the credit card business at Capital One Financial Corporation serviced customers across all channels. This challenge was different from others he had spearheaded because it was about “how we change the mind-sets of leaders across the credit card business to use a digital-first approach for servicing. It was about solving real problems that cause customers pain, anxiety, or frustration, and about how we can make it better for them.” When Brian moved into his current role as managing vice president at Card Digital Channels, he began working with a newly formed team that had just come together. “This put a whole lot of uncertainty into what we were doing,” he acknowledged, and so Brian spent the first few weeks meeting with the executives and other leaders who owned parts of the customer experience, “just listening, learning, getting context, and immersing myself in the situation.” He did the same one-on-one with his immediate team. Guiding him in this initial relationship-building process was a leadership philosophy that had served him well over the years: “At the very beginning of a journey like this,” he said, “it's about getting to know each other personally.” It's about knowing who these people are that are working with me, knowing their values, what they love to do, what they care about, and what they stand for. I also love the opportunity to introduce myself—not as a leader or as a strategist or as the analyst or whatever we're trying to do—but just as somebody who is with them as a real human trying to have a greater experience in life and trying to make the world a better place. Brian pulled his entire leadership team together for a four-hour discussion. He began by explaining how he was attempting to build an environment of trust: This is the kind of environment where we want to do the greatest work of  This is the kind of environment where we want to do the greatest work of our lives, where we want to truly make a difference, where we're feeling committed and we want to do something that matters, that has meaning to us personally. Trust comes from understanding each other's values and understanding our experiences and what we stand for. In order for that to happen, we've got to be vulnerable, and we have to be open. Then we can build on that base of values and trust. Brian had found that every time he's had this conversation with a new team the experience had been “magical.” Without exception, people opened up and shared their personal challenges with one another. As Brian appreciates, everyone has challenges in their lives, and that it's those hard moments that shape who people are and what they stand for. “What drives all of us,” Brian says, “is that we want to do something meaningful for the people we work with, where it really helps them grow and do something better for the people around us. We want to have that same kind of impact on our customers.” Through those early meetings, Brian and his team got clear about their shared vision and values. They developed their core strategy and determined how they were going to operate. With this collaborative effort, everyone on the team felt they had created their approach together and developed ownership for it. Brian and his leadership team then designed and conducted an all-hands meeting that included both his immediate team and extended teams outside the Card Customer Experience organization. They walked everyone through the process their team had gone through together, then rolled out the new plan and engaged everyone—the developers, the software engineers, the designers, and others—in learning about their mission. This approach helped to dissipate much of the concern and ambiguity, and, Brian observed, “communicated clearly that the leadership team was emotionally committed, had each other's backs, were here to help support our entire team, and to do something big that really mattered.” But they didn't want this to be only a priority for the customer experience team. They needed to make the idea of helping customers become more digital, and have effortless experiences, a shared vision across all of the credit card business. They wanted everyone—people from product design, credit policy, fraud, collection, credit lines, lost and stolen cards, and other functions—to see themselves in the bigger picture. Brian's team set up meetings with leaders from across the business, shared their aspirations with them, showed them where customers were running into problems, provided them with insightful data, and told them how they could work together to create painless experiences for told them how they could work together to create painless experiences for customers. As essential as it is to create a vision for and to serve your own vertical team, Brian told us, it's equally important to do the same for your peers and those you don't directly manage: If we can get leaders who are adjacent to our area to come help us and then be willing to give them the credit for the help they provide, it doesn't take away from my leadership or my team's contribution at all. This is a powerful way to get a lot more intelligence and mind share and support for something bigger that we all need to be working on. In doing so, we create a win for everybody. Knowing that getting others to collaborate isn't always easy, Brian offered technical resources from his own team in order to help others help him. He operated on a compelling premise: “We are going to win if we help others win. We've got to give in order to get. If we can move the whole organization, what we are going to get is so much bigger than what we could ever have done on our own.... Being humble and letting others shine comes back to you many times over.” Brian's team created moments when leaders from other parts of the organization would come together and showcase their work. These forums elevated others, honored them, and gave them public recognition and credit for the contributions they were making. While the core of the customer experience approach to leading is elevating others, staying in the background, and