The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations

By James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner

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Introduction

• The Leadership Challenge is evidence based. Analyzing thousands of case studies and millions of survey responses resulted in The Five Practices framework. The hundreds of examples in this book, of real people doing real things, document the practical nature of the model. Each chapter provides fresh and original data on the impact that the behavior of leaders has on engagement and performance.

• You don’t just owe it to yourself to become the best leader you can possibly be. You owe it to your constituents. They are also expecting you to do your best.

• 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.

• We need leaders who can unite us and ignite us.

Chapter 1: When Leaders Are at Their Best

• “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 makes sure that those who do the giving are refueled with the energy they need to keep on giving. Each week, he and his leadership team hold standup meetings at which they highlight what everyone is working on and look into problems, successes, lessons learned, and even failures they’ve had. Those who work in different geographic locations join by video. During these meetings, the leadership team looks for “praise moments” where they can draw attention to exemplary behaviors in front of everyone.

• When people see the successes and hear the positive feedback, it creates momentum.

• People wanted her to be honest, inspiring, competent, forward-looking, caring, ambitious, and supportive.

• The more successful we are, the more good we can do.

• “We find as many excuses as possible to celebrate successes. I think it’s important that people feel recognized and rewarded and valued for the difference they make.”

• “When we recognize what is working well and creating success, we are more likely to repeat the behavior that helped create the success in the first place.”

• When making extraordinary things happen in organizations, leaders engage in what we call The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, Encourage the Heart

• To effectively Model the Way, you must first be clear about your own guiding principles. You must clarify your values by finding your voice.

• You can’t command commitment; you have to inspire it. You have to enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations.

• Challenge is the crucible for greatness. Every single personal-best leadership case involved a change from the status quo. Not one person achieved a personal best by keeping things the same. Regardless of the specifics, they all involved overcoming adversity and embracing opportunities to grow, innovate, and improve.

• Innovation comes more from listening than from telling, and from constantly looking outside of yourself and your organization for new and innovative products, processes, and services.

• Life is the leader’s laboratory, and exemplary leaders use it to conduct as many experiments as possible.

• Leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships.

• “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.”

• Exemplary leader behavior makes a profoundly positive difference in people’s commitment and motivation, their work performance, and the success of their organizations.

• 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.

Chapter 2: Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• He encouraged team members to take initiative and acted as an advisor on projects, and let the ownership remain with the individual team member.

• You earn leadership from the people you aspire to lead. People choose, on a daily basis, whether they are going to follow and commit completely their talents, time, and energy. In the end, leaders don’t decide who leads, followers do.

• Knowing what people want from their leaders is the only way to complete the picture of how leaders can build and sustain the kind of relationships that will make extraordinary things happen.

• Our research on what constituents expect of leaders originally began by surveying thousands of business and government executives. In response to the open-ended question about what they looked for in a person they would be willing to follow, hundreds of different values, traits, and characteristics were reported. Subsequent content analysis by independent judges, followed by further empirical analyses, reduced these items to a checklist of twenty attributes, which we call the Characteristics of Admired Leaders (CAL). Using CAL, we ask people to select the seven qualities that they “most look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly follow.”

• For the majority of people to follow someone willingly, they want a leader who they believe is Honest, Competent, Inspiring, Forward-looking. In addition, these same four characteristics rank consistently at the top across different countries as shown by the data in Table 2.2. We also found that the ranking doesn’t significantly vary across cultures, ethnicities, organizational functions and hierarchies, genders, levels of education, and age groups

• In every survey we’ve conducted, honesty is selected more often than any other leadership characteristic. Overall, it emerges as the single most important factor in the leader-constituent relationship.

• It’s clear that if people anywhere are to willingly follow someone—whether it’s into battle or the boardroom, in the front office or on the production floor—they first want to be sure that the individual is worthy of their trust. They want to know that the person is truthful, ethical, and principled.

• That over 80 percent of constituents want their leaders to be honest above all else is a message that every leader must take to heart.

• When people follow someone they believe to be dishonest, they come to realize that they’ve compromised their own integrity. Over time, they not only lose respect for the leader, they lose respect for themselves.

• Leadership competence refers to the leader’s track record and ability to get things done.

• People demand a base level of understanding of and relevant experience in the fundamentals of the industry, market, or professional service environment,

• People expect their leaders to be excited, energetic, and positive about the future.

• People are most likely to believe what you are saying because they sense that you truly believe it.

• Fear does not persuade people to move ahead by being innovative and taking chances, but rather it motivates them to keep their heads down, hold on to the status quo, and stay out of the way. Fear may bring about compliance, but it never generates commitment. Instead, leaders need to communicate in words, demeanor, and actions that they believe obstacles will be overcome and dreams fulfilled.

• They have to have a point of view about the future envisioned for their organizations, and they need to be able to connect that point of view to the hopes and dreams of their constituents.

• They want their leader to communicate what the organization will look like, feel like, and be like when they arrive at their destination in six quarters or six years. They want to have it described in rich detail so that they’ll know themselves when they’ve arrived, and so that they can select the proper route for getting there.

• These four prerequisites for leadership—honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking—have stood the test of time and geography,

• Credibility is the foundation of leadership. People must be able, above all else, to believe in their leaders. To willingly follow them, people must believe that the leaders’ word can be trusted, that they are personally passionate and enthusiastic about their work, and that they have the knowledge and skill to lead.

• The Kouzes-Posner First Law of Leadership: If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message.

• Leaders must always be diligent in guarding their credibility. Their capacity to take strong stands, to challenge the status quo, and to point in new directions depends upon being highly credible.

• We found that when people perceive their immediate manager to have high credibility, they’re significantly more likely to: Be proud to tell others they’re part of the organization. Feel a strong sense of team spirit. See their own personal values as consistent with those of the organization. Feel attached and committed to the organization. Have a sense of ownership of the organization. When people perceive their manager to have low credibility, on the other hand, they’re significantly more likely to: Produce only if carefully watched. Be motivated primarily by money. Say good things about the organization publicly but criticize it privately. Consider looking for another job if the organization experiences problems. Feel unsupported and unappreciated.

• Here are some of the common phrases people use to describe how they know credibility when they see it: “They practice what they preach.” “They walk the talk.” “Their actions are consistent with their words.” “They put their money where their mouth is.” “They follow through on their promises.” “They do what they say they will do.”

• This is the Kouzes-Posner Second Law of Leadership: Do What You Say You Will Do.

Practice 1: Model the Way

Chapter 3: Clarify Values

• What would you say if someone were to ask you, “What is your leadership philosophy?” Are you prepared right now to say what your leadership philosophy is? If you aren’t, you should be. If you are, you need to reaffirm it on a daily basis.

• Without a doubt, in these chaotic times having a set of deeply held values allows leaders to focus and make choices among a plethora of competing theories, demands, and interests.

• People can only speak the truth when speaking in their true voice. If you only mimic what others are saying, no one can make a commitment to you because they don’t know who you are and what you believe in.

• In too many organizations, there is a huge gap between what the organization says is valued and the degree that employees believe they can apply those values to their everyday work.

