The Leadership Challenge How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations PDF

Contents Cover Praise for The Leadership Challenge, Sixth Edition Title Page Copyright Introduction: Making Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations What Leaders Do and What Constituents Expect Chapter 1: When Leaders Are at Their Best The Five Practices of Exemp...

Contents Cover Praise for The Leadership Challenge, Sixth Edition Title Page Copyright Introduction: Making Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations What Leaders Do and What Constituents Expect Chapter 1: When Leaders Are at Their Best The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® The Five Practices Make a Difference The Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership Notes Chapter 2: Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership What People Look for and Admire in Their Leaders Putting It All Together: Credibility Is the Foundation Notes Practice 1: Model the Way Chapter 3: Clarify Values Find Your Voice Affirm Shared Values Notes Chapter 4: Set the Example Live the Shared Values Teach Others to Model the Values Notes Practice 2: Inspire a Shared Vision Chapter 5: Envision the Future Imagine the Possibilities Find a Common Purpose  Notes Chapter 6: Enlist Others Appeal to Common Ideals Animate the Vision Notes Practice 3: Challenge the Process Chapter 7: Search for Opportunities Seize the Initiative Exercise Outsight Notes Chapter 8: Experiment and Take Risks Generate Small Wins Learn from Experience Notes Practice 4: Enable Others to Act Chapter 9: Foster Collaboration Create a Climate of Trust Facilitate Relationships Notes Chapter 10: Strengthen Others Enhance Self-Determination Develop Competence and Confidence Notes Practice 5: Encourage the Heart Chapter 11: Recognize Contributions Expect the Best Personalize Recognition Notes Chapter 12: Celebrate the Values and Victories Create a Spirit of Community  Be Personally Involved Notes Chapter 13: Leadership Is Everyone's Business Exemplary Leadership Is Local Exemplary Leadership Matters Learning Leadership Takes Practice Contrasts and Contradictions First Lead Yourself Leading Is Doing Remember the Secret to Success in Life Notes Acknowledgments About the Authors Index End User License Agreement List of Tables Table 1.1 Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 4.1 Table 13.1 List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Figure 3.1 Figure 4.1 Figure 5.1 Figure 6.1 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 9.1 Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2 Figure 11.1 Figure 12.1 Figure 13.1 Praise for The Leadership Challenge, Sixth Edition “Now in its sixth edition, The Leadership Challenge has stood the test of time for good reason—it's quite simply one of the best books you'll ever read on leadership. A must read!” —Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The New One Minute Manager® and Leading at a Higher Level “How can a book celebrate its 30th anniversary and still remain relevant? Easy! It's because the authors never stop growing, learning from all the clients they work with, from all they read in the literature, and from one another. They continue to fill the pages of this book with the best stories, examples, and memorable lessons learned. This is the right resource for anyone just entering the leadership field, or for those who read the book three decades ago!” —Beverly Kaye, founder, Career Systems International, coauthor, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em, Help them Grow or Watch Them Go “Whether you are just beginning your leadership journey, or a seasoned CEO, or a professor of leadership, this timeless leadership classic needs to be within constant reach!” —Harry Kraemer Jr., former chairman and CEO, Baxter International; professor of management and strategy, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management “The Leadership Challenge is a book that not only serves your career but more importantly it is a tool for leading a better life. Jim and Barry have put together one of the greatest of leadership insights. Every leader should take advantage of the gift that is The Leadership Challenge.” —Howard Behar, president (retired), Starbucks Coffee “I love The Leadership Challenge! This is the book on leadership that I recommend to all of my clients. The sixth edition provides the best of all worlds: 1. It contains the timeless wisdom that Jim and Barry have accumulated over more than 25 years—it has been and continues to be a classic in our field. 2. It has been updated to reflect how their timeless leadership concepts can be best applied in today's ever-changing world.”  —Marshall Goldsmith, bestselling author of What Got You Here Won't Get You There, MOJO, and Triggers “I've been a fan—and follower—of The Leadership Challenge for almost 25 years, and the principles are as relevant today as they have ever been. In this leadership classic, Kouzes and Posner have identified and brought to life invaluable practices that are as insightful as they are practical.” —Patrick Lencioni, president, The Table Group; bestselling author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage “No book has ever chronicled the practices of true leadership better than The Leadership Challenge, and this updated edition deftly outlines how to be a phenomenal leader in the 21st century.” —Chip Conley, New York Times bestselling author of Emotional Equations, and Airbnb Global Head of Hospitality and Strategy “The Leadership Challenge is a classic, insightful and compelling book. All leadership positions come with its own challenges, but not all leaders know how to navigate through them. If you are looking to excel as a leader, and you need digestible and partial advice: The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner is the book for you. It will not only help you become a great a leader but it will help mobilize your people into getting extraordinary things done. Buy this book, read this book and live this book. Then buy this book for those who truly care about leadership.” —Lolly Daskal, president and founder of Lead From Within, author of The Leadership Gap: What Gets Between You and Your Greatness “If I could recommend only one of the tens of thousands of leadership books ever written, The Leadership Challenge would absolutely be my top choice, and by a wide margin. This sixth edition builds markedly on the last but remains characteristically Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner—a