giving credit to others, Brian makes sure that those who do the giving are refueled with the energy they need to keep on giving. Each week, he and his leadership team hold standup meetings at which they highlight what everyone is working on and look into problems, successes, lessons learned, and even failures they've had. Those who work in different geographic locations join by video. During these meetings, the leadership team looks for “praise moments” where they can draw attention to exemplary behaviors in front of everyone. When they hear or see something they want to shine a spotlight on, someone will say, “Let's pause for just a moment. That right there was a wonderful example of what we are striving to do.” When people see the successes and hear the positive feedback, it creates momentum. “When working to transform a company into a customer-focused, digital organization,” Brian told us, “it's immensely helpful to frame the leadership scope as a mission that transcends organizational boundaries. Customers don't know which part of an organization they are dealing with! Limiting the leadership model to the immediate team greatly limits the scope and speed of leadership model to the immediate team greatly limits the scope and speed of impact a leader can have on transforming a complex customer journey through an organization.” This is definitely a leadership philosophy for a new era. It's a 360-degree view of leadership that is more inclusive and more open than what many people have experienced in the past, and it produces results. In less than a year, this collaborative effort at Capital One improved a multitude of customer experiences. For example, customers saved hundreds of thousands of hours of calling time in 2016 as a result of enhanced digital experiences and customer touchpoints. The ratio of customer calls to accounts began a steady downward trajectory to the lowest level since being measured—a major driver of efficiency for the business. At the same time, scores tracking the percentage of people recommending Capital One hit all-time highs. For Anna Blackburn, “the values match was the biggest driver” in taking her first job with Beaverbrooks the Jewellers, Limited, a family-owned retailer in the United Kingdom. Eighteen years later, these same values drive her as its chief executive officer—their first non-family member, and first female, to hold that position. Honoring values is also at the heart of Anna's Personal-Best Leadership Experience.3 Founded in 1919, Beaverbrooks has a long and honored history. Today it operates seventy stores, has a significant online presence, and employs nearly 950 people. It's not only dedicated to offering customers quality jewelry and watches, it's also very proud of its dedication to a mission of “enriching lives.” Beaverbrooks contributes 20 percent of post-tax profits to charitable organizations, and it invests heavily in its colleagues—which has earned the company recognition by The Sunday Times (Britain's largest-selling national Sunday newspaper) for thirteen consecutive years as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Anna's appointment as CEO came at an unsettled time. Her predecessor, a family member, left the company to pursue other ventures. The company had veered away somewhat from its core strategy and culture, and colleagues weren't embracing the new ways. Her fifteen years with the company, however, prepared Anna well for the challenge. Starting on the sales floor, she had served in almost every role and function, worked in locations throughout England and Scotland, and spent five years on the executive team. None of that meant she could assume she knew what people wanted from her in this new position. One of her first actions was to send out a survey inviting this new position. One of her first actions was to send out a survey inviting everyone in Beaverbrooks to say what qualities they most wanted to see in the new CEO. At the next annual managers' conference, Anna shared the survey results. People wanted her to be honest, inspiring, competent, forward-looking, caring, ambitious, and supportive, she said, and she pledged to them that she would do everything she could to live up to these expectations. These actions were an early signal of how Anna intended to be a collaborative and inclusive leader, and her next steps reinforced that aspiration. For example, over the years, Beaverbrooks's operations had become increasingly complicated and formalized, and people had lost a sense of ownership in the business. Instead of introducing any radical new direction, Anna initiated changes that were “always within the context of building on our strengths,” she said. It was back to the basics and keeping things simple. Where strategies often go wrong is that you lose connection with the person who's going to be making the biggest difference in your business. They needed to buy in and understand the impact they were having. A major disconnect that Anna observed was that even though Beaverbrooks made The Sunday Times best company list year after year, profits were relatively low. With a firm belief “that being a great workplace and having a great environment should absolutely pay into the bottom line,” Anna set out “to prove that being a great workplace is actually profitable.” However, she wasn't interested in Beaverbrooks being profitable simply for its own sake. She told us that Beaverbrooks is a business with a conscience. The more successful we are financially, the better we can take care of the people who work for us and the better we can support the wider community. The more successful we are, the more good we can do. Part of what needed to be done, Anna believed, was to create a greater sense of shared accountability and responsibility: “We needed to have each and every person ready to take their part in making the culture what it needed to be. One person cannot fix, develop, or evolve a culture.” When feedback to the executive level indicated that they worked too much in silos and were disconnected from the stores, Anna introduced