• Leaders build on agreement.

• Before they even began the project assignment, the manager had them complete a questionnaire, which covered topics such as where they grew up, favorite food, hobbies, and so on. There were also questions that dug a little deeper, asking about the type of work they liked and did not like, the role they usually played on teams, and what they respected in managers and teammates.

• Conversations about values also enable people to find more meaning in their work. When you converse with your team members about their values, and when you facilitate a values conversation they can have among themselves, you are helping them to see how the work that they do connects with who they are. You are helping them to make a much deeper connection to work than can ever be realized through discussions of tasks and rules.

• You cannot mandate unity; instead, you forge it by involving people in the process, making them feel that you are genuinely interested in their perspectives, and that they can speak freely with you. For them to be open to sharing their ideas and aspirations, they have to believe that you’ll be caring and constructive in searching for common ground.

• Model the Way begins with clarifying values by finding your voice and affirming shared values. This means you must: Identify the values you use to guide choices and decisions. Find your own authentic way of talking about what is important to you. Help others to articulate why they do what they do, and what they care about. Provide opportunities for people to talk about their values with others on the team. Build consensus around values, principles, and standards. Make sure that people are adhering to agreed-upon values and standards.

Chapter 4: Set the Example

• No one will believe you’re serious until they see you doing what you’re asking of others.

• In order to Set the Example you need to: ‘Live the shared values’ and ‘Teach others to model the values’

• “Those who serve under an effective general know well that he or she would ask nothing of others that they would not first do themselves.”

• There’s a consistent and dramatic relationship between the extent to which people trust their organization’s management and the frequency that they find their leaders following through on promises and commitments.

• The most significant signal-sending actions you can take to demonstrate that you live the values are: how you spend your time and what you pay attention to, the language (words and phrases) you use, the way you handle critical incidents, and your openness to feedback. These actions make visible and tangible your personal commitment to a shared way of being.

• How you spend your time is the single clearest indicator of what’s important to you.

• Whatever your values are, they have to show up on your calendar and on meeting agendas if people are to believe they’re significant.

• The language and words leaders use affect their self-images and people’s responses to what’s going on around them. They help build the frame around people’s views of the world, so it’s essential to be mindful of your choice of words.

• If you were to ask, for example, “What have you done today to partner with a colleague on getting the work done?” you are sending a signal about the importance of collaboration. If, on the other hand, you were to ask, “What have you done today to reduce the costs of doing business?” you are sending a very different message.

• Questions are one more tangible indicator of how serious you are about your espoused beliefs. Questions direct attention to the values that deserve attention and how much energy should be devoted to them. Questions develop people. They help people escape the trap of their mental models by broadening their perspectives and enlarging their responses by taking responsibility for their viewpoints. Asking relevant questions also forces you to listen attentively to what your constituents are saying.

• If you are genuinely interested in what other people think, then you need to ask their opinion, especially before giving your own.

• The feedback process strikes at a tension between two basic human needs: the need to learn and grow versus the need to be accepted just the way you are. Consequently, even what seems like a mild, gentle, or relatively harmless suggestion can leave a person feeling angry, anxious, poorly treated, or profoundly threatened. One major reason that most people, and especially those in leadership positions, aren’t proactive in asking for feedback is their fear of feeling exposed.

• “Being aware of your weaknesses and shortcomings,” they say, “whether you like it or not, is critical to improvement.”

• Self-reflection, the willingness to seek feedback, and the ability to engage in new behaviors based on this information is predictive of future success in managerial jobs. You can’t learn very much if you’re unwilling to find out more about the impact of your behavior on the performance of those around you.

• A side benefit of making it easy for people to give you feedback is that you increase the likelihood that people will accept honest feedback from you.

• However, keep in mind that if you don’t do anything with the feedback you receive, people will likely stop giving it to you. They’re liable to believe that you are arrogant enough to think that you are smarter than everyone else is or that you just don’t care about what anyone else has to say. Either of these outcomes seriously undermines your credibility and effectiveness as a leader.

• Every team member, partner, and colleague is a sender of signals about what’s valued. Therefore, you need to look for opportunities to teach not just by your example, but also by taking on the role of teacher and coach.

• Critical incidents are those events in leaders’ lives that offer the chance to improvise while still staying true to the script. Although they can’t be explicitly planned, it’s useful to keep in mind, as Sharada and Emily did, that the way you handle these incidents—how you link actions and decisions to shared values—speaks volumes about what’s important.

• You can’t just order people to “be more creative” or to “get motivated” or to “start loving your job.” The human brain doesn’t work that way. But you can lead them there with a good story. You can’t even successfully order people to “follow the rules” because nobody reads the rulebook. But people will read a good story about a guy who broke the rules and got fired, or a woman who followed the rules and got a raise. And that would be more effective than reading the rulebook anyway.

• Research shows that when leaders want to communicate standards, stories are a much more powerful means of communication. People more quickly and accurately remember stories—more than they recall corporate policy statements, data about performance, and even a story plus the data.

• “I think values are really, really important, but I also think that too many values are just words.” If you looked at the annual reports of ten major companies, what’s striking, he explained, is that “almost all the values are the same. But when you go inside those companies, you often see that the words don’t translate into practices.”

• Key performance measures and reward systems are among the many methods available to you. Recruitment, selection, onboarding, training, information, retention, and promotion systems are other meaningful ways to teach people how to enact values and how to align decisions with them.

• To Model the Way, you must set the example by aligning actions with shared values. This means you must: Keep your commitments and follow through on your promises. Make sure your calendar, your meetings, your interviews, your emails, and all the other ways you spend your time reflect what you say is important. Ask purposeful questions that keep people constantly focused on the values and priorities that are the most essential. Broadcast examples of exemplary behavior through vivid and memorable stories that illustrate how people are and should be behaving. Publicly ask for feedback from others about how your actions affect them. Make changes and adjustments based on the feedback you receive; otherwise, people will stop bothering to provide it.

Practice 2: Inspire a Shared Vision

Chapter 5: Envision the Future

• Call it what you will—vision, purpose, mission, legacy, dream, aspiration, calling, or personal agenda—the intent is the same. If you are going to be an exemplary leader, you have to be able to imagine a positive future.

• When you envision the future that you want for yourself and others, and when you feel passionate about the legacy you want to leave, you are much more likely to take that first step forward. However, if you don’t have the slightest clue about your hopes, dreams, and aspirations, then the chance that you’ll take the lead is slim. In fact, you may not even see the opportunity that’s right in front of you.

• Everyone wants tomorrow to be better than today. Shared visions attract more people, sustain higher levels of motivation, and withstand more challenges than those that are exclusive to only a few. You have to make sure that what you can see is also something that others can see.

• Leaders make a commitment to Envision the Future by mastering these two essentials: ‘Imagine the possibilities’ and ‘Find a common purpose’

• Every leader needs a theme, an orienting principle around which he or she can organize an entire movement. What’s your central message? What’s your recurring theme? What do you most want people to envision every time they think about the future? Ask people if their leader “paints the ‘big picture’ of what we aspire to accomplish.” Ask them how frequently their leader “describes a compelling image of what your future could be like.” What you will discover is that those leaders who engage the most in these behaviors have direct reports with the highest positive workplace attitude scores.