complex work in its underlying character, but brilliant in its simplicity and practical in design. The Leadership Challenge is the most useful leadership book ever written; I have each and every edition, and each is better than the last.” —Thomas A. Kolditz, PhD, director, Doerr Institute for New Leaders, Rice University “The Leadership Challenge is more relevant now than ever. Jim and Barry continue to provide compelling evidence and examples of leadership that embodies our humanity and capacity to intimately collaborate with others. This book is important in sustaining our faith in the possibilities inherent in institutional life, no matter what chaos surrounds us at the moment. I highly recommend this book.” —Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting and The Empowered Manager “Kouzes and Posner did not invent leadership but sometimes it seems that way. As Alice Waters is to cooking, or Paul McCartney is to music, Kouzes and Posner have developed a discipline and an approach to leadership that sets them apart from all the others. With the sixth edition of The Leadership Challenge they not only update their research, they make it once again, come alive. The Leadership Challenge, 6th Edition, not only coaches us on how to make extraordinary things happen, the book is extraordinary.” —Richard A. Moran, Ph.D., president, Menlo College and author of The Thing About Work, Showing Up and Other Important Matters “For over 25 years The Leadership Challenge has guided me to know myself and growing as a leader and achieving better results—every time! This new edition improves on an already extraordinary and time tested model by emphasizing the importance and value of engaging your team and those around you. In my business, being a better leader and growing new leaders means improving the health of people and their families. When nurses are more engaged and authentically supported, patients are healthier! The Leadership Challenge, with this contemporary update, enables me to improve the health of patients, their families and the communities that we serve. With so many leadership books out there this is truly the ONLY one that you need.” —Lori Armstrong, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, chief nurse executive, Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center “What appeals to me most about The Leadership Challenge, Sixth Edition is sheer enthusiasm for the art and the practice of leadership. The art of leadership involves bringing people together for common cause. The practice of leadership requires commitment to action for the common good. Both are easy to address, but hard to implement. In this wonderful new edition, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner provide real-world advice—underscored with solid research—that points us in the right direction. Good stuff!” —John Baldoni, president, Baldoni Consulting LLC;  author, Lead with Purpose, Lead Your Boss, and Lead By Example “The Leadership Challenge is written for leaders who want to transform organizations through some of the most turbulent times in healthcare. These case studies and research on The Five Practices and Ten Commitments of Leadership present very practical ways to be visionary, innovative, collaborative, and engaged with your employees. Every nurse is a leader—from the bedside to the boardroom—and all should be competent in the works of The Leadership Challenge. I recommend it to ALL!” —Susan Herman, DNP, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, CENP, 2015 president, Assoc. of CA Nurse Leaders, and VP Patient Care Services & CNO, San Joaquin Community Hospital/Adventist Health “If I could recommend only one of the tens of thousands of leadership books ever written, The Leadership Challenge would absolutely be my top choice, and by a wide margin. This sixth edition builds markedly on the last but remains characteristically Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner—a complex work in its underlying character, but brilliant in its simplicity and practical in design. The Leadership Challenge is the most useful leadership book ever written; I have each and every edition, and each is better than the last.” —Thomas A. Kolditz, PhD, director, Doerr Institute for New Leaders, Rice University “The Leadership Challenge isn't theory. It's insight based on rigorous and extensive research. And for me, the most profound insight is a very simple one: the importance of defining your own personal values and aligning your leadership style around them. As the leader of a large sales organization, I've seen firsthand how powerful that type of authentic leadership can be at all levels.” —Mark Madgett, SVP & Head of Agency, New York Life The Leadership Challenge Sixth Edition How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations James M. Kouzes Barry Z. Posner Cover image: © alzajac/iStockphoto Cover design: Wiley This book is printed on acid-free paper. Copyright © 2017 by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646- 8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748- 6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions. 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Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and is on file with the Library of Congress. 978-1-119-27896-2 (hardback) 978-1-119-27898-6 (ePDF) 978-1-119-27897-9 (ePUB) Introduction Making Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations The Leadership Challenge is about how leaders mobilize others to want to get extraordinary things done in organizations. It's about the practices leaders use to transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards. It's about leadership that makes a positive difference in the workplace and creates the climate in which people turn challenging opportunities into remarkable successes. The publication of this edition of The Leadership Challenge marks thirty years since the book was first published. We've spent nearly four decades together researching, consulting, teaching, and writing about what leaders do when they are at their best and how everyone can learn to become better leaders. We're honored by the reception we've received in the professional and business marketplace and blessed that students, educators, and practitioners continue to find that The Leadership Challenge is both conceptually and practically useful. We persist in asking today the same basic question we asked in 1982 when we started our journey into understanding exemplary leadership: What did you