new ways to create greater collaboration and synergy. The monthly executive team meetings, for example, became much more focused on strategy, and the quarterly senior manager and corporate office meetings dealt more with operational decisions and with acknowledging the successes experienced in the stores. Anna also continued the focus group tradition that chairman Mark Adlestone had Anna also continued the focus group tradition that chairman Mark Adlestone had started: small group meetings of about eight people from similar roles. Annually, she holds fourteen focus groups—six for sales teams, and two each for managers, assistant managers, supervisors, and the office team. The meetings last a half-day, and include discussions of what's working and not working, as well as acknowledgments of individual successes. Given feedback from the focus groups, Anna devised a new framework for talking about the business, a concept she called The Three Pillars. It is depicted as three pillars standing on a solid base and capped by a header. Written on the base is Beaverbrooks's purpose: “Enriching Lives.” On the header is the company name. The first pillar is labeled “Customer Service and Selling”; the second is “Financial Success”; and the third is “Great Workplace.” “The key thing,” Anna explains, “is that all three pillars are in alignment and the same height. If one pillar were higher than the others, the roof would fall off.” Another of Anna's major initiatives was a refresh of the Beaverbrooks Way, a one-page document, originally published in 1998, that codified the purpose and values of Beaverbrooks. It was not that the values had changed, but that the document was incomplete and unclear. “There was nothing about being a jeweler, and the family values were not referred to,” Anna told us. “The values were also open to individual interpretation rather than stating what these values mean in Beaverbrooks.” Anna wanted as many people as possible to provide input on a revised Beaverbrooks Way, and she spent twelve months gathering information. She asked questions about it in focus groups, she talked about it with trainee managers, and she sent out feedback forms to all the stores and departments. She received extensive comments and, with the help of the regional managers, created a supporting document that they introduced at the annual company meeting. In her introduction to this thirty-two-page booklet, Anna wrote: I received a lot of feedback about what you wanted to see from the Beaverbrooks Way going forward. You asked for clear and simple language, more explanation of our values and behaviors, and more of a working document. This document is a result of your feedback... [It] includes “The Beaverbrooks Way” (who we are, what we do, why we exist, and our values) and highlights our behaviors—simply. Our behaviors are defined by examples to help bring our culture to life. As much as Anna's attention focuses on improving business performance, she also takes to heart her constituents' desire for a caring and supportive leader. For example, she told us, “We find as many excuses as possible to celebrate successes. I think it's important that people feel recognized and rewarded and valued for the difference they make.” From quarterly business reviews with regional managers to informal office gatherings, Anna takes the time to turn the spotlight on those who do the right things. As they say in the Beaverbrooks Way, “When we recognize what is working well and creating success, we are more likely to repeat the behavior that helped create the success in the first place.” Repeating behaviors that create success is paying off. In the most recent ranking by The Sunday Times, Beaverbrooks was the top retailer on the list. Profits were also at an all-time high, proving that you can be both a great workplace and a profitable business. Given her experiences, what's the most important leadership lesson Anna would pass along to emerging leaders? “Being a role model is absolutely key,” she says. “It's something I've held very close to me throughout my career, whether it's on the selling floor or in the executive office. People who model the behaviors that are crucial to business success inspire others.” The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® In undertaking their leadership challenges, Brian and Anna seized the opportunity to change business as usual. And while their stories are exceptional, they are not unlike countless others. We've been conducting original global research for over thirty years, and we've discovered that such achievements are commonplace. When we ask leaders to tell us about their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences—experiences that they believe are their individual standards of excellence—there are thousands of success stories just like Brian's and Anna's. We've found them in profit-based firms and nonprofits, agriculture and mining, manufacturing and utilities, banking and healthcare, government and education, and the arts and community service. These leaders are employees and volunteers, young and old, women and men. Leadership knows no racial or religious bounds, no ethnic or cultural borders. Leaders reside in every city and every country, in every function and every organization. We find exemplary leadership everywhere we look. We've also found that in excellent organizations, everyone, regardless of title or position, is encouraged to act like a leader. In these places, people don't just believe that everyone can make a difference; they act in ways to develop and grow people's talents, including their leadership. They don't subscribe to the many myths that keep people from developing their leadership capabilities and organizations from creating leadership cultures.4 One of the greatest myths about leadership is that some people have “it” and some don't. A corollary myth is that if you don't have “it,” then you can't learn “it.” Neither could be further from the empirical truth. After reflecting on their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences, people