Leadership is a critical ingredient in sparking, sustaining, and scaling inspiration across individuals in organizations. Inspiring leaders bring out more in you than you may have realized you were capable of, or activate behaviors in you that you couldn’t manifest on your own. Such leaders recognize what different members of their team need and find ways to give it to them. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, authors of The Inspiring Leader,1 reported in a Harvard Business Review article titled “What Inspiring Leaders Do”:
Of the 16 leadership competencies we most frequently measure, inspiration is clearly the one that stands out… the ability to inspire creates the highest levels of employee engagement and commitment. It is what most powerfully separates the most effective leaders from the average and least-effective leaders. And it is the factor most subordinates identify when asked what they would most like to have in their leader.2
We challenge our clients to think about leadership more broadly than having a managerial role. We define leadership in a way that is outside formal authority over a team. Our definition of leadership is
Actions and choices that inspire commitment by activating possibility and invincibility toward a shared mission. It’s about mobilizing efforts through intentional practice and systems to both achieve results and build capability in the process.
“I work very, very hard at being inspiring. And to be inspired. I’m not a policeman; I’m a coach. So it’s very important for me. I don’t control other people’s creativity, I unlock other people’s creativity, and in order to do that, I have to be highly performing.”
—Paul Bennett, Chief Creative Officer, IDEO
From this perspective, any individual can step into leadership at any time without having a formal leadership role on an organizational chart. In fact, from this definition, people can lead outside work environments, such as in parenting or personal relationships.
Bain and Company research has shown that “inspired employees are more than twice as productive as satisfied employees.”3 This is especially true for up-and-coming leaders in the workplace today, where inspirational leadership is essential to success. Traditional authority-based leadership won’t cut it anymore. “Because I said so” doesn’t work with millennial workers, who are demotivated by hierarchy and bureaucracy. They want managers to work alongside them, not above them, and to coach and mentor them, not bark orders.
Millennials are focused on purpose and intrinsic motivation as reasons to come to work. They are driven by what they care about more than by money or external rewards, as previous generations have been. They want accelerated learning, skills, and capabilities in order to have impact in the world. And they respond best to leaders who speak to that sense of purpose and values.4 That means leading up-and-coming workers requires new leadership skills. Good leaders need the ability to inspire and to nurture an inspiring workplace.
Regardless of who they are leading, inspiring leaders want to make things better for themselves and others. They lead their own growth and thriving. They seek out more challenges and responsibilities and want to build new things, better. They strive for achievement and progress. They embrace the responsibility and the opportunity that leadership presents. Leadership can happen—and is called for—from wherever they stand in the organization. They inspire others to inspire others, and in doing so, they help to build a culture of inspiration.
“Inspiration, to me, is caring and being able to… trigger or support others in caring, all to a degree beyond what we had ever imagined possible.”
—Dennis Driver, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Theravance Biopharma
A leader’s first job is to inspire herself. Coming from an inspiring mindset, leaders are better positioned to activate others’ inspiration. As a positive emotion, inspiration is infectious: wired for social connection, individuals have open limbic systems that are designed to pick up on the emotions of others. Thus, inspiration naturally begets inspiration and is scalable through social interaction. And leaders have a unique opportunity to direct that inspiration in ways to increase positive impact. Because others look to them for cues on how to feel and act at work, a leader’s inspiration has a greater opportunity to go viral. This is true both in “front of the room” leadership moments and in everyday interactions.
We often think of inspiring leadership as a great speech, a call to action, or a moving presentation. And it can be. When all eyes are on the leader, it’s an opportunity to inspire. A leader who can tap into multiple styles of leadership and be authentically present in each of them can spread positive energy and excitement.
We witnessed an example of inspiring leadership a few years ago at SuccessFest, an annual conference that Peach, an athleisure retailer and InspireCorps client, organizes and presents to its salesforce. The star of the show wasn’t someone you typically see at the front of the room—the head of sales or the CEO—rather, it was the chief operating officer, Derek Ohly, someone who customarily works behind the scenes to keep an organization running and doesn’t always step out front and center to inspire and motivate.
