The Leadership Challenge Instructor’s Guide
CHAPTER SUMMARIES
PART 1. WHAT LEADERS DO AND WHAT CONSTITUENTS EXPECT
Chapters 1 and 2 introduce readers to the author’s point of view about leadership.
Chapter 1. The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership.
Using the stories of two people who each took advantage of an opportunity to lead their organization to excellence, the authors introduce their leadership model, The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership.
The Five Practices
Ordinary people who guide others along pioneering journeys follow similar paths, marked by common patterns of action. When getting extraordinary things done in organizations, leaders engage in Five Practices that are available to anyone who accepts the leadership challenge:
Model the Way
Inspire a Shared Vision
Challenge the Practice
Enable Others to Act
Encourage the Heart
This model has stood the test of time—research confirms that it’s just as relevant now as when Kouzes and Posner first began their investigation.
Leadership is a Relationship
Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. Success in leadership, business and life is a function of how well people work and play together, and success in leading depends on the capacity to build and sustain the human relationships that enable people to extraordinary things done
Ten Commitments of Leadership
The behaviors that serve as the basis for learning to lead are embedded in The Five Practices:
Model the Way
§ Find your voice by clarifying your personal values
§ Set the example by aligning actions with shared values
Inspire a Shared Vision
§ Envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities.
§ Enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations.
Challenge the Process
§ Search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow, and improve.
§ Experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from mistakes.
Enable Others to Act
§ Foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust.
§ Strengthen others by sharing power and discretion.
Encourage the Heart
§ Recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence.
§ Celebrate the values and victories by creating a spirit of community.
Chapter 2. Credibility is the Foundation of Leadership
The authors discuss the research into the four qualities that people believe are essential to exemplary leadership, on which all great leadership is built.
What People Look for and Admire in Their Leaders
Over a period of more than 20 years, the authors asked more than 75,000 people around the globe what values they most looked for and admired in a leader, someone “whose direction they would willingly follow.”
Only four out of 20 qualities have continuously received more than 50 per cent of the respondents’ votes: the majority of people believe a leader must be honest, forward-looking, competent, and inspiring.
Honesty is the single most important leadership characteristic for nearly 90 percent of constituents. People expect leaders to be truthful and ethical, be consistent between word and deed, and take a stand on important principles.
The ability to look ahead is one of the most important characteristics for more than 70 per cent of constituents. Being forward-looking is more important to senior people in an organization than to those on the front line, but no matter what their positions, people expect leaders to be able to envision the future—to have a sense of direction and a concern for the future of the organization.
According to more than two-thirds of all constituents, leaders must be able to inspire others, to communicate their vision and encourage others to sign on. When leaders breathe life into their constituents’ dreams and aspirations, they’re more willing to work towards that future. Leaders must lift constituents’ spirits and give them hope if constituents are to engage voluntarily in challenging pursuits.
Finally, three in five people believe that leaders need to be competent. They must demonstrate the ability to get things done and to guide the organization in the right direction. The areas in which they need to be competent depend on the nature of their leadership role and the needs of their organization. All leaders must have a good understanding of their business, even if they are not technically proficient. The most important competency is the ability to work well with others.
Credibility is the Foundation
What do these four attributes of leaders add up to? More than anything else, they indicate that people want leaders who are credible. People must be able to believe that their leaders’ word can be trusted, they’ll do what they say, that they’re personally excited and enthusiastic about the future, and that they have the knowledge and skill to lead. Thus, the First Law of Leadership, according to Kouzes and Posner, is: If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message.
The authors found that people’s perceptions of their managers’ credibility affect their loyalty, commitment, energy, and productivity. Credibility also influences customer and investor loyalty, and employee, customer, and investor loyalty affects a company’s success.
The dilemma is that leaders who are forward-looking are biased about the future—they take a position on issues and have a clear point of view and a partisan sense of where the organization should be headed. By the nature of the role they play, such leaders always have their credibility questioned by their opponents, and they need to balance their personal desires to achieve important ends with constituents’ need to believe that leaders have others’ best interests at heart.
Leaders’ ability to take strong stands depends on their ability to guard their credibility—to believe in the exciting future possibilities leaders present, constituents must believe in their trustworthiness, expertise, and dynamism.
When times are good, people have more confidence in their leaders; when they are bad, people tend to be more cynical and less likely to consider their leaders credible. Credibility is earned minute by minute, hour by hour, month by month, year by year, but can be lost quickly if leaders take it for granted and stop paying attention—and it is nearly impossible to earn back.
What is Credibility Behaviorally?
When asked, most people’s response is, “Leaders do what they say they will do”: “DWYSYWD.” In other words, people are considered credible when their words and their deeds are consonant.
There are two elements in DWYSYWD: “Say”—leaders must be clear about their beliefs; they must know what they stand for; “Do”—leaders must put what they say into practice by acting on their beliefs.
