Chapter Three
The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership
Through our studies of personal-best leadership experiences, we’ve discovered that ordinary people who guide others along pioneering journeys follow rather similar paths. Though each case was unique in expression, each path was marked by common patterns of action. Leadership is not about personality; it’s about practice. We’ve forged these common practices into a model and offer it here as guidance for leaders as they work to keep their own bearings and guide others toward peak achievements.
When getting extraordinary things done in organizations, leaders engage in these Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership:
- Model the Way.
- Inspire a Shared Vision.
- Challenge the Process.
- Enable Others to Act.
- Encourage the Heart.
These practices aren’t the private property of the people we studied or of a few select shining stars. They’re available to anyone, in any organization or situation, who accepts the leadership challenge. And they’re not the accident of a special moment in history. They’ve stood the test of time, and our most recent research confirms that they’re just as relevant today as they were when we first began our investigation over two decades ago—if not more so.
Model the Way
Titles are granted, but it’s your behavior that wins you respect. As Gayle Hamilton, a director with Pacific Gas & Electric Company, told us, “I would never ask anyone to do anything I was unwilling to do first.” This sentiment was shared across all the cases that we collected. 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. Leaders model the way.
To effectively model the behavior they expect of others, leaders must first be clear about their guiding principles. Lindsay Levin says, “You have to open up your heart and let people know what you really think and believe. This means talking about your values.” Alan Keith adds that one of the most significant leadership lessons he would pass along is, “You must lead from what you believe.” Leaders must find their own voice, and then they must clearly and distinctively give voice to their values. As the personal-best stories illustrate, leaders are supposed to stand up for their beliefs, so they’d better have some beliefs to stand up for.
Eloquent speeches about common values, however, aren’t nearly enough. Leaders’ deeds are far more important than their words when determining how serious they really are about what they say. Words and deeds must be consistent. Exemplary leaders go first. They go first by setting the example through daily actions that demonstrate they are deeply committed to their beliefs. Toni-Ann Lueddecke, for example, believes that there are no unimportant tasks in an organization’s efforts at excellence. She demonstrates this to her associates in her eight Gymboree Play & Music centers in New Jersey by her actions. As just one example, she sometimes scrubs floors in addition to teaching classes.
The personal-best projects we heard about in our research were all distinguished by relentless effort, steadfastness, competence, and attention to detail. We were also struck by how the actions leaders took to set an example were often simple things. Sure, leaders had operational and strategic plans. But the examples they gave were not about elaborate designs. They were about the power of spending time with someone, of working side by side with colleagues, of telling stories that made values come alive, of being highly visible during times of uncertainty, and of asking questions to get people to think about values and priorities. Modeling the way is essentially about earning the right and the respect to lead through direct individual involvement and action. People first follow the person, then the plan.
Inspire a Shared Vision
When people described to us their personal-best leadership experiences, they told of times when they imagined an exciting, highly attractive future for their organization. They had visions and dreams of what could be. They had absolute and total personal belief in those dreams, and they were confident in their abilities to make extraordinary things happen. Every organization, every social movement, begins with a dream. The dream or vision is the force that invents the future.
Leaders inspire a shared vision. They gaze across the horizon of time, imagining the attractive opportunities that are in store when they and their constituents arrive at a distant destination. Leaders have a desire to make something happen, to change the way things are, to create something that no one else has ever created before. In some ways, leaders live their lives backward. They see pictures in their mind’s eye of what the results will look like even before they’ve started their project, much as an architect draws a blueprint or an engineer builds a model. Their clear image of the future pulls them forward. Yet visions seen only by leaders are insufficient to create an organized movement or a significant change in a company. A person with no constituents is not a leader, and people will not follow until they accept a vision as their own. Leaders cannot command commitment, only inspire it.
To enlist people in a vision, leaders must know their constituents and speak their language. People must believe that leaders understand their needs and have their interests at heart. Leadership is a dialogue, not a monologue. To enlist support, leaders must have intimate knowledge of people’s dreams, hopes, aspirations, visions, and values.
Leaders breathe life into the hopes and dreams of others and enable them to see the exciting possibilities that the future holds. Leaders forge a unity of purpose by showing constituents how the dream is for the common good. Leaders ignite the flame of passion in others by expressing enthusiasm for the compelling vision of their group. Leaders communicate their passion through vivid language and an expressive style.
Whatever the venue, and without exception, the people in our study reported that they were incredibly enthusiastic about their personal-best projects. Their own enthusiasm was catching; it spread from leader to constituents. Their belief in and enthusiasm for the vision were the sparks that ignited the flame of inspiration.