• Breakthroughs come when you reflect on your past, attend to the present, prospect the future, and express your passion.

• Looking back enables you to understand better that the central recurring theme in your life has been there for a long time. Another benefit to looking back before looking ahead is that you gain a greater appreciation for how long it can take to fulfill aspirations.

• Set aside some time each day to stop doing “stuff.” Create some white space on your calendar. Remind yourself that your electronic devices have an off switch. Stop being in motion. Then start noticing more of what’s going on around you right now.

• “You have to make time to step back and ask yourself, ‘What’s the big story that cuts across all these little facts?”

• Listen to your constituents. What are their hot topics of conversation? What are they saying they need and want? What are they saying that gets in the way of them doing their best? What do they think should be changed? Listen as well to the weak signals, to what’s not being said. Listen for things you’ve never heard before. What does all this tell you about where things are going? What’s it telling you about what lies just around the corner?

• You have to spend more of today thinking more about tomorrow if your future is going to be an improvement over the present.

• You have to find something that’s so important that you’re willing to put in the time, suffer the inevitable setbacks, and make the necessary sacrifices. Without an intense desire, a solemn concern, a consuming question, a grave proposition, a fondest hope, or a cherished dream, you can’t ignite the spark necessary to energize aspirations and actions.

• People regard most favorably those leaders who regularly talk about the “why” of work and not just the “what” of work.

• People are more likely to commit themselves fully to the greater cause when you listen to them deeply, understand their true calling, and help them achieve their aspirations.

• Extraordinary things can happen when leaders listen—when they involve employees in identifying issues, hear their frustrations and their aspirations, and find ways to respond with initiatives that address those concerns. Generating excitement in a workplace is possible when leaders pay attention to what people want and need.

• People stay with an organization, research finds, because they like the work they are doing and find it challenging, meaningful, and purposeful.

• People desire….

  • Integrity: Pursuing values and goals congruent with their own.
  • Purpose: Making a significant difference in the lives of others.
  • Challenge: Doing innovative work.
  • Growth: Learning and developing professionally and personally.
  • Belonging: Engaging in close and positive relationships.
  • Autonomy: Determining the course of their own lives.
  • Significance: Feeling trusted and validated

• “Leaders make others feel important and needed.” He says that you won’t find the keys to devoted effort from focusing simply on pay, benefits, or even plush working conditions.

• To Inspire a Shared Vision, you must envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. This means you must: Determine what drives you and where your passions lie in order to identify what you care enough about to imagine how it could be better in the future, compelling you forward. Reflect on your experiences, looking for the major themes in your life and understanding what you find worthwhile. Stop, look, and listen to what is going on right now—the important trends, major topics of conversation, and social discontents. Spend a higher percentage of your time focused on the future, imagining the exciting possibilities. Listen deeply to what is important to others in their future and to what gives their lives meaning and purpose. Involve others in crafting a shared vision of the future. Don’t make it a top-down process.

Chapter 6: Enlist Others

• Whether you’re trying to mobilize thousands of people in the community or one person in the workplace, to Enlist Others you must act on these two essentials: ‘Appeal to common ideals’ and ‘Animate the vision’

• To make extraordinary things happen in organizations, you have to go beyond reason, engaging the hearts as well as the minds of your constituents. Start by understanding their strongest yearnings for something meaningful and significant.

• Researchers have shown that stressing the “why” to people, as in “Why are we doing this and why does this matter?” activates the brain’s reward system and increases not only people’s efforts but how they feel about what they are doing.

• We’ve asked thousands of people over the years to do just that; listen to his remarks and then tell us what they heard, how they felt, and why they thought this speech remains so moving even today. Following is a sampling of their observations. “He appealed to common interests.” “He talked about traditional values of family, church, and country.” “He used a lot of images and word pictures that the audience could relate to. They were familiar.” “He mentioned things everyone could relate to, like family and children.” “His references were credible. It’s hard to argue against the Constitution or the Bible.” “It was personal. He mentioned his own children, as well as struggling.” “He included everybody: different parts of the country, all ages, both sexes, and major religions.” “He used a lot of repetition: for example, saying ‘I have a dream,’ and ‘Let freedom ring’ several times.” “He talked about the same ideas many times but in different ways.” “He was positive and hopeful.” “Although positive, he didn’t promise it would be easy.” “He shifted his focus from ‘I’ to ‘we’.” “He spoke with emotion and passion. It was something he genuinely felt.”

• You have to show them that it’s not about you, or even the organization, but about them and their needs.

• Along these lines, visions with image-based words are more consistent with the literal meaning of the word vision. When leaders include vivid images in their communications, they’re transporting employees to the future by telling snippets of a compelling story—a story that captures events that have yet to unfold. His research has found that image-based words inspire people.

• To enlist others, you need to help them see and feel how their interests and aspirations align with the vision.

• If you’re going to lead, you have to recognize that your enthusiasm and expressiveness are among your strongest allies in your efforts to generate commitment in others.

• They use metaphors and analogies. They give examples, tell stories, and relate anecdotes. They draw word pictures, and they offer quotations and recite slogans.

• Metaphors are everywhere—there are art metaphors, game and sports metaphors, war metaphors, science fiction metaphors, machine metaphors, religious metaphors, and spiritual metaphors. They influence both what and how people think, what they imagine and invent, what they eat and drink, what they consume and purchase, and whom they vote for and rally behind. Learning to use these figures of speech greatly enhances your ability to enlist others in a common vision of the future.

• Vision statements, then, are not statements at all. They are pictures—word pictures. They are images of the future. For people to share a vision, they have to be able to see it in the mind’s eye.

• We ask people to shout out the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the words Paris, France. The replies that pop out—the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Seine, Notre Dame, delicious food, wine, and romance—are all images of real places and real sensations. No one calls out the square kilometers, population, or gross domestic product of Paris. Why? Because most of what we recall about memorable places or events are those things associated with our senses—sights, sounds, tastes, smells, tactile sensations, and feelings.

• Individuals who enjoy more positivity are also better able to cope with adversity and are more resilient during times of high stress.

• Instead of defining charisma as a personality trait, some social scientists have investigated what people are doing when others say they are charismatic. What they’ve found is that individuals who are perceived to be charismatic are simply more animated than people who are not. They smile more, speak faster, pronounce words more clearly, and move their heads and bodies more often. Being energetic and expressive are key descriptors of what it means to be charismatic.

• By adding emotion to your words and behavior, you can increase the likelihood that people will remember what you say.

• Keep in mind that the content alone doesn’t make the message stick; key is how well you tap into people’s emotions. To be willing to change, people have to feel something. Thinking isn’t nearly enough to get things moving.

• The prerequisite to enlisting others in a shared vision is genuineness.