do when you were at your personal best as a leader? We've talked to men and women, young and old, representing just about every type of organization there is, at all levels, in all functions, from many different places around the world. Their stories, and the behaviors and actions they've described, have resulted in the creation of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® framework described in this book. When leaders do their best, they Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. The Leadership Challenge is evidence-based. Analyzing thousands of case studies and millions of survey responses resulted in The Five Practices framework. The hundreds of examples in this book, of real people doing real things, document the practical nature of the model. Each chapter provides fresh and original data on the impact that the behavior of leaders has on engagement and performance. With each new edition, we get clearer about the leadership actions that make a difference. We reiterate what's still important, discard what's not, and add what's new. We contemporize the framework and freshen up the language and point of new. We contemporize the framework and freshen up the language and point of view so that the book is highly relevant to current circumstances and conditions. And, we are more authoritatively prescriptive about the best practices of leaders. The more we research and write about leadership, the more confident we become that leadership is within the grasp of everyone. The opportunities for leadership are boundless and boundaryless. With each new edition, we also get to address a new audience, and sometimes even a new generation of emerging leaders. That opportunity motivates us to collect new cases, examine new research findings, and talk with people we haven't heard from. It encourages us to perform a litmus test of relevance on our results: Does this model of leadership continue to make sense? If we started all over again, would we find new leadership practices? Would we eliminate any of the practices? In this regard, we are aided by the ongoing empirical data provided by the online version of the Leadership Practices Inventory.® This inventory, which assesses The Five Practices, provides more than 400,000 responses annually, and keeps us on guard and on target in identifying the behaviors that make a difference. We know that all of you face vexing issues that not only make leadership more urgent, but also require you to be more conscious and conscientious about being a leader. Others are looking to you to help them figure out what they should be doing and how they can develop themselves to be leaders. You don't just owe it to yourself to become the best leader you can possibly be. You owe it to your constituents. They are also expecting you to do your best. A Field Guide for Leaders How do you become the kind of leader people want to follow? How do you get other people, by free will and free choice, to move forward together in pursuit of a common vision? How do you mobilize others to want to struggle for shared aspirations? These are only some of the important questions we address in The Leadership Challenge. Think of the book as a field guide to take along on your leadership journey. Think of it as a manual you can consult when you want advice and counsel on how to make things happen and move forward. Chapter One offers two case studies about Personal-Best Leadership Experiences. These stories took place in dissimilar locations and industries, involving different functions, people, and styles, but they both illustrate how The Five Practices apply whenever you accept the challenge of leadership. The chapter continues with an overview of The Five Practices and illustrates empirically that these leadership practices make a difference. Asking leaders about their personal bests is important, but it's only half the story. Leadership is a relationship between leaders and followers. A more complete picture of leadership develops when you understand what people look for in someone they would willingly follow. In Chapter Two, we reveal the characteristics people value most in their leaders and share the voices of people explaining why these are important. The ten chapters that follow describe the Ten Commitments of Leadership—the essential behaviors that leaders employ to make extraordinary things happen— and explain the conceptual principles that support each of The Five Practices. We offer evidence from our research, and that of others, to support the principles, provide examples of real people who demonstrate each practice in real life, and prescribe specific recommendations on what you can do to make each practice your own. A Take Action section concludes each of these chapters, suggesting what you need to do to make this leadership practice an ongoing and natural part of your behavioral and attitudinal repertoire. Whether the focus is your own learning or the development of your constituents—your direct reports, team, peers, manager, community members, and the like—you can take immediate action on every one of our recommendations. They don't require a budget or approval from anyone. They just require your personal commitment and discipline. In Chapter Thirteen, we call on everyone to accept personal responsibility to be a role model for leadership. Through six editions, we continue to champion the role model for leadership. Through six editions, we continue to champion the view that leadership is everyone's business. The first place to look for leadership is within yourself. Accepting the leadership challenge requires reflection, practice, humility, and taking advantage of every opportunity to make a difference. As we have in every edition, we close with this conclusion: Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart. We recommend that you first read Chapters One and Two, but after that there is no sacred order to proceeding through the rest of this book. Go wherever your interests are. We wrote this material to support you in your leadership development. Just remember that each practice and commitment of leadership is essential. Although you might skip around in the book, you can't skip any of the fundamentals of leadership. The domain of leaders is the future. The work of leaders is change. The most significant contribution leaders make is not to today's bottom line; it is to the long-term development of people and institutions so they can adapt, change, prosper, and grow. Our ongoing aspiration is that this book contributes to the revitalization of organizations, to the creation of new enterprises, to the renewal of healthy communities, and to greater respect and understanding in the world. We also fervently hope that it enriches your life and that of your community and your family. Leadership is important, not just in your career and within your organization, but in every sector, in every community, and in every country. We need more exemplary leaders, and we need them more than ever. So much extraordinary work needs to be done. We need leaders who can unite us and ignite us. Meeting the leadership challenge is a personal—and a daily—challenge for everyone. We know that if you have the will and the way to lead, you can. You supply the will. We'll do our best to keep supplying the way. James M. Kouzes Orinda, California Barry Z. Posner Berkeley, California April 2017 What Leaders Do and What Constituents Expect 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 Copyright © 1987 –2017. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. The Leadership Challenge. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce for educational purposes, contact the publisher, John Wiley & Sons. Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from personal interviews, from Personal-Best Leadership Experience case studies, or leadership reflections written by the respondent leaders. The titles and affiliations of the leaders quoted may be different today from what they were at the time of their case study or publication of this edition. In a few instances when leaders have asked us not to use their real names, we have used pseudonyms for ease of discussion. All other details of the example are the respondent's actual experience. 2. We are grateful to Steve Coats for providing this example, expanded by further interviews. 3. We are grateful to Natalie Loeb for providing this example, expanded by further interviews. 4. More information about the myths that keep people from fully developing as leaders can be found in J. M. Kouzes and B. Z. Posner, Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader (San Francisco: The Leadership Challenge—A Wiley Brand, 2016). 5. We are grateful to Valarie Willis for providing this example. 6. We are grateful to Valarie Willis for providing this example. 7. We are grateful to Joseph Hines for providing this example. 8. More information about the research methodology and findings can be found in B. Z. Posner, “Bringing the Rigor of Research to the Art of Leadership: Evidence Behind The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership and the LPI: Leadership Practices Inventory,” http://www.leadershipchallenge.com/Research-section-Our-Authors- Research-Detail/bringing-the-rigor-of-research-to-the-art-of-leadership.aspx. 9. Posner, “Bringing the Rigor,” and J. M. Kouzes and B. Z. Posner, LPI: Leadership Practices Inventory, 4th ed. (San Francisco: The Leadership Challenge—A Wiley Brand, 2012),  http://www.leadershipchallenge.com/professionals-section-lpi.aspx. 10. R. Roi, Leadership Practices, Corporate Culture, and Company Financial Performance: 2005 Study Results (Palo Alto, CA: Crawford and Associates International, 2006), http://www.hr.com/en? s=ldYUsXbBU1qzkTZI&t=/documentManager/sfdoc.file.supply&fileID=1168032065880 For a list of hundreds of scholarly articles examining how The Five Practices impacts engagement and performance, see Posner, “Bringing the Rigor.” Chapter 2 Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership The inescapable conclusion from analyzing thousands of Personal-Best Leadership Experiences is that everyone has a story to tell. Moreover, these experiences are much more similar in terms of actions, behaviors, and processes than they are different, regardless of context. The data clearly challenges the myths that leadership is something that you find only at the highest levels of organizations and society and that it's something reserved for only a handful of charismatic men and women. The notion that there are only a few great people who can lead others to greatness is just plain wrong. Likewise, it is wrong to suggest that leaders come only from large, or small, or already great, or new organizations, or from established economies, or from certain industries, functions, or disciplines. The truth is leadership is an identifiable set of skills and abilities that are available to anyone. It is because there are so many—not so few —leaders that extraordinary things happen on a regular basis in organizations, especially in times of great uncertainty. Another crucial truth that weaves itself throughout every situation and every leadership action is that Personal-Best Leadership Experiences are never stories about solo performances. Leaders never make extraordinary things happen all by themselves. Leaders mobilize others to want to struggle for shared aspirations, and this means that, fundamentally, leadership is a relationship. Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. You can't have one without the other. To lead effectively you have to appreciate fully the fundamental dynamics of the leader-constituent relationship. A leader- constituent relationship characterized by fear and distrust will never produce anything of lasting value. A relationship characterized by mutual respect and confidence will overcome the greatest adversities and leave a legacy of significance. That is precisely what Yamin Durrani told us about his relationship with Bobby Matinpour, marketing manager at National Semiconductor, now part of Texas Instruments, who came aboard just after the company had gone through a massive reorganization followed by a huge layoff. “Company-wide there was a general lack of motivation, sense of mistrust, insecurity, and everyone was looking after their own interest,” Yamin said. “Our group in particular was suffering from low motivation, as we didn't trust each other. I dreaded going to the office and there was too much internal competition leading to breakdowns in the office and there was too much internal competition leading to breakdowns in communication.” Bobby realized that he was going to have to get people to trust one another. His very first initiative was to sit with individual team members to understand their desires, needs, and plans. For the first month, he spent most of the time learning and trying to understand what each person aspired to and enjoyed doing. He held weekly one-on-one meetings with individual team members, asked questions, and listened attentively to what they had to