JAMES M. KOUZES AND BARRY Z. POSNER
I got to know Barry Posner when he was working on his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts where I was a professor. We reconnected when he teamed up with Jim Kouzes and they became one of the most dynamic duos in the field of leadership today. In this essay, Jim and Barry reflect on the nature of leadership and address the question of whether leadership is something that can be learned. The three of us agree that effective servant leadership is an inside-out job. All of the servant leaders I’ve had the pleasure to work with are comfortable in their own skin—in Jim and Barry’s terms, they have “found their voice.” Thanks to you both for validating that truth. —KB
ONE OF THE most persistent myths in our culture associates leadership with rank. Another myth attributes leadership to talent. But leadership isn’t a position or a special gift that only a few special people have.1 It’s an observable, learnable set of skills and practices available to everyone, anywhere in the organization.
We were making that case to a group of senior managers at a seminar when a hand shot up across the room. “I’d like to challenge that statement,” said one participant. “I’ve been pondering this lately. Can anyone really learn to lead? If so, why do we seem to lack effective leadership these days?”
Now why is that? What is it about leadership that constantly raises questions about the capacity to learn it? What is it about the concept of leadership that brings forth this question? Tell us, what is that unique something about leadership? What is the something else about leadership that can’t be learned?
Here are a few representative responses to these questions from workshop participants: “Soul.” “Spirit.” “It’s inside yourself.” “Ethics.” “Value system.”
Is there anything on this list that you cannot learn? Maybe some of these things can’t be taught, but can you learn them? You may or may not agree with what others said, but think about it for a moment. Soul? Spirit? Ethics? Values? Can you learn about your soul? Can you learn about your spirit? Can you learn what is right? Can you learn what you hope the future to be? Can you learn what gives you passion? Not for everyone. Not for society. But for you?
We bet you can. You won’t find the answer in a workshop or a book, including the ones we’ve written. But if you search inside yourself, you will find your truth. As Ken Blanchard has said about servant leadership: “It’s an inside-out job. It starts in your heart with who you are—your character and your answer to the question am I here to serve or be served?”
In his witty book Management of the Absurd, psychologist and CEO Richard Farson writes:
In both parenthood and management, it’s not so much what we do as what we are that counts. What parents do deliberately appears to make little difference in the most important outcomes—whether their children grow up to be happy or unhappy, successful or unsuccessful, good or evil. There is no question that parents can and should do worthwhile things for their children, but it’s what they are that will really matter. . . . The same dynamic occurs in management and leadership. People learn—and respond to—what we are.2
Richard nailed it. All the techniques and all the tools that fill the pages of all the management and leadership books are not substitutes for who and what you are. In fact, they boomerang if thrown by some spin-meister who’s mastered form but not substance.
We have been collaborating on leadership research for thirty-five years and we keep rediscovering that credibility is the foundation of leadership. It’s been reinforced so often that we’ve come to refer to it as the First Law of Leadership: if you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message. People don’t follow your technique; they follow you—your message and your embodiment of that message. This is key for effective servant leaders.
In Leadership Jazz, Max De Pree, former chairman and CEO of the Michigan furniture maker Herman Miller, tells a moving story about being with his prematurely born granddaughter during the first days of her fragile life. The nurse had advised Max and his wife to touch as well as talk to the tiny infant, “because she has to be able to connect your voice to your touch.” That message, says Max, is “at the core of becoming a leader.”3
Leadership credibility is about connecting voice and touch, about practicing what you preach, and about doing what you say you will do. But as Max makes quite clear, there’s a prior task to connecting voice and touch. It’s “finding one’s voice in the first place.”
Authentic servant leadership flows from the inside out. It does not come from the outside in. Inside-out leadership is about discovering who you are, what drives you to do what you do, and what gives you the credibility to lead others. Inside-out leadership is about becoming the author of your own story and the maker of your own history. Inside-out leadership is also the only way to respond to what your people want from you. And what is that? What they most want is to know who you genuinely are.
Finding your voice is critical if you are to be a servant leader. If you don’t find your voice, you may find yourself with a vocabulary that belongs to someone else, mouthing words that were written by a speechwriter who is nothing like you at all. If you doubt the importance of choosing your own vocabulary, consider these phrases from the speech by a banking manager we observed during the course of our research:
• “You’ve got to watch out for the headhunters.”
• “Keep your capital, and keep it dry.”
• “We’ll act like SWAT teams.”
• “We’re going to beat their brains out.”
• “We won’t tolerate the building of fiefdoms.”
• “There will be only a few survivors.”
Contrast them with these phrases from Anita Roddick,4 founder of The Body Shop:
• “We communicate with passion—and passion persuades.”