The first of The Five Practices, Model the Way, links directly to people’s behavioral definition of credibility.
PART 2. MODEL THE WAY
Chapter 3. Find Your Voice
To be a credible leader, you first need to engage in two essentials. You first need to clarify your values by comprehending fully the values, beliefs, and assumptions that drive you, choose the principles you’ll use to guide your actions, and be clear about the message you want to deliver. You then need to express your self by communicating your beliefs in ways that uniquely represent who you are.
In the authors’ research, the people most frequently mentioned as admired leaders all had strong beliefs about matters of principle, an unwavering commitment to a clear set of values, and passion about their causes. The lesson is that we admire most those who believe strongly in something and are willing to stand up for their beliefs.
To stand up for your beliefs, you first have to know what they are. Thus, the corollary to the Kouzes Posner First Law of Leadership, “If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message,” is “You can’t believe in the messenger if you don’t know what the messenger believes.”
Values Are Guides
Values—defined in the context of Model the Way as “our here-and-now beliefs about how things should be accomplished” —supply us with a moral compass by which to navigate the course of our daily lives. Values are most important in difficult times when daily challenges can easily throw you off course.
Values set the parameters for our decisions, our commitments to personal and organizational goals, and serve as guides to action. They empower us by helping us be more in control of our lives, and they motivate us by keeping us focused on why we’re doing what we’re doing and the ends toward which we are striving.
Research shows that people who have clarity about personal values have higher degrees of positive work attributes, such as organizational commitment to their organization, than do those who have either low or high levels of organizational clarity. In other words, clarity about personal values is more important than clarity about organizational values—and the difference in positive work attributes between those with clarity about both personal and organizational values is not significantly different from those with only high degrees of personal value clarity.
People with the clearest personal values are better prepared to make choices about whether to commit to an organization or movement, and they cannot fully commit to an organization that does not fit with their own beliefs
Leadership begins with something that grabs hold of you and won’t let go. To find your voice, you must know what you care about—you must explore your inner territory for the principles that matter most to you.
You must also listen to the “masters.” The leaders we admire tell us a lot about our own values and beliefs, and people model their behavior after those they admire and respect
Express Your Self
Once you have a voice—know what you want to say—you must express that voice in ways that are uniquely your own, so people know that you are the one who’s speaking. The words you choose tell others how you view the world, and each person is free to choose what they want to express and the way they want to express it.
There are three stages of self-expression. Like an artist, finding your unique way of expressing yourself as a leader involves:
§ looking outside yourself for the fundamentals, tools and techniques others have used
§ looking inside yourself to see what you need to improve
§ moving on to become an authentic leader by merging the lessons from your inner and outer journeys
Your value as a leader is determined not only by your guiding techniques, but also by your ability to act on them. To strengthen credibility, you need to continually assess your abilities and learn new ones.
Chapter 4. Set The Example
Constituents are more deeply moved by deeds than by words. Leading by example is how leaders make visions and values tangible—how they demonstrate that they are personally committed. To set the example, leaders build and affirm shared values and align actions with values.
Build And Affirm Shared Values
Shared values are the foundation for productive and genuine relationships: people must have a common core of understanding.
Shared values intensify commitment, enthusiasm, and drive, and make a significant difference in work attitudes and performance. Leaders must be able to gain consensus on a common cause and a common set of principles.
When people are clear about the leader’s values, their own values, and shared values, they know what’s expected of them, can manage higher levels of stress, and can better handle the conflicting demands of work and their personal lives
For values to be truly shared, however, they must be deeply supported and broadly endorsed beliefs about what’s important to the people who hold them. Unity is forged, not forced: Leaders can’t impose their values on others in the organization—they need to involve others in the process of creating shared values. A unified voice on values results from discovery and dialogue, so leaders must make it possible for individuals to discuss their own and the organization’s values, and to find common ground.
Align Actions with Values
Leaders must practice what they preach--demonstrate their efforts to align shared values through their actions. The authors present several ways in which leaders can align actions with values:
§ Set an example by the way they spend their time—make a connection between how they allocate their time and what they say are their priorities and key values
§ Use critical incidents as opportunities to teach lessons about appropriate norms of behavior
§ Tell stories that let people know what’s important and how things are done in the organization
§ Understand and pay attention to the power of words
§ Use measurement and feedback to improve performance
PART 3. INSPIRE A SHARED VISION
Chapter 5. Envision The Future
Vision comes from relationships with others. We are much more likely to step forward when we feel passionate about the legacy we want to leave and about the kind of world we want for others.
“Forward-Looking,” one of the three most admired leadership characteristics, is the one that is not directly related to credibility. But for people to willingly follow, they need to believe that a leader knows where she is heading. All enterprises or projects begin with the belief that what’s merely an idea can one day be made real. Thus, to envision the future, leaders must master these essentials: Discover the theme and imagine the possibilities.