say. “His friendly style and honest, straightforward approach,” said Yamin, “led team members to open up and feel secure. He never acted as if he knew everything and was open to learning new things from the team. Bobby understood that he couldn't gain the respect of the team without respecting them and allowing them the freedom to take ownership of their projects. Bobby opened up lines of communication within the team, especially by encouraging greater face-to-face interactions.” In management meetings when a question was asked, even though he could have provided the answer himself, Bobby typically referred it to one of his team members, stating, for example, “Yamin is an expert on this topic. I will let him answer this question.” During the annual sales conference, attended by hundreds of company employees, he let the most junior team member make the group presentation, while the whole team stood behind the presenter to answer questions. Yamin observed that: Being new to the group, Bobby could have easily fallen into the trap of trying to prove himself by individually contributing in projects, or acting as a gatekeeper for information flow; however, he opted to trust his team members on projects and took advice from them as for the approach to take on a particular project. He never forced his ideas. In other words, “my way or the highway” was not his style. He encouraged team members to take initiative and acted as an advisor on projects, and let the ownership remain with the individual team member. The results of Bobby's leadership were significant. The unit's revenue increased by 25 percent, and the product pipeline overflowed with product ideas. Team spirit soared, people felt engaged, and a general sense of collaboration and teamwork developed. “I personally had not felt more empowered and trusted ever before,” Yamin told us. “From this experience I've realized that great leaders grow their followers into leaders themselves.” As Bobby so well demonstrated in the way he focused on others and not on himself, success in leadership, success in work, and success in life are a function of how well people work and play together. Because leadership is a reciprocal of how well people work and play together. Because leadership is a reciprocal process between leaders and their constituents, any discussion of leadership has to appreciate the dynamics of this relationship. Strategies, tactics, skills, and practices are empty without an understanding of the fundamental human aspirations that connect leaders and their constituents. Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart are the leadership practices that emerge from thousands of personal-best leadership cases. However, they paint only a partial portrait of what's going on because leaders don't make extraordinary things happen all by themselves. The full picture requires an understanding and appreciation of what constituents expect from their leaders. You earn leadership from the people you aspire to lead. People choose, on a daily basis, whether they are going to follow and commit completely their talents, time, and energy. In the end, leaders don't decide who leads, followers do. Leadership is something you experience in an interaction with another human being. That experience varies from leader to leader, from constituent to constituent, and from day to day. No two leaders are exactly alike, no two constituent groups are exactly alike, and no two days in the life of leaders and constituents are exactly alike. Great leadership potential is discovered, and unlocked, when you seek to understand the desires and expectations of your constituents, and when you act on them in ways that are congruent with their norms and image of what an exemplary leader is and does. What leaders say they do is one thing; what constituents say they want and how well leaders meet these expectations is another. Knowing what people want from their leaders is the only way to complete the picture of how leaders can build and sustain the kind of relationships that will make extraordinary things happen. What People Look for and Admire in Their Leaders To understand leadership as a relationship, we have investigated the expectations that constituents have of leaders.1 Over the years, we have asked people to tell us the personal traits, characteristics, and attributes they look for and admire in a person whom they would be willing to follow. The responses both affirm and enrich the picture that emerged from studies of personal leadership bests. Our research on what constituents expect of leaders originally began by surveying thousands of business and government executives. In response to the open-ended question about what they looked for in a person they would be willing to follow, hundreds of different values, traits, and characteristics were reported.2 Subsequent content analysis by independent judges, followed by further empirical analyses, reduced these items to a checklist of twenty attributes, which we call the Characteristics of Admired Leaders (CAL). Using CAL, we ask people to select the seven qualities that they “most look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly follow.” The key word in the preceding sentence is “willingly.” It's one thing to follow someone because you think you have to “or else,” and it's another when you follow a leader because you want to. What do people expect from an individual they would follow, not because they have to, but because they want to? What does it take to be the kind of leader that others want to follow, doing so enthusiastically and voluntarily? Over 100,000 people around the globe have responded to the CAL checklist. The survey results have been remarkable in their consistency over the years, as the data in Table 2.1 illustrates. There are some essential “character tests” individuals must pass before others are willing to grant them the designation leader. While every characteristic receives votes, meaning that each is important to some people, what is most evident and striking is that for over three decades, there are only four qualities that have always received more than 60 percent of the votes (with the exception of Inspiring in 1987, which was valued by 58 percent at that time). Despite all the dramatic changes in the world, what people most look for in a leader has been amazingly stable. Table 2.1 Characteristics of Admired Leaders For the majority of people to follow someone willingly, they want a leader who they believe is Honest Competent Inspiring  Forward-looking In