Challenge the Process
Leaders venture out. None of the individuals in our study sat idly by waiting for fate to smile upon them. “Luck” or “being in the right place at the right time” may play a role in the specific opportunities leaders embrace, but those who lead others to greatness seek and accept challenge.
Every single personal-best leadership case we collected involved some kind of challenge. The challenge might have been an innovative new product, a cutting-edge service, a groundbreaking piece of legislation, an invigorating campaign to get adolescents to join an environmental program, a revolutionary turnaround of a bureaucratic military program, or the start-up of a new plant or business. Whatever the challenge, all the cases involved a change from the status quo. Not one person claimed to have achieved a personal best by keeping things the same. All leaders challenge the process.
Leaders are pioneers—people who are willing to step out into the unknown. They search for opportunities to innovate, grow, and improve. But leaders aren’t the only creators or originators of new products, services, or processes. In fact, it’s more likely that they’re not: innovation comes more from listening than from telling. Product and service innovations tend to come from customers, clients, vendors, people in the labs, and people on the front lines; process innovations, from the people doing the work. Sometimes a dramatic external event thrusts an organization into a radically new condition.
The leader’s primary contribution is in the recognition of good ideas, the support of those ideas, and the willingness to challenge the system to get new products, processes, services, and systems adopted. It might be more accurate, then, to say that leaders are early adopters of innovation.
Leaders know well that innovation and change all involve experimentation, risk, and failure. They proceed anyway. One way of dealing with the potential risks and failures of experimentation is to approach change through incremental steps and small wins. Little victories, when piled on top of each other, build confidence that even the biggest challenges can be met. In so doing, they strengthen commitment to the long-term future. Yet not everyone is equally comfortable with risk and uncertainty. Leaders also pay attention to the capacity of their constituents to take control of challenging situations and become fully committed to change. You can’t exhort people to take risks if they don’t also feel safe.
It would be ridiculous to assert that those who fail over and over again eventually succeed as leaders. Success in any endeavor isn’t a process of simply buying enough lottery tickets. The key that unlocks the door to opportunity is learning. In his own study of exemplary leadership practices, Warren Bennis writes that “leaders learn by leading, and they learn best by leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders. Difficult bosses, lack of vision and virtue in the executive suite, circumstances beyond their control, and their own mistakes have been the leaders’ basic curriculum.”1 In other words, leaders are learners. They learn from their failures as well as their successes.
Enable Others to Act
Grand dreams don’t become significant realities through the actions of a single person. Leadership is a team effort. After reviewing thousands of personal-best cases, we developed a simple test to detect whether someone is on the road to becoming a leader. That test is the frequency of the use of the word “we.” In our interview with one leader, for instance, he used the word “we” nearly three times more often than the word “I” in explaining his personal-best leadership experience.
Exemplary leaders enable others to act. They foster collaboration and build trust. This sense of teamwork goes far beyond a few direct reports or close confidants. They engage all those who must make the project work—and in some way, all who must live with the results. In today’s “virtual” organization, cooperation can’t be restricted to a small group of loyalists; it must include peers, managers, customers and clients, suppliers, citizens—all those who have a stake in the vision.
Leaders make it possible for others to do good work. They know that those who are expected to produce the results must feel a sense of personal power and ownership. Leaders understand that the command-and-control techniques of the Industrial Revolution no longer apply. Instead, leaders work to make people feel strong, capable, and committed. Leaders enable others to act not by hoarding the power they have but by giving it away. Exemplary leaders strengthen everyone’s capacity to deliver on the promises they make. As a budget analyst for Catholic Healthcare West, Cindy Giordano would ask “What do you think?” and use the ensuing discussion to build up the capabilities of others (as well as educate and update her own information and perspective). She discovered that when people are trusted and have more discretion, more authority, and more information, they’re much more likely to use their energies to produce extraordinary results.
Encourage the Heart
The climb to the top is arduous and long. People become exhausted, frustrated, and disenchanted. They’re often tempted to give up. Leaders encourage the heart of their constituents to carry on. Genuine acts of caring uplift the spirits and draw people forward. Encouragement can come from dramatic gestures or simple actions. When Cary Turner was head of Pier 1 Imports’ Stores Division, he once showed up in a wedding gown to promote the bridal registry. On another occasion, he promised store employees he’d parasail over Puget Sound and the Seattle waterfront if they met their sales targets. They kept their commitment; he kept his. As mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani wore different hats (literally) to acknowledge various groups of rescue workers as he toured ground zero after the World Trade Center towers were destroyed on September 11, 2001. But it doesn’t take events or media coverage to let people know you appreciate their contributions. Terri Sarhatt, customer services manager at Applied Biosystems, looked after her employees so well that at least one reported that the time she spent with them was more valuable than the tangible rewards she was able to give out.