• To Inspire a Shared Vision, you must enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations. This means you must: Talk with your constituents and find out about their hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the future. Make sure your constituents know what makes their products or services unique and special. Show constituents how enlisting in a common vision serves their long-term interests. Be positive, upbeat, and energetic when talking about the future of your organization, and make liberal use of metaphors, symbols, examples, and stories. Acknowledge the emotions of others and validate them as important. Let your passion show in a manner genuinely expressive of who you are.

Practice 3: Challenge the Process

Chapter 7: Search for Opportunities

• Exemplary leaders embrace the commitment to Search for Opportunities to ensure that extraordinary things happen. They make sure they engage in these two essentials: ‘Seize the initiative’ and ‘Exercise outsight’

• We didn’t ask people to tell us about change. They could review any leadership experience. What people chose to discuss were the changes they made in response to the challenges they faced. Their electing to talk about times of change underscores the fact that leadership demands altering the business-as-usual environment. There is a clear connection between challenge and change; and there’s a clear connection between challenge and being an effective leader. The more frequently people see their leader “searching outside the formal boundaries of his or her organization for innovative ways to improve,” the more strongly they agree that their leader is effective.

• The study of leadership is the study of how men and women guide others through adversity, uncertainty, and other significant challenges.

• They began by brainstorming “what would we change if anything was possible.”

• As Emily reflected, new jobs and new assignments are ideal opportunities for asking probing questions and challenging the way you do things. They are the times when you’re expected to ask, “Why do we do this?”

• Studies of business breakthroughs find that they often originated from someone asking questions about why a problem existed and how to tackle it. Be proactive in asking questions that test people’s assumptions, stimulate different ways of thinking, and open new avenues to explore.

• To break out of this pattern, she created a new forum that met after every event to brainstorm on how they could do things better for the next event. In these forums, she invited the team to give their opinions and suggestions for the improvement of their program and encouraged them to share what they might have read about or experienced at other events. She also created a digital diary for the team to pitch new ideas, get into the details of the ones they decided to try out, and generate a log of what they’ve learned from those experiences.

• In addition, find ways for people to stretch themselves. Set the bar incrementally higher, but at a level at which people feel they can succeed. Raise it too high, and people will fail; if they fail too often, they’ll quit trying. Raise the bar a bit at a time, and as more and more people eventually master the situation and build the self-confidence to continue, move the bar upward.

• Connect people with role models from whom they can start learning, and help them take the next steps of creating a mental picture of performing that same skill themselves and internalizing why it is important to develop that competency.

• The strongest motivation to deal with challenge and the uncertainties of life and work comes from inside of people, and not the outside.

• Studies provide convincing evidence that reliance on extrinsic motivators can actually lower performance and create a culture of divisiveness and selfishness, precisely because it diminishes an inner sense of purpose. When it comes to excellence, it’s definitely not “What gets rewarded gets done”; it’s “What is rewarding gets done.”

• After all, why do people push their own limits to get extraordinary things done? And, for that matter, why do people do so many things for nothing? Why do they volunteer to put out fires, raise money for worthy causes, or help children in need? Why do they risk their careers to start a new business or risk their security to change the social condition? Why do they risk their lives to save others or defend liberty? How do people find satisfaction in efforts that don’t pay a lot of money, options, perks, or prestige? Extrinsic rewards certainly can’t explain these actions. Leaders tap into people’s hearts and minds, not merely their hands and wallets.

• According to a global study of CEOs, the most significant sources of innovative ideas are discovered outside the organization. Sometimes ideas come from customers, sometimes from lead users, sometimes from suppliers, sometimes from business partners, and sometimes from the R&D labs of other organizations.

• It’s by keeping the doors open to the passage of ideas and information that you become knowledgeable about what is going on around you. Insight without outsight is like seeing with blinders on; you just can’t get a complete picture.

• Studies into how the brain processes information suggest that to see things differently and hence creatively, you need to bombard your brain with stuff it has never encountered. This kind of novelty is vital, according to Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns, because the brain, evolved for efficiency, routinely takes perceptual shortcuts to save energy. Only by forcing yourself to break free of preexisting views can you get your brain to recategorize information. Moving beyond habitual thinking patterns is the starting point to imagining novel alternatives. Because the human mind is surprisingly adroit at supporting its deep-seated ways of viewing the world while sifting out evidence to the contrary, McKinsey & Company researchers suggest that direct personal experience is the antidote: “Seeing and experiencing something firsthand can shake people up in ways that abstract discussions around conference room tables can’t.

• She also started looking outside the four walls of her organization, researching how competitors were addressing similar business situations and speaking with other comparable nonprofit organizations.

• Researchers find that unless people actively encourage external communication and seek diverse points of view, they tend to interact with outsiders less and less frequently, and new ideas are cut off.

• One way to open yourself up to new information is by taking on multiple perspectives. What can you do to take a more expansive view of your present circumstances? Researchers have suggested three approaches: Take the perspective of someone who frustrates or irritates you, and consider what that person might have to teach you. Listen to what other people have to say; that is, listen to learn rather than to necessarily change their perspective. Seek out the opinions of people beyond your comfort zone, folks you don’t typically talk with.

• Clay told us that he “learned that you will likely get shot down when you bring forth a proposal to change the status quo, and you will likely be denied more than once. However, good leaders do not give up when confronted with adversity; they meet that adversity with alternative solutions, and do not stop putting forth additional solutions until that adversity is overcome.”

• Collect ideas through focus groups, advisory boards, suggestion boxes, breakfast meetings, brainstorming sessions, customer evaluation forms, mystery shoppers, mystery guests, visits to competitors, and the like.

• To Challenge the Process, you must search for opportunities by seizing the initiative and look outward for innovative ways to improve. This means you must: Do something each day so that you are better than you were the day before. Seek firsthand experiences outside your comfort zone and skill set. Always be asking, “What’s new? What’s next? What’s better?” and not just for yourself but also for those around you. Find a significant purpose for addressing your challenging and most difficult assignments. Ask questions, seek advice, and listen to diverse perspectives. Be adventurous; don’t let routines become ruts.

Chapter 8: Experiment and Take Risks

• Exemplary leaders make the commitment to Experiment and Take Risks. They know that making extraordinary things happen requires that leaders ‘Generate small wins’ and ‘Learn from experience’.

• A small win is “a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.” It identifies a place to begin. Small wins make the project seem doable, that is, within the parameters of existing skills and resources. They minimize the cost of trying and reduce the risks of failing.

• When people don’t feel overwhelmed by a task, their energy goes into getting the job done, instead of wondering, “How will we ever solve that problem?”

• There are three key factors to building psychological hardiness: commitment, control, and challenge. To turn adversity into advantage, you need first to commit yourself to what’s happening. You have to become involved, engaged, and curious. You can’t sit back and wait for something to happen. You also have to take control of your life. You need to make an effort to influence what is going on. Even if it’s unlikely that all your attempts will be successful, you can’t sink into passivity. Finally, you need to view challenge as an opportunity to learn from both negative and positive experiences.

• While there is a very real human tendency to focus on the negative, you need to concentrate on progress—not on the gap between aspirations and reality, but on how much you have advanced.

