The Leadership Challenge. Posner Barry Z.

how they had not been operating as “One Team with One Voice.” As Wendy remarked, “This will only be achieved when we have developed greater relationships with one another.”7

      Leaders appreciate that constituents don't perform at their best or stick around for very long if they feel weak, dependent, or alienated. When you strengthen others by increasing self-determination and developing competence, they are more likely to give it their all and exceed their own expectations. Omar Pualuan, head of engineering at RVision, reflecting on his Personal-Best Leadership Experience, realized that “letting each member of the team contribute to the project plan and make it their own was the most important tool for success.”

      Focusing on serving others' needs rather than one's own builds trust in a leader. The more people trust their leaders, and each other, the more they take risks, make changes, and keep moving ahead. Leaders have to create an environment where, as Ana Sardeson, materials program manager at Nest, told us, “individuals are comfortable with voicing their opinions, because then the team feels empowered to take action. This level of comfort with decision making is paramount to creating a space that is conducive to collaboration.” She explained: “When the conversation shifts from a silo to an open and collaborative space, relationships become stronger and more resilient.” When people are trusted and have more information, discretion, and authority, they're much more likely to use their energies to produce extraordinary results.

      Encourage the Heart

      The climb to the top is arduous and steep, and people become exhausted, frustrated, and disenchanted, and are often tempted to give up. Genuine acts of caring draw people forward, which is an important lesson Denise Straka, vice president, corporate insurance with Calpine, took away from her Personal-Best Leadership Experience: “People want to know that their managers believe in them and in their abilities to get a job done. They want to feel valued by their employers, and acknowledging an accomplishment is a great way to demonstrate their value.”

      Leaders recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence. It can be one to one or with many people. It can come from dramatic gestures or simple actions. It can come from informal channels, just as well as through the formal hierarchy. Eakta Malik, senior clinical research associate with a global medical device company, realizing that many people didn't feel sufficiently appreciated, and lacked a sense of team cohesiveness, organized some company-sponsored happy hours and team events, designed “for the team to unwind, get to know each other on a personal level, and to create a spirit of a community.” She publicly acknowledged her teammates' hard work in bi-weekly meetings, which, she explained, “really lightens up the mood. I used to think that having praise on a project looks better when it comes from a director/manager, but I learned that praising someone doesn't have to be connected with having a title for it to be meaningful.”

      Being a leader requires showing appreciation for people's contributions and creating a culture of celebrating the values and victories by creating a spirit of community. One lesson that Andy Mackenzie, chief operating officer with BioCardia, learned from his Personal-Best Leadership Experience was to “make sure that you and the team are having fun. Every day won't be fun, but if it's all drudgery, then it's hardly worth getting out of bed for.”

      Encouragement is, curiously, serious business because it's how you visibly and behaviorally link rewards with performance. Celebrations and rituals, when done in an authentic way and from the heart, build a strong sense of collective identity and community spirit that can carry a group through extraordinarily tough times. As Deanna Lee, director of marketing strategy with MIG, told us: “By bringing a team together after an important milestone, it reinforces the fact that more can be accomplished together than apart. Engaging one another outside of the work setting also increases personal connection, which builds trust, improves communication, and strengthens the bonds within the team.”

      Recognitions and celebrations need to be personal and personalized. As Eddie Tai, project director with Pacific Eagle Holdings, realized, “There's no way to fake it.” In telling us about his experiences, he noted, “Encouraging the Heart might very well be the hardest job of any leader because it requires the most honesty and sincerity.” Yet this leadership practice, he maintained, “can have the most significant and long-lasting impact on those it touches and inspires.”

✭✭✭

      These five leadership practices – Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart – provide an operating system for what people are doing as leaders when at they are at their best, and there's abundant empirical evidence that these leadership practices matter. Hundreds of studies have reported that The Five Practices make a positive difference in the engagement and performance of people and organizations.8 This is highlighted in the next section, and more of the research supporting this operating system is reported in subsequent chapters.

      The Five Practices Make a Difference

      Exemplary leader behavior makes a profoundly positive difference in people's commitment and motivation, their work performance, and the success of their organizations. That's the definitive conclusion from analyzing responses from nearly three million people around the world using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) to assess how often their leaders engage in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. Those leaders who more frequently use The Five Practices are considerably more effective than their counterparts who use them less frequently.

      In these studies, the leader's direct reports complete the LPI indicating how frequently they observe their leader engaging in the specific behaviors associated with The Five Practices. In addition, they respond to ten questions regarding (a) their feelings about their workplace, for example, levels of satisfaction, pride, and commitment, and (b) assessments about their leader on such things as trustworthiness and overall effectiveness. There is an unambiguous relationship between how engaged

Figure 1.1 The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership Impacts the Engagement Level of Direct Reports

people are and how frequently they observe their leaders using The Five Practices, as shown in Figure 1.1. Nearly 96 percent of direct reports who are most highly engaged (i.e., in the top third of the distribution) indicate that their leaders very frequently or almost always use The Five Practices. In contrast, less than 5 percent of direct reports are highly engaged when they indicate that their leaders seldom use The Five Practices (at best, only once in a while). The differential impact is huge.

      In addition, respondents provide information about who they are and their organizational context. Multivariate analyses show that individual characteristics and organizational context combined explain less than 1 percent of the distribution connected with the engagement levels of their reports, while The Five Practices account for nearly 40 percent of the variance. How their leaders behave significantly influences engagement, and is independent of who the direct reports are (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, or education), or their circumstance (e.g., position, tenure, discipline, industry, or nationality). How their leader behaves is what makes a difference in explaining why people work hard, their commitment, pride, and productivity.

      The more you use The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, the more likely it is that you'll have a positive influence on other people and the organization. That's what all the data adds up to: if you want to have a significant impact on people, on organizations, and on communities, you'd be wise to invest in learning the behaviors that enable you to become the very best leader you can. Moreover, the data clearly shows that how strongly direct reports would “recommend their leader to a colleague” directly links with the extent to which they report their leader using The Five Practices.

      Many scholars have documented that leaders who engage in The Five Practices are more effective than those who don't.9 This is true whether the context is inside or outside

7

We are grateful to Joseph Hines for providing this example.

8

More information about the research methodology and findings can be found in B. Z. Posner, “Bringing the Rigor of Research to the Art of Leadership: Evidence Behind The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership and the LPI: Leadership Practices Inventory,” http://www.leadershipchallenge.com/Research- section-Our-Authors-Research-Detail/bringing-the-rigor-of-research-to-the-art-of-leadership.aspx.