When Ohly took the stage at SuccessFest before an almost entirely female audience, his vulnerability, humility, and authenticity quickly got everyone’s attention. Ohly spoke from his heart, welling up a few times as he talked about his relationship with his cofounder, Janet Kraus, their vision for the company, and their mission of empowering women. He was humble, his words were heartfelt, and the audience hung on his every word. He spoke slowly, enunciating for emphasis, and used the power of the pause to draw the crowd in, feeling his hope for the future and his appreciation for how far they had come.
As Ohly described the company’s growth trajectory, he used a metaphor of a sports stadium. “As of today, we’ve only sold four seats in a seventy-thousand-seat stadium, based on our market share,” he explained. “In five years, we’ll fill a section, and we’ll be able to do the wave, and in ten years, we will fill all the seats in the stadium.”5 Through this visual, he helped the audience picture and experience where the company was and where it would be, thanks to their efforts. He shared with them the emotions and the energy they would all feel when they hit that next milestone. His story helped the audience capture the progress they were making, having them picture what the stadium would look like as it filled from their box seats above, looking down on their loyal customer base. He created awe.
At one point in his speech, Ohly took off his jacket and did some funny disco moves, to the delight of those in the audience. He showed his true self; his willingness to risk embarrassing himself proved his sincerity. His connection to those in the room deepened with every goofy gesture and dance step.
People were pumped! It was as if that room became the stadium. People were on their feet, cheering, ready to carry him out on their shoulders; he was heroic. They left the event feeling incredibly energized and excited for the future. They also felt a strong connection to Ohly—they would follow him anywhere!
Ohly was the epitome of the inspiring leader in that moment. He stepped up and shared his whole self with those in the audience. He was authentic and human, he was humble, and he showed agility by gracefully weaving together themes of determination, creativity, hope, and love for the audience.
Ohly had a formal event as a platform from which to voice his leadership, but that’s not the only way to be an inspiring leader. Leaders can also inspire on a daily basis, in their ongoing stewardship of their organizations.
Danielle Warner, founder and CEO of Singapore-based Expat Insurance, discovered a lack of available insurance coverage for expatriates (people living outside their native country, as the American-born Warner was). Warner moved to Singapore and discovered that insurance products that were common in the United States were nearly unheard of in Singapore. And she had client business owners who were struggling to find insurance options for their businesses and employees.6
Warner uncovered a need and fostered a vision to develop insurance options in this marketplace, capturing a leadership position in the market by taking an unconventional approach of partnering with her clients rather than dealing with them at arm’s length, as was the norm in the industry.
In all her work with clients, Warner tried to embed her team within Expat’s corporate clients, so that they became “integrated,” she told the British Chamber of Commerce in an interview with Orient Magazine a few years ago. “Our business model is totally different! With our corporate clients where we take care of their employee benefit structures we become their benefits team, like an implant. We become integrated with their team, work with the HR staff every day and try to reflect their company language and culture.”7
Her success is also attributable to her people strategy and day-to-day leadership of the organization. One of her priorities is “creating a stable employment opportunity for my team,” she says. In doing so, she builds trust that leads to longevity. “My primary responsibility is to create a safe environment and to build a culture of trust within my own team. If my team does not feel that their jobs are safe and that they have long-term prospects with us, then they will leave,” she explains. Well-honed soft skills and personality are more desirable to Warner than insurance experience in the hiring process. Building relationships with clients is a higher priority than technical knowledge.
Warner’s company has grown quickly by staying focused on the company’s niche clients—businesses owned and operated by expats. But her skilled everyday leadership is another reason for her firm’s success. She is clear about who the company’s ideal client is, what they need, and how to best serve them, and that’s what she is committed to pursuing.
