The Leadership Challenge. Posner Barry Z.

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 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.

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      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. KouzesOrinda, CaliforniaBarry Z. PosnerBerkeley, CaliforniaApril 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 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

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.