• This was precisely the lesson from an experiment one ceramics teacher carried out in his classroom. At the beginning of the semester, the teacher divided the students into two groups. He told the first group they could earn better grades by producing more pots (e.g., thirty for a B, forty for an A), regardless of the quality. He told the second group that their grades depended solely on the quality of the pots they produced. Not surprisingly, students in the first group got right to it, producing as many pots as possible, while the second group was quite careful and deliberate in how they went about making the best pots. The teacher found, to his surprise, that the students who made the most pots—those graded on quantity rather than quality—also made the best ones. It turned out that the practice of making lots of pots naturally resulted in better quality; for example, these students became more familiar with the intricacies of the kiln and how various firing positions affected the aesthetics of their products.

• Being able to reflect on your experiences, and subsequently to adjust and engage in new behaviors, is the single best predictor of future success in new and different managerial jobs.

• I think of my failures as a gift. Unless you view them that way, you won’t learn from failure, you won’t get better.

• Building your capacity to be an active learner begins with what Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck refers to as a growth mind-set, which she says “is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.” She compares this to a fixed mindset, which assumes “that your qualities are carved in stone.” Individuals with a growth mindset believe that people can learn to be better leaders. Those with a fixed mindset think that leaders are born, not made, and that no amount of training is going to make you any better than you naturally or already are.

• “Curiosity has, quite literally, been the key to my success, and also the key to my happiness,”

• Asking questions is how Brian expresses his curiosity, which, he says, sparks interesting thoughts and builds collaborative relationships.

• You don’t waste those tough times. When the tough times hit, and the setbacks and the disappointments come, you’re a lot more teachable. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I had not taken advantage of the disappointments and the setbacks. Through those setbacks I’ve learned more, and made more advances, than through the good times.

• Resilience is the capacity Pat describes—that ability to recover quickly from setbacks and continue to pursue a vision of the future—and similar to what Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, calls grit. She and her research colleagues define grit very simply as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” and report that it “entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.” Showing grit involves setting goals, being obsessed with an idea or project, maintaining focus, sticking with things that take a long time to complete, overcoming setbacks, and the like.

• Consider situational circumstances that contributed to the failure and convey the belief that this particular situation is likely to be temporary, not permanent.

• Breed a growth mindset when reaching milestones and achieving success by attributing these to the hard work and effort of the individuals in the group. Convey a belief that many more victories are at hand and be optimistic that good fortune will be with your team for a long time. Bolster resilience as well by assigning tasks that are challenging but within people’s skill level, focusing on rewards rather than punishments, and encouraging people to see change as full of possibilities.

• To Challenge the Process, you must experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from experience. This means you must: Create opportunities for small wins, promoting meaningful progress. Set incremental goals and milestones, breaking big projects down into achievable steps. Keep people focused on what they can control in their work and commit to in their lives. Make it safe for people to experiment and take risks by promoting learning from experience, debriefing successes and failures, capturing lessons learned and disseminating them broadly. Emphasize how personal fulfillment results from constantly challenging oneself to improve. Continuously experiment with new ideas through small bets.

Practice 4: Enable Others to Act

Chapter 9: Foster Collaboration

• Exemplary leaders make the commitment to Foster Collaboration by engaging in these essentials: ‘Create a climate of trust’ and ‘Facilitate relationships’

• Individuals who are unable to trust others fail to become leaders, precisely because they can’t bear to be dependent on the words and works of others. They end up doing all the work themselves or supervising work so closely that they become micromanagers. Their lack of trust in others results in their lack of trust in them.

• People perceived as trusting are sought out more as friends, more frequently listened to, and subsequently more influential.

• “Trust is the cornerstone for creating a workplace where employees are engaged, productive, and continually innovating.”

• Self-disclosure is one way that you go first. Letting others know what you stand for, what you value, what you want, what you hope for, and what you’re willing (and not willing) to do reveals information about yourself. You can’t be certain that other people will appreciate your candor, agree with your aspirations, or interpret your words and actions in the way you intend. But once you take the risk of being open, others are more likely to take a similar risk and work toward mutual understanding.

• The concern you show for others is one of the clearest and most unambiguous signals of your trustworthiness.

• However, this is something people need to see in your actions—actions such as listening, paying attention to their ideas and concerns, helping them solve their problems, and being open to their influence. When you show your openness to their ideas and your interest in their concerns, people will be more open to yours.

• Active listening involves more than simply paying attention. The best listeners, according to a study involving nearly 3,500 participants in a coaching skills development program, did much more than remain silent while the other person talked. They demonstrated that they were listening by asking questions that “promoted discovery and insight.” The act of active listening is like having a conversation. It requires more than just hearing the other person’s words. It means being engaged in a way that makes the conversation a positive experience, causing the person you are listening to feel supported and valued.

• Great listeners also tend to offer suggestions, and have been described as “trampolines” in that you feel you can bounce ideas off of them.

• In addition to this, he took the time to schedule lunches with us to get to know who we were as individuals instead of just talking about work.

• These initial actions piqued our interest in him as a leader, and we began to slowly listen to his thoughts and seek his advice more frequently because of the strong foundational relationship he built at the beginning.

• I want to be remembered for how I served my team and not as the one being served.”

• People have to feel that they can talk freely with you about their challenges. For them to be open to sharing their ideas, their frustrations, and their dreams with you, they have to believe that you’ll be caring and constructive in your responses. They have to feel that you care about their best interests.

• It’s interesting how these same skills of nonjudgmental listening show up in the people referred to as friends—and every successful leadership relationship has some element of friendship in it. Although you are not expected to be everyone’s best friend, researchers have demonstrated across a variety of settings that having a friend at work, and having a friendly relationship with your supervisor, contribute significantly to healthy and productive workplaces.

• Managers who create distrustful environments tend to take self-protective postures.

• To create conditions in which people know they can count on each other, a leader needs to develop cooperative goals and roles, support norms of reciprocity, structure projects to promote joint efforts, and encourage face-to-face interactions.

• Reciprocity leads to predictability and stability in relationships; in other words, trust. It’s less stressful to work with others when you understand how they will behave in response—especially to your own behavior in negotiations and disagreements.

• Wharton professor Adam Grant argues in his book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success that organizations filled with “givers”—those who help others—are consistently more effective than those loaded with “takers.” Knowing about the amount of help people are willing to give one another, it turns out, is a highly accurate predictor of the team’s effectiveness.

• People can act as a cohesive team only when they can have some amount of face time with each other. This is true not only locally but also in globally distributed relationships. Getting to know others firsthand is essential to cultivating trust and collaboration. And this need for face-to-face communication increases with the complexity of the issues. As Wilson Chu, principal product manager at VMware, realized: “Until you see someone’s face, they are not a real person to you.”

• Exemplary leaders Foster Collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. This means you must: Extend trust to others, even if they haven’t already extended it to you. Spend time getting to know your constituents and find out what makes them tick. Show concern for the problems and aspirations others have. Listen, listen, and listen some more. Structure projects so that there is a common goal that requires cooperation, making sure that people understand how they are interdependent with one another. Find ways to get people together face to face and increase the durability of their relationship.