It’s part of the leader’s job to show appreciation for people’s contributions and to create a culture of celebration. In the cases we collected, we saw thousands of examples of individual recognition and group celebration. We’ve heard and seen everything from handwritten thank-yous to marching bands and “This Is Your Life” ceremonies.
Recognition and celebration aren’t about fun and games, though there is a lot of fun and there are a lot of games when people encourage the hearts of their constituents. Neither are they about pretentious ceremonies designed to create some phony sense of camaraderie. When people see a charlatan making noisy affectations, they turn away in disgust. Encouragement is curiously serious business. It’s how leaders visibly and behaviorally link rewards with performance. When striving to raise quality, recover from disaster, start up a new service, or make dramatic change of any kind, leaders make sure people see the benefit of behavior that’s aligned with cherished values. And leaders also know that celebrations and rituals, when done with authenticity and from the heart, build a strong sense of collective identity and community spirit that can carry a group through extraordinarily tough times.
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Leadership is an identifiable set of skills and practices that are available to all of us, not just a few charismatic men and women. The “great person”—woman or man—theory of leadership is just plain wrong. Or, we should say, the theory that there are only a few great men and women who can lead us to greatness is just plain wrong. We consider the women and men in our research to be great, and so do those with whom they worked. They are the everyday heroes of our world. It’s because we have so many—not so few—leaders that we are able to get extraordinary things done on a regular basis, even in extraordinary times.
Our findings also challenge the myth that leadership is something that you find only at the highest levels of organizations and society. We found it everywhere. To us this is inspiring and should give everyone hope. Hope, because it means that no one needs to wait around to be saved by someone riding into town on a white horse. Hope, because there’s a generation of leaders searching for the opportunities to make a difference. Hope, because right down the block or right down the hall there are people who will seize the opportunity to lead you to greatness. They’re your neighbors, friends, and colleagues. And you are one of them, too.
There’s still another crucial truth about leadership—more apparent to us this time around than it was before. It’s something that we’ve known for a long time, but we’ve come to prize its value even more today. In talking to leaders and reading their cases, there was a very clear message that wove itself throughout every situation and every action: leadership is a relationship. Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow.
Evidence abounds for this point of view. For instance, in examining the critical variables for success in the top three jobs in large organizations, Jodi Taylor and her colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership found the number one success factor to be “relationships with subordinates.”2 We were intrigued to find that even in this nanosecond world of e-everything, opinion is consistent with the facts. In an on-line survey, respondents were asked to indicate, among other things, which would be more essential to business success in five years—social skills or skills in using the Internet. Seventy-two percent selected social skills; 28 percent, Internet skills.3 Internet literati completing a poll on-line realize that it’s not the web of technology that matters the most, it’s the web of people.
Similar results were found in a study by Public Allies, an AmeriCorps organization dedicated to creating young leaders who can strengthen their communities. Public Allies sought the opinions of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds on the subject of leadership. Among the items was a question about the qualities that were important in a good leader. Topping the respondents’ list is “Being able to see a situation from someone else’s point of view.” In second place, “Getting along well with other people.”4
Success in leadership, success in business, and success in life has been, is now, and will continue to be a function of how well people work and play together. We’re even more convinced of this today than we were twenty years ago. Success in leading will be wholly dependent upon the capacity to build and sustain those human relationships that enable people to get extraordinary things done on a regular basis.
THE TEN COMMITMENTS OF LEADERSHIP
Embedded in the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership are behaviors that can serve as the basis for learning to lead. We call these the Ten Commitments of Leadership (see Exhibit 3.1). These ten commitments serve as the guide for how leaders get extraordinary things done in organizations.
Exhibit 3.1. The Five Practices and the Ten Commitments of Leadership.
| Practice | Commitment |
|---|---|
| Model the Way | 1. Find your voice by clarifying your personal values. |
| 2. Set the example by aligning actions with shared values. | |
| Inspire a Shared Vision | 3. Envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. |
| 4. Enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations. | |
| Challenge the Process | 5. Search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow, and improve. |
| 6. Experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from mistakes. | |
| Enable Others to Act | 7. Foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust. |
| 8. Strengthen others by sharing power and discretion. | |
| Encourage the Heart | 9. Recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence. |
| 10. Celebrate the values and victories by creating a spirit of community. |
James M. Kouzes is the Dean’s Executive Professor of Leadership, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University; an award-winning professional speaker; and best-selling author of multiple books on leadership.
Barry Z. Posner is dean and professor of leadership at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, and coauthor with Jim Kouzes of multiple books, leadership development instruments, videos, and empirical studies.