come to the same conclusion as Tanvi Lotwala, revenue accountant at Bloom Energy: “All of us are born leaders. We all have leadership qualities ingrained. All that we need is polishing them up and bringing them to the forefront. It is an ongoing process to develop ourselves as a leader, but unless we take on the leadership challenges presented to us on a daily basis, we cannot become better at it.” We first asked people in the early 1980s to tell us what they did when they were at their “personal best” in leading others, and we continue to ask this question of people around the world. After analyzing thousands of these leadership experiences, we discovered, and continue to find, that regardless of the times or settings, individuals who guide others along pioneering journeys follow surprisingly similar paths. Although each experience was unique in its individual expression, there were clearly identifiable behaviors and actions that made a expression, there were clearly identifiable behaviors and actions that made a difference. When making extraordinary things happen in organizations, leaders engage in what we call The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership®: Model the Way Inspire a Shared Vision Challenge the Process Enable Others to Act Encourage the Heart These practices are not the private purview of the people we studied. Nor do they belong to a few select shining stars. Leadership is not about personality. It's about behavior. The Five Practices are available to anyone who accepts the leadership challenge—the challenge of taking people and organizations to places they have never been before. It is the challenge of moving beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary. The Five Practices framework is not an accident of a special moment in history. It has passed the test of time. While the context of leadership has changed dramatically over the years, the content of leadership has not changed much at all. The fundamental behaviors and actions of leaders have remained essentially the same, and they are as relevant today as they were when we began our study of exemplary leadership. The truth of each individual Personal-Best Leadership Experience, multiplied thousands of times, and substantiated empirically by millions of respondents and hundreds of scholars, establishes The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership as an “operating system” for leaders everywhere. In the remainder of this chapter, we introduce each of The Five Practices and provide brief examples that demonstrate how leaders, just like Brian and Anna, across a variety of circumstances use them to make extraordinary things happen. When you explore The Five Practices in depth in Chapters Three through Twelve, you'll find scores of illustrations from the real-life experiences of people who have taken the leadership challenge. Model the Way Titles are granted, but it's your behavior that earns you respect. When Terry Callahan asks, “How can I help you?” he means it. One example was while vice president for Miller Valentine Group, a real estate solution provider, they needed to make an important community grand-opening event happen in record time and it required an “all hands on deck” effort. What surprised the team the most was when Terry removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and literally got down and dirty as he started mulching the landscape. “Terry taught me that leadership is not about titles and ranks,” said one of his direct reports, “but about personal responsibility and setting a positive example.”5 This sentiment reverberated across all the cases we collected. “At the end of the day,” Toni Lejano, human resources manager at Cisco, recalled from her Personal-Best Leadership Experience, “leadership is all about how you behave that makes a difference.” Exemplary leaders know that if they want to gain commitment and achieve the highest standards, they must be models of the behavior they expect of others. To effectively Model the Way, you must first be clear about your own guiding principles. You must clarify values by finding your voice. When you understand who you are and what your values are, then you can give voice to those values. As Alan Spiegelman, wealth management advisor with Northwestern Mutual, explained: “Before you can be a leader of others, you need to know clearly who you are and what your core values are. Once you know that, then you can give your voice to those values and feel comfortable sharing them with others.” Arpana Tiwari, senior manager with one of the world's largest e-commerce retailers, found that “the more I spoke with others about my values, the clearer they became for me.” She realized, however, that her values weren't the only ones that mattered. Everyone on the team has principles that guide their actions and, as a leader, you must affirm the shared values of the group. This requires getting everyone involved in creating the values. Doing so, Arpana observed, “makes it relatively easy to model the values that everyone has agreed to.” Another benefit she realized was that “it is also less difficult to confront people when they make decisions that are not aligned. When a value is violated, leaders have to do or say something or they run the risk of sending a message that this is not important.” Therefore, leaders must set the example. Deeds are far more important than words when constituents want to determine how serious leaders really are about what they say. Words and deeds must be consistent. Inspire a Shared Vision People describe their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences as times when they imagined an exciting, highly attractive future for their organizations. They had visions and dreams of what could be. They had absolute and total personal faith in their dreams, and they were confident in their abilities to make those extraordinary things happen. Every organization, every social movement, begins with a vision. It is the force that creates the future. Leaders envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. You