Chapter 10: Strengthen Others

• To Strengthen Others, exemplary leaders engage in two essentials. They ‘Enhance self-determination’ and ‘Develop competence and confidence’.

• Actions and Conditions That Make People Feel POWERLESS:

  • “No one was interested in, listened to, or paid attention to my opinion or questions.”
  • “I had no input into an important decision that affected the way I did my work.”
  • “My boss argued with me in front of my colleagues—even called me names.”
  • “My decisions were not supported, even though my manager said he would back me up.”
  • “Someone else took credit for my hard work and results.”
  • “Information essential to my work was withheld, or I was excluded from the information loop.”
  • “I was given responsibility but no authority to hold others accountable.”

• Actions and Conditions That Make People Feel POWERFUL:

  • “All the important information and data were shared with me.”
  • “I was able to exercise discretion about how we would handle a situation.”
  • “I made decisions about key aspects of the project.”
  • “The organization invested resources in helping me to learn.”
  • “Management publicly expressed great confidence in my ability.”
  • “The supervisor told others about the great work I was doing.”
  • “My manager took the time to let me know how I was doing and where I could be improving.”

• People feel more empowered when they have decision-making power that could make real impact.”

• Freedom is the ability to make choices. People who perceive they don’t have any choices feel trapped, and like rats in a maze, when left with no alternatives, they typically stop moving, and eventually shut down. By giving employees genuine autonomy, leaders can reduce the sense of powerlessness and stress that people feel and increase their willingness to exercise more fully their capabilities.

• Give people choices, and let them make decisions on their own, and then it becomes quite difficult to blame “the company” (or management) when things don’t go their way or when they don’t like the way things are going. After all, if they don’t like the way something is done, they can do something about it.

• To feel in control of their own work lives, people need to be able to take non-routine action, exercise independent judgment, and make decisions that affect how they do their work, without having to check with someone else. It means being creative and flexible—liberated from a standard set of rules, procedures, or schedules—and the payoff can be enormous.

• The power to choose rests on the willingness to be held accountable. She learned that the more freedom of choice people have, the more personal responsibility they must accept.

• It’s true that some people become social loafers when working in groups, slacking off while others do their jobs for them. However, this doesn’t last for long, because their colleagues quickly tire of carrying the extra load. Either the slacker steps up to the responsibility, or the team wants that person removed—provided the team has shared goals and shared accountability.

• Here are some examples on how to foster individual accountability: Make certain that everyone, no matter the task, has a customer. Substantially increase signature authority at all levels. Remove or reduce unnecessary approval steps. Broadly define jobs (e.g., as projects, not tasks). Provide greater freedom of access, vertically and horizontally, inside and outside the organization.

• “When high challenges are matched with high skills, then the deep involvement that sets flow apart from ordinary life is likely to occur.”

• By problem solving, they could use their skills and develop new ideas on how to make operations better. Once they were confident and had solved a problem, I had them teach the entire team how to solve that problem. This training exercise turned out to be the best activity I could have done and did much more for the team than I ever imagined. While walking through the problems with the team, other team members were very engaged, and you could see their confidence rise.

• “Everyone is better off when they know why decisions are made with as much accuracy as possible. It gives them an understanding of what matters and provides information on which to base the trade-offs being made constantly at every level. When reasons behind decisions are not shared, the decisions seem arbitrary and possibly self-serving.”

• Making people smarter is the job of every leader.

• They provide sufficient information so that people feel that they have the perspective of owners in making decisions, which fosters greater competence and enhances their self-confidence.

• By building people’s belief in themselves, you are bolstering their inner strength to forge ahead in uncharted terrain, to make tough choices, to face opposition and the like because they believe in their skills and decision-making abilities.

• Performance, takes the viewpoint that “coaches have to empower each player’s dream.” He views the coach’s role—whether working with athletes or would-be leaders—as needing to move from pushing (the coach’s agenda), which operates from a fixed mindset, to pulling (the player’s agenda), which generates a growth mindset.

• “Ask, don’t tell.” She learned this from renowned management guru Peter Drucker, who noted, “The leader of the future asks; the leader of the past tells.” The benefits of asking questions are numerous. For one, it gives others the room to think and to frame issues from their perspective. Second, asking questions indicates an underlying trust in people’s abilities by shifting accountability, and it has the benefit of creating almost immediate buy-in for the solution. (After all, it’s their idea.) Asking questions also puts leaders in a coaching position, more of a guiding role, which frees them up to think more freely and strategically.

• To Enable Others to Act, you must strengthen others by increasing their self-determination and developing competence. This means you must: Take actions that make people feel powerful and in control of their circumstances. Provide people opportunities to make choices about how they do their work and serve their customers. Structure jobs so that people have opportunities to use their judgment, developing both greater competence and self-confidence. Find a balance between people’s skills and the challenges associated with their work. Demonstrate your confidence in the capabilities of constituents and colleagues. Ask questions; stop giving answers.

Practice 5: Encourage the Heart

Chapter 11: Recognize Contributions

• To Recognize Contributions, you need to utilize these two essentials: ‘Expect the best’ and ‘Personalize recognition’.

• Research on self-fulfilling prophecies provides ample evidence that people act in ways that are consistent with others’ expectations. When you expect people to fail, they probably will. If you expect them to succeed, they probably will.

• When you believe that people are winners, you behave in ways that communicate to them that they are precisely that—not just in your words but also through tone of voice, posture, gestures, and facial expressions.

• “I use three pennies to help me practice encouragement,” said Ravi Gandhi, chief financial officer, United Auto Credit Corporation. When he gets into work, he sets three pennies on the left side of his computer, and during the day, he says, “I look for opportunities to recognize, thank, and encourage good work that people are doing around me.” After encouraging someone, he moves a penny from the left side of the computer to the right side. When not at his desk, he puts the pennies in his left pocket and moves them to the right pocket as he encourages people during the day. This small reminder, explains Ravi, “keeps me mindful of the fact that we live in an encouragement-starved world—I am just trying to do my small part to fix that—at least with my work team.” If Ravi gets to the end of the day with pennies in his left pocket, he calls his kids and friends on the way home and offers them some encouragement!

• Also, when you know that people are coming around to look for problems, you’re more likely to hide them than to reveal them. People who work for highly controlling managers are more likely to keep information to themselves, conceal the truth, and be dishonest about what is going on.

• Goals help you concentrate and avoid distractions.

• Goals give recognition context. They give people something to strive for, something important to attain—for example, coming in first, breaking a record, setting a new standard of excellence.

• Only those who received positive feedback improved their performance. Saying nothing about a person’s performance doesn’t help anyone—not the performer, not the leader, not the organization. People hunger for feedback. They prefer to know how they are doing, and no news has the same negative impact as bad news.

