The Leadership Challenge. Posner Barry Z.

or within schools, healthcare organizations, business firms, prisons, churches, and so on. Here are just a few examples of the impact of leaders who use The Five Practices more frequently than their counterparts:

      ▶ Create higher-performing teams

      ▶ Generate increased sales and customer satisfaction levels

      ▶ Foster renewed loyalty and greater organizational commitment

      ▶ Enhance motivation and the willingness to work hard

      ▶ Facilitate high patient-satisfaction scores and more effectively meet family member needs

      ▶ Promote high degrees of student and teacher involvement in schools

      ▶ Enlarge the membership size of their religious congregations

      ▶ Reduce absenteeism, turnover, and dropout rates

      ▶ Positively influence recruitment yields

      While The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership don't completely explain why leaders and their organizations are successful, it's very clear that engaging in them makes quite a difference no matter who you are or where you are located. How you behave as a leader matters, and it matters a lot. Furthermore, evaluations of the effectiveness of the leader by their direct reports, and others, correlate directly with how frequently The Five Practices are used.

      Consider these findings at a macro level. Researchers examined the financial performance of organizations over a five-year period and compared those that constituents rated senior leaders as actively using The Five Practices with organizations whose leaders were significantly less engaged in The Five Practices. The bottom line: net income growth was nearly eighteen times higher, and stock price growth was nearly three times greater for those publicly traded organizations whose leadership strongly engaged in The Five Practices than their counterparts.10

      The Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership

Embedded in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership are behaviors that can serve as the basis for becoming an exemplary leader. We call these The Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership (Table 1.1). They focus on behaviors and actions you need to be comfortable with engaging in. These ten commitments serve as the template for explaining, understanding, appreciating, and learning how leaders get extraordinary things done in organizations, and each of them is discussed in depth in Chapters Three through Twelve. Before we go into depth on each of these commitments, let's next consider leadership from the standpoint of the constituent. Leadership, after all, is a relationship. What do people look for in a leader? What do people want from someone whose direction they'd be willing to follow?

Table 1.1 The Five Practices and Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership

      Copyright © 1987 –2017. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. The Leadership Challenge. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce for educational purposes, contact the publisher, John Wiley & Sons.

      Chapter 2

      Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership

      The inescapable conclusion from analyzing thousands of Personal-Best Leadership Experiences is that everyone has a story to tell. Moreover, these experiences are much more similar in terms of actions, behaviors, and processes than they are different, regardless of context. The data clearly challenges the myths that leadership is something that you find only at the highest levels of organizations and society and that it's something reserved for only a handful of charismatic men and women. The notion that there are only a few great people who can lead others to greatness is just plain wrong. Likewise, it is wrong to suggest that leaders come only from large, or small, or already great, or new organizations, or from established economies, or from certain industries, functions, or disciplines. The truth is leadership is an identifiable set of skills and abilities that are available to anyone. It is because there are so many – not so few – leaders that extraordinary things happen on a regular basis in organizations, especially in times of great uncertainty.

      Another crucial truth that weaves itself throughout every situation and every leadership action is that Personal-Best Leadership Experiences are never stories about solo performances. Leaders never make extraordinary things happen all by themselves. Leaders mobilize others to want to struggle for shared aspirations, and this means that, fundamentally, leadership is a relationship. Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. You can't have one without the other. To lead effectively you have to appreciate fully the fundamental dynamics of the leader-constituent relationship. A leader- constituent relationship characterized by fear and distrust will never produce anything of lasting value. A relationship characterized by mutual respect and confidence will overcome the greatest adversities and leave a legacy of significance.

      That is precisely what Yamin Durrani told us about his relationship with Bobby Matinpour, marketing manager at National Semiconductor, now part of Texas Instruments, who came aboard just after the company had gone through a massive reorganization followed by a huge layoff. “Company-wide there was a general lack of motivation, sense of mistrust, insecurity, and everyone was looking after their own interest,” Yamin said. “Our group in particular was suffering from low motivation, as we didn't trust each other. I dreaded going to the office and there was too much internal competition leading to breakdowns in communication.”

      Bobby realized that he was going to have to get people to trust one another. His very first initiative was to sit with individual team members to understand their desires, needs, and plans. For the first month, he spent most of the time learning and trying to understand what each person aspired to and enjoyed doing. He held weekly one-on-one meetings with individual team members, asked questions, and listened attentively to what they had to say. “His friendly style and honest, straightforward approach,” said Yamin, “led team members to open up and feel secure. He never acted as if he knew everything and was open to learning new things from the team. Bobby understood that he couldn't gain the respect of the team without respecting them and allowing them the freedom to take ownership of their projects. Bobby opened up lines of communication within the team, especially by encouraging greater face-to-face interactions.”

      In management meetings when a question was asked, even though he could have provided the answer himself, Bobby typically referred it to one of his team members, stating, for example, “Yamin is an expert on this topic. I will let him answer this question.” During the annual sales conference, attended by hundreds of company employees, he let the most junior team member make the group presentation, while the whole team stood behind the presenter to answer questions. Yamin observed that:

      Being new to the group, Bobby could have easily fallen into the trap of trying to prove himself by individually contributing in projects, or acting as a gatekeeper for information flow; however, he opted to trust his team members on projects and took advice from them as for the approach to take on a particular project. He never forced his ideas. In other words, “my way or the highway” was not his style. He encouraged team members to take initiative and acted as an advisor on projects, and let the ownership remain with the individual team member.

      The results of Bobby's leadership were significant. The unit's revenue increased by 25 percent, and the product pipeline overflowed with product ideas. Team spirit soared, people felt engaged, and a general sense of collaboration and teamwork developed. “I personally had not felt more empowered and trusted ever before,” Yamin told us. “From this experience I've realized that great leaders grow their followers into leaders themselves.”

      As Bobby so well demonstrated in the way he focused on others and not on himself, success in leadership, success in work, and success in life are a function of how well people work and play together. Because leadership is a reciprocal process between leaders and their constituents, any discussion of leadership has to appreciate the dynamics of this relationship. Strategies, tactics, skills, and practices are empty without an understanding of the fundamental human aspirations that connect

10

R. Roi, Leadership Practices, Corporate Culture, and Company Financial Performance: 2005 Study Results (Palo Alto, CA: Crawford and Associates International, 2006), http://www.hr.com/en?s=ldYUsXbBU1qzkTZI&t=/documentManager/sfdoc.file.supply&fileID=1168032065880. For a list of hundreds of scholarly articles examining how The Five Practices impacts engagement and performance, see Posner, “Bringing the Rigor.”