need to have an appreciation of the past and a clear image of what the results should look like even before starting any project, much as an architect draws a blueprint or an engineer builds a model. As Ajay Aggrawal, information technology (IT) project manager with Oracle, said, “You have to connect to what's meaningful to others and create the belief that people can achieve something grand. Otherwise, people may fail to see how their work is meaningful and their contributions fit into the big picture.” You can't command commitment; you have to inspire it. You have to enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations. Stephanie Capron, Ritzman Pharmacies vice president of human resources, told us how this family business, with over twenty-five locations, asked people within each location and every department to create a vision board of what they saw the future looking like, and then brought all of these together to create a shared vision (and new brand). “We painted a big picture,” she said, “and got everyone to see that picture so they could understand what great service looked and felt like, and their part in it.”6 Too many people think that the leader's job is to come up with the vision when the reality is that people, like those at Ritzman Pharmacies, want to be involved in the process. This grassroots approach is much more effective than preaching one person's perspective. In these times of rapid change and uncertainty, people want to follow those who can see beyond today's difficulties and imagine a brighter tomorrow. As Oliver Vivell, senior director, corporate development at SAP, points out, “Others have to see themselves as part of that vision and as able to contribute in order to embrace the vision and make it their own.” Leaders forge unity of purpose by showing their constituents how the dream is a shared dream and how it fulfills the common good. When you express your enthusiasm and excitement for the vision, you ignite that same passion in others. As Amy Matson Drohan, ON24's senior customer success manager, reflected on her Personal-Best Leadership Experience, she observed that: “You can't proselytize a vision that you don't full-heartedly believe.” Ultimately, she said, “The leader's excitement shines through and convinces the team that the vision is worthy of their time and support.” Challenge the Process Challenge is the crucible for greatness. Every single personal-best leadership case involved a change from the status quo. Not one person achieved a personal best by keeping things the same. Regardless of the specifics, they all involved overcoming adversity and embracing opportunities to grow, innovate, and improve. Leaders are pioneers willing to step out into the unknown. However, leaders aren't the only creators or originators of new products, services, or processes. Innovation comes more from listening than from telling, and from constantly looking outside of yourself and your organization for new and innovative products, processes, and services. You need to search for opportunities by seizing the initiative and by looking outward for innovative ways to improve. Leaders don't sit idly by waiting for fate to smile upon them; they venture out. Taking risks was what Srinath Thurthahalli Nagaraj recalled about his personal- best (and first) leadership experience in India with Flextronics. “When things did not work as expected,” Srinath explained, “we kept on experimenting and challenging one another's ideas. You have to make room for failure and more importantly the opportunity to learn from failure.” By making something happen, Srinath was able to move the project forward. Because innovation and change involve experimenting and taking risks, your main contribution will be to create a climate for experimentation, the recognition of good ideas, the support of those ideas, and the willingness to challenge the system. One way of dealing with the potential risks and failures of experimentation is by constantly generating small wins and learning from experience. Pierfrancesco Ronzi, as the London-based engagement manager with McKinsey and Company, recalled how successfully turning around the credit process for a banking client in North Africa meant breaking the project down into parts so that they could find a place to start, determine what would work, and see how they could learn in the process of moving forward. “Showing them that we were able to make something happen,” he said, “was a significant boost to their confidence in the project and their willingness to stay involved.” There's a strong correlation between the process of learning and the approach leaders take to making extraordinary things happen. Leaders are always learning from their errors and failures. Life is the leader's laboratory, and exemplary leaders use it to conduct as many experiments as possible. Kinjal Shah, senior manager at Quisk, told us how his personal best “taught me a lot. I stumbled at places, many times, and got up, dusted myself off, learned from it and tried to do better the next time around. I learned a lot, and the experience definitely made me a better leader.” me a better leader.” Enable Others to Act Grand dreams don't become significant realities through the actions of a single person. Achieving greatness requires a team effort. It requires solid trust and enduring relationships. It requires group collaboration and individual accountability, which begins, as Sushma Bhope, co-founder of Stealth Technology Startup, appreciated, “by empowering those around you.” She concluded, just as many others had when reviewing their personal-best experiences, that “no one could have this done this alone. It was essential to be open to all ideas and to give everyone a voice in the decision-making process. The one guiding principle on the project was that the team was larger than any individual on the team.” Leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. You have to engage all those who must make the project work—and in some way, all who must live with the