• In this regard, Wharton Professor Adam Grant suggests “stop serving the feedback sandwich,” a traditional technique for giving feedback where you put a slice of praise on the top and bottom and stick the meat of any criticism in between. The data, he argues, shows that the “feedback sandwich doesn’t taste as good as it looks,” and he offers several suggestions for making feedback more constructive. First, explain why you are giving the feedback. People are more open to criticism when they believe it’s intended to help them and you show that you care personally. Second, because negative feedback can make people feel inferior, he recommends leveling the playing field by sharing how feedback has been helpful in your career. Third, ask if the person wants feedback because once they take ownership of this decision, they’re less defensive about whatever you have to offer. Framing feedback in this manner goes a long way toward transforming feedback into guidance, which is what most people hunger for.

• On the Leadership Practices Inventory—our 360-degree leadership assessment tool—the statement on which leaders consistently report engaging in least frequently is “asks for feedback on how my actions affect other people’s performance.” In other words, the behavior that leaders and their constituents consider being the most uncomfortable with is the behavior that most enables leaders to know how they’re doing! How can you learn very much if you’re unwilling to find out more about how your actions are affecting the behavior and performance of those around you?

• Openness to feedback, especially negative feedback, is characteristic of the best learners, and it’s something all leaders, especially aspiring ones, need to cultivate.

• A one-size-fits-all approach to recognition feels insincere, forced, and thoughtless. Bureaucratic and routine recognition, along with most incentive systems, doesn’t make anyone very excited.

• “To encourage people to do their best, you should be able to recognize their achievements and make them feel trusted and valued. It has to be personal, precise, and visible. Even if it is a great reward, if you don’t give it out right—or get it right—it will be forgotten soon without achieving the purpose of bringing out the best in people.”

• Feeling a connection with others motivates people to work harder for the simple reason that people don’t like to disappoint or let down individuals they consider friends. People also stick around longer at their companies when they feel they have friends at their workplace.

• As the VP and general manager of station KJRH, the NBC affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she figured that if she took $300 of her own money and spent it on recognition efforts, it probably would not touch that many people. Instead, she split that money among fifteen people and asked them to spend it over the course of a month to encourage the hearts of others.

• Although salary increases and bonuses are certainly valued, individual needs for appreciation and rewards extend beyond cash. Spontaneous, unexpected rewards are often more meaningful than predictable, formal ones. Rewards are the most effective when they’re highly specific and given soon after the appropriate behavior.

• “The form of recognition that has the most positive influence, and that should be used most often, is on-the-spot recognition,” says Sonia Clark, chief human resource officer with Oportun. “When something really terrific happens, I comment on it right away and to anyone who might be close enough to hear.”

• Researchers have found that members of top-performing teams provide at least three, and as many as six, times the number of positive comments for every negative one they make.

• Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, finds that people who practice gratitude, compared to those who do not, are healthier, more optimistic, more positive, and better able to cope with stress. They are also more alert, more energized, more resilient, more willing to offer support to others, more generous, and more likely to make progress toward important goals.

• To Encourage the Heart, you must recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence. This means you must: Maintain high expectations about what individuals and teams can accomplish. Communicate your positive expectations clearly and regularly. Create an environment that makes it comfortable to receive and give feedback. Find out the types of encouragement that make the most difference. Don’t assume you know. Ask. Take the time to inquire and observe. Be creative when it comes to recognition. Be spontaneous. Have fun. Make saying “thank you” a natural part of your everyday behavior.

Chapter 12: Celebrate the Values and Victories

• Exemplary leaders make a commitment to Celebrate the Values and Victories by mastering these essentials: ‘Create a spirit of community’ and ‘Be personally involved’.

• For example, Kurt Richarz, executive vice president of sales at Seagate Technology, uses regular monthly conference calls with the entire sales organization to shine the spotlight on people who have been given “Standing Ovations.” This program is very simple: peers nominate colleagues by filling out a brief form highlighting their contributions or an achievement.

• Celebrations are the punctuation marks that make sense of the passage of time; without them, there are no beginnings and endings. Life becomes an endless series of Wednesdays.

• When the spotlight shines on certain people, and others tell stories about what they did, they become role models. They visibly represent how the organization would like everyone to behave, and concretely demonstrate that it is possible to do so.

• A month after receiving the Red Stapler award the recipient will then pay it forward and recognize someone else.

• Private rewards may work fine to motivate individuals, but they have little impact on the team. Researchers have shown that people tend to pick up on the mood and attitudes of those around them, called “emotional contagion,” and often in ways they don’t consciously realize. Circuits in the brain are activated when people see others act in a certain way; it’s as if they had taken action themselves. Watching someone else can impact the brain in ways that mirror experiencing it directly.

• Employees with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to engage fully in their work than those reporting no such friendships.

• Studies involving more than three million people around the world show that social isolation is worse for people’s health than obesity, smoking, or alcoholism.

• By making achievements public, leaders build a culture in which people know that their actions and decisions are not being taken for granted.

• Every Personal-Best Leadership Experience was a combination of hard work and fun. Most people agreed that without the enjoyment and the pleasure they experienced interacting with others on the team, they wouldn’t have been able to sustain the level of intensity and hard work required to do their personal best.

• Jo would do small things such as taking the team out for a surprise lunch or letting team members leave early if she knew they had something special happening in the evening. She let team members with children come in late or leave early on special occasions like birthdays. She scattered small and silly gifts with hidden jokes or meaning on everyone’s desks. Being personally involved at this level resulted in Jo’s team, according to Beth, “being completely dedicated to her. She was an inspiration, and that meant they would work until all hours to ensure the project was completed.”

• People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care for them.

• He admitted that “it was a really painful conversation,” but he believed that the best thing he could do was to “be real” with them.

• People who perceive their colleagues as caring, research shows, are most likely to be sought out for advice and be seen as a leader, and this, in turn, results in higher performance levels.

• Stories that put a human face on values. First-person examples are always more powerful and striking than third-party examples. It’s that critical difference between “I saw it for myself” and “Someone told me about it.”

• That way, you can give “up close and personal” accounts of what it means to put into practice shared values and aspirations. In the process, you create organizational role models to whom everyone can relate. You put the behavior in a real context.

• By telling stories, you accomplish more effectively the objectives of teaching, mobilizing, and motivating than you can through bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation or tweets on a mobile device. Listening to and understanding the stories leaders tell does more to inform people about the values and culture of an organization than do the company policies or the employee manual. Well-told stories are much more effective in reaching people’s emotions and pulling them along. They make the message stick. They simulate the experience of actually being there and give people a compelling way of learning what is most important about the experience.

• You probably already have calendar birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. You also should do it for the significant milestones in the life of your team and organization. Giving them a date, time, and place announces to everyone that these things matter. It also creates a sense of anticipation. Scheduling celebrations doesn’t rule out spontaneous events; it just means that certain occasions are of such significance that everyone needs to pay particular attention to them.

• Perhaps you want to honor the group or team of people who created the year’s breakthrough innovations, praise those who gave extraordinary customer service, or thank the families of your constituents for their support. Whatever you wish to celebrate, you need to formalize it, announce it, and tell people how they become eligible to participate.

• They have an annual New Year’s Eve party every June 30th, the end of Zeno’s fiscal year. On that day, all the offices connect by teleconference. They pop champagne and raise a virtual toast. CEO Barby Siegel communicates with everyone via teleconference, reflecting on what they’ve accomplished, and talks about what’s ahead in the future. Then all of the offices continue with their own celebrations.