addition, these same four characteristics rank consistently at the top across different countries as shown by the data in Table 2.2. We also found that the ranking doesn't significantly vary across cultures, ethnicities, organizational functions and hierarchies, genders, levels of education, and age groups (and we'll say a bit more about this shortly). Table 2.2 Characteristics of Admired Leaders (CAL) Around the World (Rank Order by Country) The examination of admired leader attributes is very consistent with hundreds of interviews we've conducted, asking people to tell us about the most credible leader they have ever experienced. Compare how the characteristics of honest, competent, forward-looking, and inspiring are embedded into what Melinda Jackson, corporate recruiter for a multinational technology company, told us Jackson, corporate recruiter for a multinational technology company, told us about her most admired leader: “I remember her deep knowledge of the work, clear vision for the future, incredible support and care for those around her, and her stark authenticity. She believed wholeheartedly in what we were doing and led with a fervor that encouraged even my most pessimistic co-workers to follow.” Such stories and the characteristics of admired leaders mirror the actions people describe in their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences. The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership and the behaviors of people admired as leaders are complementary perspectives on the same subject. When they're performing at their peak, leaders are doing more than just getting results. They're also responding to the behavioral expectations of their constituents, underscoring the point that the relationship is one of service to a purpose and service to people. As we weave the themes of being honest, forward-looking, competent, and inspiring into the text of the subsequent chapters on The Five Practices, you'll see in more detail how exemplary leaders respond to the needs of their constituents. For example, being regarded as honest is essential if a leader is to Model the Way. The leadership practice of Inspire a Shared Vision requires being forward-looking and inspiring. When leaders Challenge the Process, they also enhance the perception that they're dynamic. Trustworthiness, often a synonym for honesty, plays a major role in how leaders Enable Others to Act, as does the leader's own competency. Likewise, leaders who recognize and celebrate significant contributions and accomplishments—who Encourage the Heart—increase their constituents' understanding of and commitment to the vision and values. When leaders demonstrate capacity in all of The Five Practices, they show others they have the competence to make extraordinary things happen. Let's examine why each of these characteristics is essential for creating a sustainable relationship between those who would be willing to follow and those who aspire to lead others. We'll also discover in the process the foundation on which leaders must build that sustainable relationship. Honest In every survey we've conducted, honesty is selected more often than any other leadership characteristic. Overall, it emerges as the single most important factor in the leader-constituent relationship. The percentages vary, but the final ranking does not. First and foremost, people want a leader who is honest. It's clear that if people anywhere are to willingly follow someone—whether it's into battle or the boardroom, in the front office or on the production floor—they into battle or the boardroom, in the front office or on the production floor—they first want to be sure that the individual is worthy of their trust. They want to know that the person is truthful, ethical, and principled. When people talk to us about the qualities they admire in leaders, they often use “integrity” and “authentic” as synonyms for honesty. No matter what the setting, people want to be fully confident in their leaders, and to be fully confident they have to believe that their leaders are individuals of authentic character and solid integrity. That over 80 percent of constituents want their leaders to be honest above all else is a message that every leader must take to heart. “After all,” Jennifer McRae, an engineer with the City of San Jose, explained: “Why would you want to follow someone if you suspected that they were lying or trying to trick you? Honesty is the basis of trust and you have to believe that what the leader speaks or knows is true.” Of all the qualities that people look for and admire in a leader, honesty is by far the most personal. People want their leaders to be honest because a leader's honesty is also a reflection upon their own honesty. It's the quality that can most enhance or most damage personal reputations. If you follow someone who's universally viewed as having impeccable character and strong integrity, then you're likely to be viewed the same. If you willingly follow someone who's considered dishonest and unethical, your own image is tarnished. In addition, there's perhaps another, subtler, reason why honesty is at the top. When people follow someone they believe to be dishonest, they come to realize that they've compromised their own integrity. Over time, they not only lose respect for the leader, they lose respect for themselves. As Anand Reddy, senior engineering manager at Intel, explained: “A failure of honesty poisons the team, damages the trust between people, and breaks down team cohesion. Besides, nobody wants to follow a leader who is not honest.” Honesty is strongly tied to values and ethics. Constituents appreciate leaders who take a stand on important principles. People resolutely refuse to follow those who lack confidence in their own beliefs. Confusion over where the leader stands creates stress. Not knowing the leader's beliefs contributes to conflict, indecision, and political rivalry. People simply don't trust leaders who can't or won't disclose or live by a clear set of values, ethics, and standards. You really are only as good as your word in the eyes of those you aspire to lead. Competent To enlist in another's cause, people must believe that the leader is competent to guide them along the path to the future. They must see the leader as capable and effective. “Competence is important,” explained Kevin Schultz, assurance associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, “because it is difficult to wholeheartedly follow someone who does not know what they are doing.” If