results. General Wendy Masiello, director of the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency, articulated the importance of being “one team, one voice” to over 600 leaders at their World Wide Training Conference. To make this point, she asked everyone who had contracts with Lockheed Martin to stand. A third of the room stood. She said, “Look around the room at the people you need to team with during this conference. While in sessions sit together, meet together, and share your experiences and expertise.” She then asked those to stand who worked with Boeing, and then with Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and the like. Each time, she spoke the same message and you could hear the sighs as people recognized how they had not been operating as “One Team with One Voice.” As Wendy remarked, “This will only be achieved when we have developed greater relationships with one another.”7 Leaders appreciate that constituents don't perform at their best or stick around for very long if they feel weak, dependent, or alienated. When you strengthen others by increasing self-determination and developing competence, they are more likely to give it their all and exceed their own expectations. Omar Pualuan, head of engineering at RVision, reflecting on his Personal-Best Leadership Experience, realized that “letting each member of the team contribute to the project plan and make it their own was the most important tool for success.” Focusing on serving others' needs rather than one's own builds trust in a leader. The more people trust their leaders, and each other, the more they take risks, make changes, and keep moving ahead. Leaders have to create an environment where, as Ana Sardeson, materials program manager at Nest, told us, where, as Ana Sardeson, materials program manager at Nest, told us, “individuals are comfortable with voicing their opinions, because then the team feels empowered to take action. This level of comfort with decision making is paramount to creating a space that is conducive to collaboration.” She explained: “When the conversation shifts from a silo to an open and collaborative space, relationships become stronger and more resilient.” When people are trusted and have more information, discretion, and authority, they're much more likely to use their energies to produce extraordinary results. Encourage the Heart The climb to the top is arduous and steep, and people become exhausted, frustrated, and disenchanted, and are often tempted to give up. Genuine acts of caring draw people forward, which is an important lesson Denise Straka, vice president, corporate insurance with Calpine, took away from her Personal-Best Leadership Experience: “People want to know that their managers believe in them and in their abilities to get a job done. They want to feel valued by their employers, and acknowledging an accomplishment is a great way to demonstrate their value.” Leaders recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence. It can be one to one or with many people. It can come from dramatic gestures or simple actions. It can come from informal channels, just as well as through the formal hierarchy. Eakta Malik, senior clinical research associate with a global medical device company, realizing that many people didn't feel sufficiently appreciated, and lacked a sense of team cohesiveness, organized some company-sponsored happy hours and team events, designed “for the team to unwind, get to know each other on a personal level, and to create a spirit of a community.” She publicly acknowledged her teammates' hard work in bi-weekly meetings, which, she explained, “really lightens up the mood. I used to think that having praise on a project looks better when it comes from a director/manager, but I learned that praising someone doesn't have to be connected with having a title for it to be meaningful.” Being a leader requires showing appreciation for people's contributions and creating a culture of celebrating the values and victories by creating a spirit of community. One lesson that Andy Mackenzie, chief operating officer with BioCardia, learned from his Personal-Best Leadership Experience was to “make sure that you and the team are having fun. Every day won't be fun, but if it's all drudgery, then it's hardly worth getting out of bed for.” Encouragement is, curiously, serious business because it's how you visibly and Encouragement is, curiously, serious business because it's how you visibly and behaviorally link rewards with performance. Celebrations and rituals, when done in an authentic way and from the heart, build a strong sense of collective identity and community spirit that can carry a group through extraordinarily tough times. As Deanna Lee, director of marketing strategy with MIG, told us: “By bringing a team together after an important milestone, it reinforces the fact that more can be accomplished together than apart. Engaging one another outside of the work setting also increases personal connection, which builds trust, improves communication, and strengthens the bonds within the team.” Recognitions and celebrations need to be personal and personalized. As Eddie Tai, project director with Pacific Eagle Holdings, realized, “There's no way to fake it.” In telling us about his experiences, he noted, “Encouraging the Heart might very well be the hardest job of any leader because it requires the most honesty and sincerity.” Yet this leadership practice, he maintained, “can have the most significant and long-lasting impact on those it touches and inspires.” These five leadership practices—Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart—provide an operating system for what people are doing as leaders when at they are at their best, and there's abundant empirical evidence that these leadership practices matter. Hundreds of studies have reported that The Five Practices make a positive difference in the engagement and performance of people and organizations.8 This is highlighted in the next section, and more of the research supporting this operating system is reported