• To Encourage the Heart, you must celebrate the values and victories by creating a spirit of community. This means you must: Find, and also create, occasions to bring people together to publicly celebrate accomplishments. Take actions that demonstrate that you “have people’s backs” and ensure they feel “part of the whole.” Make fun a portion of your work environment—laugh and enjoy yourself, along with others. Get personally involved in as many recognitions and celebrations as possible. Show you care by being visible in the tough times. Never pass up an opportunity to relate publicly true stories about how people in your organization went above and beyond the call of duty. Calendar celebrations and look, as well, for spontaneous opportunities to link shared values with victories.

Chapter 13: Leadership Is Everyone’s Business

• We ask them to identify the person they’d select as their most important leadership role model, and select from a list of eight possible categories from which these leaders might come.

• Regardless of age, when thinking back over their lives and selecting their most important leadership role models, people are more likely to choose a family member than anyone else. In second place, for respondents thirty years of age and under, is a teacher or coach. For the over-thirty crowd, business leader is number two; and upon probing further, people tell us that “business leader” really means an individual who was an immediate supervisor who essentially served as a teacher and coach in the workplace.

• People are watching you, regardless of whether you know it or not. You are having an impact on them, regardless of whether you intend to or not.

• The most lasting test of your leadership effectiveness is the extent to which you bring forth and develop the leadership abilities in others, not just in yourself.

• When people think about their experience with their worst leaders, the percentage of talent utilized typically ranges between 2 percent and 40 percent, with an average of 31 percent. In other words, people report that they expended less than a third of their available talents in their experiences with their worst leaders. Many continued to work hard, but few put all that they were capable of delivering into their work. Exit interviews reveal a similar phenomenon: people aren’t quitting their companies as much as they are quitting the relationship with their manager. Surveys show that one in two people at some point in their careers have left their job to get away from their managers.

• The performance difference between people’s worst and best leaders is huge. The best leaders bring out more than three times the amount of talent, energy, and motivation from their people compared with their counterparts at the other end of the spectrum.

• It’s a myth that leadership can’t be learned—that you either have it or you don’t.

• Leadership is an observable pattern of practices and behaviors, and a definable set of skills and abilities. And any skill can be learned, strengthened, honed, and enhanced, given the motivation and desire, along with practice, feedback, role models, and coaching.

• Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.

• What truly differentiates the expert performers from the good performers is devotion to deliberate practice. Practicing deliberately doesn’t mean you engage in just any activity. Instead, you engage in experiences designed specifically to improve performance. Designed is the key idea, meaning there is a methodology, and there is a very specific goal. Second, practice is not a one-time event. Engaging in a designed learning experience just once or twice doesn’t cut it. It has to be done over and over, and over again, until it’s automatic, and that takes hours of repetition.

• Furthermore, and let’s be realistic, deliberate practice isn’t much fun. What keeps the top performers going during the often-grueling practice sessions is not the enjoyment that they are having in that activity, but the knowledge that they are improving and getting closer to their dream of superior performance when it counts.

• There’s no get-rich-quick, instant weight-loss program for leadership. There’s still another catch. Any leadership practice can become destructive. Virtues can become vices. There’s a point at which each of The Five Practices, taken to extremes, can lead you astray.

• We know that finding your voice and setting an example are essential to credibility and accomplishment. But an obsession with being seen as a role model can lead to being too focused on your own values and your way of doing things. It can cause you to discount others’ views and be closed to feedback. It can push you into isolation for fear of losing privacy or being “found out.” It can also cause you to be more concerned with style than substance.

• Being forward-looking and communicating a clear and common vision of the future are what set leaders apart from other credible people. Yet, a singular focus on one vision of the future can blind you to other possibilities as well as to the realities of the present. It can cause you to miss the exciting possibilities that are just out of your sight or make you hang on just a little too long to an old, tired, and out-of-date technology. Exploiting your powers of inspiration can cause others to surrender their will. Your own energy, enthusiasm, and charm may be so magnetic that others stop thinking for themselves and mindlessly agree with your perspective.

• Challenging the process is essential to promoting innovation and progressive change. Seizing initiative and taking risks are necessary for learning and continuous improvement. However, take this to extremes and you can create needless turmoil, confusion, and paranoia. Routines are important, and if you seldom pause long enough to give people an opportunity to gain confidence and competence, they’ll lose their motivation to try new things. Change simply for change’s sake can be just as demoralizing as complacency.

• Collaboration and teamwork are essential to getting extraordinary things done in today’s hyperactive world. Innovation depends on high degrees of trust, and people must feel a sense of control in their own lives if they are to accomplish great things. However, an over-reliance on collaboration and trust may reflect an avoidance of addressing critical issues or providing negative feedback. It may be a way of not taking charge when the situation requires. Delegating power and responsibility can become a way of dumping too much on others when they’re not fully prepared to handle it and evading your responsibility.

• We know that people perform at higher levels when they’re encouraged. Personal recognition and group celebration create the spirit and momentum that can carry a group forward, even during the toughest of challenges. At the same time, constantly worrying about who should be recognized and when there should be celebrations can turn us into gregarious minstrels. You can lose sight of the mission and any sense of urgency because you’re having so much fun. You can become so consumed by all the perks and pleasures that you forget the purpose of it all.

• Humility is the antidote for hubris. You can avoid excessive pride only when you recognize that you’re human and need the help of others. Exemplary leaders know that they “can’t do it alone,” and they act accordingly.

• As you continue your journey toward exemplary leadership, you must wrestle with some difficult questions: What were the peak moments in my life, and what motivated me to achieve them? What are the values that should guide my decisions and actions? What do I need to do to improve my abilities to move this team or organization forward? Where do I think the organization should be headed over the next ten years? What gives me the courage to continue in the face of uncertainty and adversity? How solid are my relationships with my constituents? How trustworthy am I? What can I do to keep hope alive—in others and myself?

• You need to make leading a daily habit. You need to do something every day to learn more about leading, and you need to put those lessons into practice every day.

• We asked John how he’d go about developing leaders, whether in universities, in the military, in government, in the nonprofit sector, or in private business. He replied: When anyone asks me that question, I tell them I have the secret to success in life. The secret to success is to stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to ignite other people, to see inside other people, to have a greater desire to get things done than other people. A person who is not in love doesn’t really feel the kind of excitement that helps them to get ahead and to lead others and to achieve. I don’t know any other fire, any other thing in life that is more exhilarating and is more positive a feeling than love is.

• “Staying in love” isn’t the answer we expected to get—at least not when we began our study of leadership. But after studying leadership for over thirty years, through thousands of interviews and case analyses, we are constantly reminded about how many leaders use the word love freely when talking about their own motivations to lead.

• Of all the things that sustain a leader over time, love is the most lasting. It’s hard to imagine leaders getting up day after day, putting in the long hours and hard work it takes to make extraordinary things happen, without having their hearts in it. The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations provide, and with those who honor the organization by using its products and services.