people doubt the leader's abilities, they're not going readily to enlist in the crusade. Studies point out that when people perceive their leader as incompetent, they reject the individual as well as that person's position.3 Leadership competence refers to the leader's track record and ability to get things done. This kind of competence inspires confidence—the leader will be able to guide the entire organization, large or small, in the direction in which it needs to go. Another benefit, as Rebecca Sanchez, local government budget analyst, pointed out: “I become a better follower because I have confidence that my leader knows what she is talking about and asking us to do.” However, as Brian Dalton, finance manager with Rocket Fuel, noted: “A leader isn't expected to be an expert in everything, because if they were, then why would they even need followers? Rather, a leader is expected to have a competent understanding of the organization, and be able to recruit and ask instructive and insightful questions to those who are experts in their fields.” When people talk about a competent leader, they aren't referring specifically to the leader's abilities in the core technology of the operation. People demand a base level of understanding of and relevant experience in the fundamentals of the industry, market, or professional service environment, but they also know that as leaders move up in the organization's hierarchy they can't be expected to be the most technically competent in an operational specialty. Organizations are too complex and multifunctional for that ever to be the case. The type of competence demanded also seems to vary with the leader's position and the condition of the organization. For example, expect abilities in strategic planning and policymaking for those who hold officer positions. A leader on the line, or at the point of customer or client contact, typically has to be more product competent compared with someone less engaged in directly providing services or making products. An effective leader in a high technology company may not need to be a master programmer, but must understand the business implications of electronic data interchange, networking, cloud computing, and the Internet. For people to have confidence in the competence of their leader, they need to believe that the person knows the business and understands the current operation, culture, and people in the company. They need to know that the leader has had the breadth of experiences that will enable him or her to lead through the challenges that the organization faces at the time. That is why senior leaders tend challenges that the organization faces at the time. That is why senior leaders tend to have a broader exposure to more functions, markets, countries, and cultures than those in early career stages. The broader the experience, the more likely it is that they can be successful across organizations and industries. Inspiring People expect their leaders to be excited, energetic, and positive about the future. A person who is enthusiastic and passionate about future possibilities conveys to others a stronger belief in those possibilities than someone who shows little or no emotion. People are most likely to believe what you are saying because they sense that you truly believe it. “The worst kind of ‘leader' from my experience,” says Amber Willits, marketing specialist at Maxim Integrated, “is one who stands in front of a group of people or an individual and gives zero life and energy into their dream. Hopelessness and negativity follow from those kinds of messages. How can anyone feel motivated to perform their best if their leader does not provide words of encouragement, optimism, and excitement?” It's not enough, then, for a leader to have a dream. A leader must be able to communicate that vision in ways that encourage others to sign on for the duration. For one nursing supervisor, Ellen Vargas, this took the form of being “contagiously enthusiastic.” “I infected everyone with my passion,” Ellen said, “and because I was so keen about how this new procedure could change lives, everyone else signed up.” People long to find some greater sense of purpose and worth in their day-to-day working lives. Although the enthusiasm, energy, and positive attitude of the leader may not change the content of work, he or she certainly can make the context more fulfilling. Whatever the circumstances, when leaders breathe life into dreams and aspirations, people are much more willing to enlist in a common cause. Inspiring leadership speaks to people's need to have meaning and purpose in their lives. Leaders must uplift their constituents' spirits and give them hope if they're voluntarily going to engage in doing things that they have never done before. Enthusiasm and excitement are essential, and they signal the leader's personal commitment to pursuing a dream. If a leader displays no passion for a cause, why should anyone else? Furthermore, being upbeat, positive, and optimistic offers people hope that the future can be brighter.4 This is crucial at any time, but in times of great uncertainty, leading with positive emotions is absolutely essential to moving people upward and forward. When people are worried, discouraged, frightened, and uncertain about the present, they often struggle to focus on the possibilities of tomorrow, and the last present, they often struggle to focus on the possibilities of tomorrow, and the last thing they need is a leader who feeds those negative emotions. Fear does not persuade people to move ahead by being innovative and taking chances, but rather it motivates them to keep their heads down, hold on to the status quo, and stay out of the way. Fear may bring about compliance, but it never generates commitment. Instead, leaders need to communicate in words, demeanor, and actions that they believe obstacles will be overcome and dreams fulfilled. “Working to achieve a shared vision,” says Kathryn Trapani, administrative coordinator for a university healthcare organization, “necessitates that leaders get people to feel at the deepest level that by joining in the cause, their lives and those of others can be uplifted.” Emotions are infectious, and positive emotions resonate throughout an organization and into relationships with other constituents. To make extraordinary things happen in extraordinary times, leaders must fuel the effort with positive emotions. Forward-Looking Sixty-two percent of recent respondents to our Characteristics of Admired Leaders survey, on average, selected the ability to look ahead as one of their most sought-after leadership traits. People expect leaders to have a sense of direction and a concern for the future of the organization. Simply put, says first- year attorney Sarah Holden: “If leaders want to rely on others to follow them, the leader needs to tell them where they are going, and get everyone heading in the same direction.” Compared to all the other leadership qualities constituents expect, this is the one that most distinguishes individuals as leaders because this expectation directly corresponds to the ability to envision the future that people described in their personal-best leadership cases. After all, if the vision is simply same-old status quo, then what is the purpose of that leader, anyway? Leaders are not content with things as they are today; they focus on how things should be better in the future. Whether you call that future a vision, a dream, a calling, a goal, a mission, or a personal agenda, the message is clear: leaders must know where they're going if they expect others to willingly join them on the journey. They have to have a point of view about the future envisioned for their organizations, and they need to be able to connect that point of view to the hopes and dreams of their constituents. Gloria Leung told us that because her most-admired leader at Hang Seng Bank (Hong Kong) was forward-looking, “this provided us the capacity to walk a path toward the future with great confidence, and fostered shared values because we all knew where we were heading.” You can't get yourself buried in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. Leaders must have a destination the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. Leaders must have a destination in mind when asking others to join them on a journey into the unknown. While the other three critical leadership characteristics don't vary much by hierarchical level, it isn't altogether surprising that the importance of being forward-looking does. Our surveys involving the most senior levels in organizations indicate that nearly 95 percent select forward-looking as a requisite leadership quality, while this percentage drops to 60 percent among people in frontline supervisory roles. For college students, this characteristic is typically among their top seven, but not top four. This wide gap indicates an important difference in expectations tied to the breadth, scope, and time horizon of the job. As people move up the organizational hierarchy, their perspective on the future needs to expand. However, the ability to be forward-looking doesn't mean that people expect their leaders to have the magical power of a prescient visionary. The reality is far more down to earth. People want their leader to have a well-defined orientation toward the future. They want their leader to communicate what the organization will look like, feel like, and be like when they arrive at their destination in six quarters or six years. They want to have it described in rich detail so that they'll know themselves when they've arrived, and so that they can select the proper route for getting there. Consistency over Time and Place These four prerequisites for leadership—honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking—have stood the test of time and geography, even though there have been modest changes in emphasis. For example, being honest remains at the top of the list, but it's not quite as high a percentage as in earlier times. This modest decline in honest as an admired leadership quality parallels a decline in the levels of trust people have expressed in institutional leaders worldwide.5 People have become more cynical about what they can actually expect from leaders, but it is important to note that honest still remains the number-one quality people look for in a person they would willingly follow. The biggest change in percentage numbers is in the importance of forward- looking, which has declined in the percentage of people selecting it. Even so, it is still among the top four and clearly ahead in relevance compared to the remaining leadership characteristics. The modest changes in preferences underscore the remarkable consistency of people's expectation of leaders over a wide variety of personal, organizational, and cultural dimensions. These twenty leader characteristics have not changed and cultural dimensions. These twenty leader characteristics have not changed by more than a few percentage points (plus and minus) since the first round of data collected more than thirty-five years ago. People continue to want their leaders to be truthful, to know what they are doing and talking about, to demonstrate genuine enthusiasm and a positive outlook, and to have a sense of direction. At the same time, you should appreciate that context matters and the external environment may influence what people look for and admire in a leader at any given moment or in any specific organization or location, and in how you would demonstrate these crucial leadership characteristics. Expectations can vary from organization to organization, function to function, group to group, and level to level. For example, data collected in healthcare organizations often finds caring to be more salient than in other environments. Being loyal dramatically increases in importance when sampling people connected with the military, while intelligent receives higher scores in academic circles, and mature gets more votes than the norm from senior citizens. Similarly, people in management positions choose forward-looking much more often than do those in exempt positions. Human resource professionals select supportive more often than other functional groups, while sales people tend to select inspiring more frequently than their accounting counterparts do. Furthermore, there are likely to be nuances and possibly subtle differences in how leaders demonstrate these characteristics in various cultures. Appreciating these local differences is important, even while the four qualities remain universal. Putting It All Together: Credibility Is the Foundation Honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking are the essential characteristics people want in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly follow. They are the “transportable” part of every leader's repertoire, and you need to carry them with you wherever you go. This finding has remained constant over more than three decades of economic growth and recession, birth of the World Wide Web, globalization o