“Being so connected to my purpose makes it easy to stay on the right path, to know what we should and should not be doing—when something is right, and when to say no,” she told Expat Living.8
What is it that inspiring leaders do differently? How are they different from typical or struggling leaders? Recall that a leader’s first job is to inspire self. Attending to one’s own inspiration always starts with keen self-awareness. Leaders have to monitor their own levels of inspiration, starting with when it needs new and more sparks. To do that, they turn first to the inspiration engines that fuel them.
At Peach, Derek Ohly’s engines were “connecting to and voicing your values and purpose” and “being vulnerable and transparent.” By standing onstage and being vulnerable with the audience, sharing why he is committed to the company, his personal connection to the company’s team and mission, and his vision of their success, he sparked inspiration in himself and in the audience. They felt connected to him and wanted to support the work he was doing as best they could; they became raving fans.
Danielle Warner’s initial inspiration engine was “using your unique passions or qualifications to impact a situation.” She found a specific opportunity in the Asian market, where insurance was relatively obscure. The lack of insurance options for her clients sparked her vision for a new firm. Once established, Warner recognized another market opportunity in how she did business. She saw that embedding employees within her clientele would make them almost indispensable, thereby making her company indispensable and more difficult to let go of. As she developed the company, the engine of “connecting to and voicing meaning and values” through purpose helped sustain her inspiration.
What a leader does matters. Their behavior is visible to followers, and thus, one of their great opportunities to share inspiration comes through role modeling. As role models, leaders can be intentional about how they demonstrate and call for inspiration. Vigilantly monitoring and maintaining their own inspiration, keeping it uppermost in their minds, and openly practicing it shows others how to do the same.
Inspiring leaders are transparent about the importance of inspiration to themselves and others. You can see it in their behaviors and in how they talk about their work. For example, when Warner talks about being connected to her purpose as her guiding light for leading the business, she is demonstrating how the “connecting to and voicing values and purpose” engine drives her inspiration. This authenticity and transparency are key to effectively modeling inspiration for others.
Julia Balfour, leader of the organization that bears her name, runs an inspiring team. Her firm does print and digital marketing for its clients and is ranked as one of the fastest growing private companies in America.9 As founder and CEO of her organization, Balfour knows that she plays a critical role in the daily inspiration of her team. Her core values, which include love, hard work, cutting-edge creativity, and a collaborative and family environment that welcomes pets and children, are evident in the workspace she has created for her employees.10 She fills her beautiful, light-filled offices with colorful fabrics and decorations, the walls hung with framed inspiring quotes and pictures that have personal meaning aligned to her values. As a classically trained artist (Parsons and Rhode Island School of Design), she senses how the environment around her is inspiring (or not) to herself, her clients, and her team. She also models inspiration in the way she conducts business, modeling both possibility and invincibility. “I typically will ask for things that are out of the limits of what we think is possible. For example, a client came in… and said ‘Julia, I need a website in forty-eight hours. We have this big board meeting we’re going to.’”11 She explained that it was a big site for a large organization, and putting a site together in forty-eight hours was almost impossible. But the sense of invincibility on Balfour’s team prevailed. She accepted the challenge and rallied her team to do the same. She describes: “So I got up the next morning and I met with my leads and my head of design, whom I adore, and he stated out of the gate, ‘This is not possible.’ And I said, ‘I know. Everything that we have done before this means that this is not possible, so we have to leave behind the way we do things and completely think of this in a new way.… I’ve got you. We’re gonna do the best we can do and I think this is possible.’”
Two days later, the site was up. Balfour called it “incredible.” Her commitment to expanding what’s possible and expecting confidence and capability to achieve is how she models inspiration for herself and her team. This modeling is a powerful way to be an inspiring leader. However, the best leaders do not stop there—they also explicitly invite others to practice inspiration with them, shoulder to shoulder.
As we discussed in Part III of the book, sustaining inspiration over time and in the face of day-to-day challenges that can erode it is essential for the spark to translate into inspired performance and results. The four methods introduced in Part III of the book for sustaining inspiration at the individual level can also be applied at the leadership level, as leaders model and practice sustaining inspiration with others.
Resparking the engines in new ways and in new combinations is one way to sustain inspiration. Many stories we have shared throughout the book talk about leaders who are sparked by the “connecting to and voicing values and purpose” engine and go back to this engine regularly to sustain their connection to it. Warner talks about the importance of purpose and models this by voicing it frequently in public forums and directly to employees. This is just one example of how a leader goes back to an engine regularly and resparks inspiration for herself and others. In addition, leaders get to know the people working with them and the engines that spark them. We have talked about how leaders need to know the people who follow them. That knowledge will serve them here in selecting and introducing engines of inspiration that will particularly resonate. For example, Ohly knew that for many of the Peach entrepreneurs in the audience that advancing women’s success as business owners was as important to them as the product itself. Knowing this, he activated two engines in his speech that he knew would be inspiring: “shared group mission” and “values and purpose.”
Directing inspiration toward desired outcomes involves activating behaviors that (1) drive to results, (2) intentionally align, (3) build connection and trust, and (4) cultivate visionary and innovative thinking. For leaders, directing behavior across these four categories happens by adopting and being agile across four leadership styles.
1. For example, when using inspiration to drive to results, a leader activates his or her strengths, sets aspirational goals, and charts a plan to achieve them. We refer to this style as driver.
2. For leaders, intentional alignment involves defending core values, strengthening processes, systems, and infrastructure, attending to fiduciary and regulatory responsibilities, and making sure all bases and priorities are covered. We call this leadership style pillar.
3. When leaders focus on building connection and trust, by appreciating one another’s strengths and contributions and building a sense of belonging and trust, they are leading through the advocate style.
4. Leaders in innovator style advance vision and innovation by expressing optimism and hope, communicating a picture of what’s possible and dreaming big, and envisioning a strategy to realize the dream.
What agility looks like in action is balancing and combining leadership styles in the moment. The idea of leaders using multiple styles and moving from one to another, or across them, is consistent with both seminal and newer research. In the 1960s, researchers such as Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard12 and Fred Fiedler13 first codified typologies of different leadership styles and the idea that leaders should shift among them to be most effective across different situations. The notion of different leader styles having different impacts depending on the situation is backed up by more current research as well.14 Our work with clients has shown us that four distinct styles are critical for leaders to access, combine, and activate according to situational demands in order to be effective and inspiring to others.
Inspiring leaders combine and blend these four styles and shift among them to expand their followers’ imagination of what is possible and to empower their sense of invincibility. Innovator style opens up new possibilities by painting a clear picture of an imagined future—for themselves and for their followers. For example, Warner at Expat Insurance quickly recognized that insurance industry experience wouldn’t give her clients the experience she wanted them to have. So, using agility to buck industry tradition, she ignored what other insurance firms did and hired employees based on their soft skills, such as empathy and their ability to connect with clients and build relationships.
Advocate style provides the trust and safety that undergirds invincibility, while also supporting risk taking to test out and explore new possibilities. For example, Warner determined that the ability to develop a personal relationship with others is more positively correlated with customer retention and satisfaction than years of insurance experience. She models this advocate style of warmth and connection both internally to those she leads and externally to her clients.
“The most inspiring leaders have the ability to reframe like crazy—they entertain possibility. They’re willing in their reframing to say, ‘Ooh, imagine a world where… What would that be like? Let’s play with it. Let’s turn it around. Let’s try it on. Let’s experiment with it. Mentally prototype.’”
—Keith Yamashita, Founder, SY Partner
Driver style models invincibility with perseverance and grit and helps followers recognize the same in themselves, inspiring them to rise to higher standards as a group. Derek Ohly activated driver style in his speech to compel his salesforce to reach higher goals together, while also modeling pillar to stay true to the Peach mission, message, and core values. Pillar style brings practicality to invincibility, grounding it in the how of both accomplishing new goals that align with the Peach structure and core mission.
Inspiring leaders produce the best results for themselves and others by being authentically agile across these four styles. It’s not about acting; it’s about authentically shifting how they lead, adjusting and flexing their styles to situations as needed. In some situations, agile leaders can be frank and direct; in others, more encouraging and warm. The most effective leadership response to an event or a person shifts as the situation does.
Of course, understanding what leadership response is needed begins with social and self-awareness. For example, are you demonstrating openness to different outcomes? Are you connecting with the people in the room in meaningful ways? Are you there to push boundaries or to maintain them? Recognizing your own style in the room, taking into account your strengths and your comfort level around certain activities, is a first step in being agile. Seeing the same in others is also essential.
Leaders who accurately pick up on social cues know the mood of a room, which helps them determine how they need to respond. For example, noticing that employees are seated with their arms firmly crossed could be a signal that they’re expecting a confrontation. In this situation, a leader would bring a more advocate style, listening and being open to others’ ideas. If everyone looks anxious, the leader knows they need reassurance about what’s going on or how the company is performing and activates the innovator style to communicate hope and vision and advocate activating empathy and care. Spotting these signals can help leaders flex their responses.
Finally, a third way that leaders sustain their own inspiration and model this for others is through boosting inspiration with positive rituals, accountability, and social support.
The more that inspiration reminders and practices are built into the fabric of day-to-day habits and culture, the better. One such example of a positive ritual used to sustain inspiration is described in our interview with Alexander McCobin, the CEO of Conscious Capitalism International (CCI). CCI as an organization aims to elevate humanity through business, inspiring all businesses—not just nonprofits—to take responsibility for bettering society through their work. While McCobin feels inspired every day by the efforts of conscientious businesses to do this, his original source of inspiration comes from his father. To remind him of this, he programs an automatic e-mail that arrives in his in-box first thing every morning about his higher purpose.15
To increase connection and accountability and provide regular doses of inspiration, many of our organizational clients have implemented inspiration pulse meetings to replace or supplement annual performance reviews. During these pulse meetings, which can happen one-on-one or with teams, leaders check in on inspiration levels, ask questions that help them understand issues that need to be addressed, and codesign next steps to boost or sustain inspiration. In addition, these pulse checks offer opportunities for in-the-moment feedback, both constructive and positive, which is a form of social support. Leaders model sustaining inspiration by prioritizing regular pulse conversations that focus on more than just the work that needs to get done—they focus on the person behind the work that gets done, the human pulse. CEO Bill Jennings’s hospital leadership offers a novel path to accountability. He makes his priority to the patient highly public with a nameplate on his desk that—instead of bearing his name and title—is emblazoned with the question: How Does This Help the Patient?16
We have offered a few examples of how leaders model and practice sustainable inspiration shoulder to shoulder with those they lead—and as you can imagine, the possibilities for this are endless. We have found that leaders who prioritize the practice of inspiration for themselves understand the benefits of it and intuitively find ways to cascade it in authentic ways to those they lead.
Beyond the engines, leaders must practice energy management—tuning in to their own levels of energy and, when it dips, taking action to bring it back up. In Chapter 9, we talked about many ways individuals can manage energy through their body, mindset, and emotions. Leaders, to be authentic, have to understand the importance of energy management and practice it for themselves—to model the priority of this to others. In addition, they have a platform to practice energy management shoulder-to-shoulder with those they lead. For example, Ohly—during a particularly labor-intensive period for his operations department—designed and implemented several group resets that would activate energy and positive emotions. He opened meetings with brief check-ins on how everyone was feeling and then led resets that involved stretching and energizing music. He asked his team to contribute ideas, and one of his team members came up with a metric that measured quantity of laughs in his department and tracked it as data, reporting out to the company during strategic planning. Trends show more leaders are encouraging the use of walking meetings,17 which research shows increases creative thinking18—a great boost for mindset while also managing physical and emotional energy. The more that leaders understand the link between the quality of their energy and their ability to feel inspired, the more they will intentionally own and model this practice.
Leadership is an inspiration opportunity. Our wish for you, as readers, is that you will inspire yourself in service of sharing it with all those around you.