• “I think all businesses practices would improve immeasurably if they were guided by feminine principles—qualities like love and care and intuition.”
• “What we need is optimism, humanism, enthusiasm, intuition, curiosity, love, humour, magic, fun, and that secret ingredient—euphoria.”
• “I believe that service—whether it is serving the community or your family or the people you love, or whatever—is fundamental to what life is about.”
What do these words communicate about the guiding beliefs and assumptions of the individuals speaking? Would any of these words be in your lexicon? Would you want them used in your organization?
Every artist knows that finding a voice is most definitely not a matter of technique. It’s a matter of time and a matter of searching—soul searching.
We remember attending, with an artist friend, a retrospective of painter Richard Diebenkorn’s work. Toward the end of our gallery walk, our friend turned to us and made this observation: “There are really three periods in an artist’s life. In the first, we paint exterior landscapes. In the second, we paint interior landscapes. In the third, they come together into an artist’s unique style—in the third period, we paint ourselves.” We consider this the most important art appreciation lesson we’ve ever received. It applies just as well to the appreciation of the art of servant leadership.
When first learning to lead, you paint what you see outside yourself—the exterior landscape. You read biographies and autobiographies of famous leaders, you read books by experienced executives and dedicated scholars, you listen to podcasts by motivational speakers, you watch streaming TED Talks, and you participate in training programs. You accept job assignments so that you can work alongside someone who can coach you.
You do all this to master the fundamentals, the tools, and the techniques. You’re clumsy at first, failing more than succeeding. But pretty soon you can give a speech with ease, conduct a meeting with grace, listen to others with openness, and praise an employee with style. It’s an essential period; an aspiring leader can no more skip the fundamentals than can an aspiring painter.
Then it happens. Somewhere along the way you notice how that last speech sounded mechanically rote, how that last meeting was a boring routine, and how that last encounter felt terribly sad and empty. You awaken to the frightening thought that the words aren’t yours, and that the technique is out of a text, not straight from the heart.
This can be a truly terrifying moment. You’ve invested so much time and energy in learning to do all the right things and you suddenly see that they are no longer serving you well. They seem hollow. You stare into the darkness of your inner territory and begin to wonder what lies inside. You say to yourself I’m not someone else. I’m a unique human being. But who exactly am I? What is my true voice?
For aspiring leaders, this awakening initiates a period of intense internal exploration—a period of going beyond technique, beyond training, beyond copying what the masters do, beyond taking the advice of others. And if you surrender to it, after exhausting experimentation and often painful suffering, there emerges from all those abstract strokes on the canvas an expression of self that is truly your own.
The turning point in your development as a leader comes when you’re able to merge the lessons from your outer and inner journeys. You awaken to the fact that you don’t have to copy someone else and you don’t have to read a script written by someone else. Unless it’s your words, and your style, then it’s not really you. It’s just an act—you pretending to be you.
This leadership lesson is quite similar to what Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, tells would-be writers in her classes:
The truth of your experience can only come through in your own voice. If it is wrapped in someone else’s voice, we readers are suspicious, as if you are dressed up in someone else’s clothes. You cannot write out of someone else’s big dark place; you can only write out of your own. When you try to capture the truth of your experience in some other person’s voice or on that person’s terms, you are moving yourself one step further from what you have seen and what you know.5
What’s true for writers is just as true for leaders. You cannot lead out of someone else’s experience. You can only lead out of your own.
To lead others, you have to learn about yourself. After all, if you are to speak out, you have to know what to speak about, and if you are to stand up for your beliefs, you have to know the beliefs you stand for. To do what you say, you have to know what you want to say. Authentic servant leadership cannot come from the outside in. It comes from the inside out.
So we’ll have to amend what we said to the workshop participants. Yes, you can learn to lead, but don’t confuse leadership with position or place. Don’t confuse leadership with talent. And don’t confuse leadership with tools and techniques. They are not what earn you the respect and commitment of your people. What earns you their respect in the end is whether you are you.
So just who are you, anyway? What a great question for aspiring, as well as experienced, servant leaders.
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner (www.leadershipchallenge.com) are coauthors of the bestselling, award-winning book, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations and more than a dozen other books on leadership. Jim is the Dean’s Executive Fellow of Leadership and Barry is the Accolti Endowed Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.
1. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (San Francisco: Wiley, 2012, 2017). See also their Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader (San Francisco: Wiley, 2016).
2. Richard Farson, Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes of Leadership (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
3. Max De Pree, Leadership Jazz (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1992).
4. Anita Roddick, Body and Soul: Profits with Principles—The Amazing Story of Anita Roddick and The Body Shop (New York: Crown, 1991).
5. Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Pantheon, 1994).