in subsequent chapters. The Five Practices Make a Difference Exemplary leader behavior makes a profoundly positive difference in people's commitment and motivation, their work performance, and the success of their organizations. That's the definitive conclusion from analyzing responses from nearly three million people around the world using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) to assess how often their leaders engage in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. Those leaders who more frequently use The Five Practices are considerably more effective than their counterparts who use them less frequently. In these studies, the leader's direct reports complete the LPI indicating how frequently they observe their leader engaging in the specific behaviors associated with The Five Practices. In addition, they respond to ten questions regarding (a) their feelings about their workplace, for example, levels of satisfaction, pride, and commitment, and (b) assessments about their leader on such things as trustworthiness and overall effectiveness. There is an unambiguous relationship between how engaged Figure 1.1 The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership Impacts the Engagement Level of Direct Reports people are and how frequently they observe their leaders using The Five Practices, as shown in Figure 1.1. Nearly 96 percent of direct reports who are most highly engaged (i.e., in the top third of the distribution) indicate that their leaders very frequently or almost always use The Five Practices. In contrast, less than 5 percent of direct reports are highly engaged when they indicate that their leaders seldom use The Five Practices (at best, only once in a while). The differential impact is huge. In addition, respondents provide information about who they are and their organizational context. Multivariate analyses show that individual characteristics and organizational context combined explain less than 1 percent of the distribution connected with the engagement levels of their reports, while The Five Practices account for nearly 40 percent of the variance. How their leaders behave significantly influences engagement, and is independent of who the direct reports are (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, or education), or their circumstance (e.g., position, tenure, discipline, industry, or nationality). How their leader behaves is what makes a difference in explaining why people work hard, their commitment, pride, and productivity. The more you use The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, the more likely it is that you'll have a positive influence on other people and the organization. That's what all the data adds up to: if you want to have a significant impact on people, on organizations, and on communities, you'd be wise to invest in learning the behaviors that enable you to become the very best leader you can. Moreover, the data clearly shows that how strongly direct reports would “recommend their leader to a colleague” directly links with the extent to which they report their leader using The Five Practices. Many scholars have documented that leaders who engage in The Five Practices are more effective than those who don't.9 This is true whether the context is inside or outside the United States, in the public or private sector, or within schools, healthcare organizations, business firms, prisons, churches, and so on. Here are just a few examples of the impact of leaders who use The Five Practices more frequently than their counterparts: Create higher-performing teams Generate increased sales and customer satisfaction levels Foster renewed loyalty and greater organizational commitment Enhance motivation and the willingness to work hard Facilitate high patient-satisfaction scores and more effectively meet family member needs Promote high degrees of student and teacher involvement in schools Enlarge the membership size of their religious congregations Reduce absenteeism, turnover, and dropout rates  Positively influence recruitment yields While The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership don't completely explain why leaders and their organizations are successful, it's very clear that engaging in them makes quite a difference no matter who you are or where you are located. How you behave as a leader matters, and it matters a lot. Furthermore, evaluations of the effectiveness of the leader by their direct reports, and others, correlate directly with how frequently The Five Practices are used. Consider these findings at a macro level. Researchers examined the financial performance of organizations over a five-year period and compared those that constituents rated senior leaders as actively using The Five Practices with organizations whose leaders were significantly less engaged in The Five Practices. The bottom line: net income growth was nearly eighteen times higher, and stock price growth was nearly three times greater for those publicly traded organizations whose leadership strongly engaged in The Five Practices than their counterparts.10 The Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership Embedded in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership are behaviors that can serve as the basis for becoming an exemplary leader. We call these The Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership (Table 1.1). They focus on behaviors and actions you need to be comfortable with engaging in. These ten commitments serve as the template for explaining, understanding, appreciating, and learning how leaders get extraordinary things done in organizations, and each of them is discussed in depth in Chapters Three through Twelve. Before we go into depth on each of these commitments, let's next consider leadership from the standpoint of the constituent. Leadership, after all, is a relationship. What do people look for in a leader? What do people want from someone whose direction they'd be willing to follow? Table 1.1 The Five Practices and Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership