Introduction
This is an evidence-based book. Analyzing thousands of case studies and millions of survey responses produced The Five Practices framework, and the hundreds of real people doing real things documented throughout these pages make the model practical rather than theoretical. Each chapter brings fresh data on the impact that the behavior of leaders has on engagement and performance.
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. 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 expecting you to do your best. The world needs 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,” said one leader reflecting on how he approaches every new team, “it’s about getting to know each other personally.” It’s about knowing who these people are — knowing their values, what they love to do, what they care about, and what they stand for. The introduction he offers isn’t a leader’s introduction or a strategist’s. It’s the introduction of a real human trying to have a greater experience in life and trying to make the world a better place.
That orientation shapes everything downstream. Consider Brian, whose leadership team holds weekly standup meetings to highlight what everyone is working on, examine problems, celebrate successes, work through lessons learned, and even acknowledge failures. Those in different geographic locations join by video. During these meetings, the team looks deliberately for what they call “praise moments” — opportunities to draw attention to exemplary behaviors in front of everyone. When people see the successes and hear the positive feedback, it creates momentum. The more good you do as a leader, the more successful you can become, and the more good you can keep doing.
Leaders who operate at their best find as many excuses as possible to celebrate successes. They believe, as the evidence bears out, that when you recognize what is working well and creating success, people are more likely to repeat the behavior that helped create that success in the first place. People want their leaders to be honest, inspiring, competent, forward-looking, caring, ambitious, and supportive. When all those qualities meet, and when recognition is woven into the daily fabric of a team’s life, the result is not just better morale but better performance.
When making extraordinary things happen in organizations, leaders engage in what the research identifies as The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and 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 — enlisting 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, and they guard against the creeping joylessness that can hollow out a team. “Make sure that you and the team are having fun,” as one leader put it. “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 this holds independent of who the direct reports are: their age, gender, ethnicity, education, position, tenure, discipline, industry, or nationality. The behavior of the leader is what makes the difference in explaining why people work hard, why they feel committed, why they carry pride in what they do.
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 — a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. Bobby understood this from his first day. Rather than arriving with a plan already written, he spent his first month sitting with individual team members to understand their desires, needs, and plans. He tried to learn what each person aspired to and enjoyed doing before he ever asked anything of them.
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 initiative, acted as an advisor on projects, and let ownership remain with the individual. This approach earned him something no title can provide.
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. 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. In the end, leaders don’t decide who leads — followers do.
Research on what constituents expect of leaders began with open-ended surveys of thousands of business and government executives. Hundreds of different values, traits, and characteristics emerged. Subsequent content analysis and empirical work reduced these to a checklist of twenty attributes — the Characteristics of Admired Leaders. From that list, respondents select the seven qualities they “most look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly follow.” Across every culture, ethnicity, organizational function, gender, level of education, and age group, four characteristics consistently rise to the top: honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking.
In every survey conducted, honesty is selected more often than any other leadership characteristic. Over 80 percent of constituents want their leaders to be honest above all else, and that figure is a message every leader must take to heart. If people anywhere are to willingly follow someone — whether into battle or the boardroom, on the front line or 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. When people follow someone they believe to be dishonest, they come to realize that they have 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 their industry, market, or professional environment. Inspiring leadership means that 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 innovate or take chances; 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. And being forward-looking means having a point of view about the future — and being able to connect that point of view to the hopes and dreams of constituents. People want their leader to communicate what the organization will look like, feel like, and be like in six quarters or six years, described in rich enough detail that they’ll know when they’ve arrived and can choose the proper route for getting there.
These four prerequisites — honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking — have stood the test of time and geography. They are what makes credibility 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 leader’s word can be trusted, that they are personally passionate and enthusiastic about their work, and that they have the knowledge and skill to lead. This is what is captured in what might be called the First Law of Leadership: if you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message.
When people perceive their immediate manager to have high credibility, they are significantly more likely to feel proud to tell others they are part of the organization, to feel a strong sense of team spirit, to see their own personal values as consistent with those of the organization, to feel attached and committed to the organization, and to have a sense of ownership of the organization. When people perceive their manager to have low credibility, they are significantly more likely to produce only if carefully watched, to be motivated primarily by money, to say good things about the organization publicly but criticize it privately, to consider looking for another job if problems arise, and to feel unsupported and unappreciated.
People know credibility when they see it. They describe it with phrases like: “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.” That last phrase is not just a description — it is the Second Law of Leadership: Do What You Say You Will Do. 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.
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 answer that question? If you aren’t, you should be. If you are, you need to reaffirm it on a daily basis. In 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. Without that inner clarity, the pressures of the day will make choices for you.
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 to which employees believe they can apply those values to their everyday work. That gap is not a communication problem — it is a leadership problem, and the solution begins with leaders who have first done the harder work of finding their own voice.
Leaders build on agreement. One approach that captures this well: before a team even begins a project assignment, the manager had them complete a questionnaire covering topics such as where they grew up, favorite food, hobbies, and the role they usually played on teams, what they respected in managers and teammates, and what kind of work they liked and didn’t like. Getting people talking about themselves — even in small ways — is the beginning of building a shared foundation.
Conversations about values 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 help them see how the work they do connects with who they are. You help them make a much deeper connection to work than can ever be realized through discussions of tasks and rules alone. 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 people 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.
Clarifying values means identifying the values you use to guide choices and decisions, finding your own authentic way of talking about what is important to you, helping others articulate why they do what they do and what they care about, providing opportunities for people to talk about their values with others on the team, building consensus around shared principles and standards, and then making sure people are adhering to what was agreed.
Chapter 4 — Set the Example
No one will believe you’re serious until they see you doing what you’re asking of others. 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 is a consistent and dramatic relationship between the extent to which people trust their organization’s management and the frequency with which they find their leaders following through on promises and commitments. Setting the example is not a performance — it is the continuous alignment of action and value, made visible in the smallest decisions of every day.
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 and words 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 leaders use affects people’s self-images and their responses to what’s going on around them. Words help build the frame around people’s views of the world, so it’s essential to be mindful of your choices. Ask yourself what you’re really communicating with the questions you raise. If you ask, “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 you ask instead, “What have you done today to reduce the costs of doing business?” you are sending a very different message. Questions direct attention to the values that deserve it. They develop people by helping them escape the trap of their mental models and broaden their perspectives. Asking relevant questions also forces you to listen attentively to what your constituents are saying — and if you are genuinely interested in what other people think, 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. Even what seems like a mild, gentle, or relatively harmless suggestion can leave a person feeling angry, anxious, or profoundly threatened. One major reason that leaders aren’t proactive in asking for feedback is their fear of feeling exposed. But being aware of your weaknesses and shortcomings, 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 that information is predictive of future success. A side benefit of making it easy for people to give you feedback is that you increase the likelihood that they will accept honest feedback from you. Keep in mind, though, that if you don’t do anything with the feedback you receive, people will likely stop giving it — they’ll believe that you’re arrogant enough to think you’re smarter than everyone else, or that you simply don’t care. Either outcome seriously undermines your credibility and effectiveness as a leader.
Critical incidents are those events in a leader’s life that offer the chance to improvise while still staying true to the script. Although they can’t be explicitly planned, 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. 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 than they recall corporate policy statements, data about performance, or even a story combined with data. Too many values remain just words. If you were to look at the annual reports of ten major companies, you’d find that almost all the values are the same — but when you go inside those companies, the words often don’t translate into practices. Key performance measures, reward systems, recruitment, selection, onboarding, training, and promotion systems are all methods available for teaching people how to enact values and align decisions with them.
Setting the example means keeping your commitments and following through on your promises, making sure your calendar and meetings and emails reflect what you say is important, asking purposeful questions that keep people focused on essential priorities, broadcasting examples of exemplary behavior through vivid and memorable stories, publicly asking for feedback from others about how your actions affect them, and making changes based on what you hear — because if you don’t, people will stop bothering to provide it.
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. 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. Every leader needs a theme, an orienting principle around which to organize an entire movement. The leaders whose direct reports give them the highest scores on engagement are precisely those who regularly paint the “big picture” of what the team aspires to accomplish, and who frequently describe a compelling image of what the future could look like.
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 that the central recurring theme in your life has been there for a long time. It also gives you a greater appreciation for how long it can take to fulfill aspirations. Attending to the present means creating white space on your calendar, turning off your devices, stopping the motion, and starting to notice more of what’s going on around you right now. As one leader put it: “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 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 — those quiet clues about where things are going and what lies just around the corner.
You have to spend more of today thinking about tomorrow if your future is going to be an improvement over the present. And you have to find something 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 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 happen when leaders pay attention to what people want and need — when they involve employees in identifying issues, hear their frustrations and their aspirations, and find ways to respond with initiatives that address those concerns. Research finds that people stay with an organization because they like the work they are doing and find it challenging, meaningful, and purposeful. What they desire is 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; and significance — feeling trusted and validated. Leaders make others feel important and needed. You won’t find the keys to devoted effort by focusing simply on pay, benefits, or even plush working conditions.
Envisioning the future means determining what drives you and where your passions lie, reflecting on your experiences and the major themes of your life, stopping to look and listen to what is happening right now, spending more time focused on the future, listening deeply to what is important to others, and involving others in crafting a shared vision rather than issuing it from the top down.
Chapter 6 — Enlist Others
Whether you’re trying to mobilize thousands of people in the community or one person in the workplace, you must 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.
The lessons from great communicators are consistent. When people analyze what made Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech so moving — decades after it was delivered — they point to the same patterns: he appealed to common interests and traditional values of family and faith; he used images and word pictures that the audience could relate to; he made it personal, mentioning his own children and struggles; he included everybody — different parts of the country, all ages, both sexes, major religions; he used repetition, saying “I have a dream” and “Let freedom ring” many times; he talked about the same ideas in different ways; he was positive and hopeful while not promising it would be easy; and he shifted his focus from “I” to “we.” He spoke with genuine emotion and passion for something he truly felt. The lesson for every leader is that you have to show people it’s not about you, or even the organization, but about them and their needs.
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. To enlist others, you need to help them see and feel how their interests and aspirations align with the vision. Use metaphors and analogies. Give examples, tell stories, and relate anecdotes. Draw word pictures, offer quotations, and recite slogans. Metaphors are everywhere — art metaphors, game and sports metaphors, war metaphors, machine metaphors, religious and spiritual metaphors. They influence both what and how people think, what they imagine and invent. 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. Consider what happens when someone calls out the first thing that comes to mind at the words “Paris, France.” The replies that pop out — the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Seine, 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 things associated with our senses.
Your enthusiasm and expressiveness are among your strongest allies in generating commitment in others. Individuals who are perceived as charismatic are simply more animated than those 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 increase the likelihood that people will remember what you say. 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. Individuals who enjoy more positivity are also better able to cope with adversity and are more resilient during times of high stress.
The prerequisite to enlisting others in a shared vision is genuineness. Talk with your constituents and find out about their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Show them how enlisting in a common vision serves their long-term interests. Be positive, upbeat, and energetic when talking about the future. Acknowledge the emotions of others and validate them as important. Let your passion show in a manner genuinely expressive of who you are.
Chapter 7 — Search for Opportunities
When people are asked to describe their personal-best leadership experiences, they don’t choose to talk about maintaining the status quo. They choose to discuss times of challenge and change. 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 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.
Seizing the initiative often starts with the simplest of questions. Brainstorm “what would we change if anything was possible.” New jobs and new assignments are ideal opportunities for asking probing questions and challenging the way things are done — 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 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.
Creating forums for continuous improvement is another way to seize the initiative. One leader created a new forum that met after every event to brainstorm on how the team could do things better for the next one. She invited the team to share opinions and suggestions, encouraged them to share what they might have read about or experienced at other events, and created a digital diary for pitching new ideas, getting into the details of the ones they decided to try, and generating a log of lessons learned.
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 developing that competency matters.
The strongest motivation to deal with challenge and the uncertainties of life and work comes from inside of people, 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.” Why do people push their own limits to get extraordinary things done? 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 their security to change the social condition? Extrinsic rewards certainly can’t explain these actions. Leaders tap into people’s hearts and minds, not merely their hands and wallets.
According to global studies of CEOs, the most significant sources of innovative ideas are discovered outside the organization — from customers, lead users, suppliers, business partners, and sometimes the R&D labs of other organizations. 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 creatively, you need to bombard your brain with stuff it has never encountered. Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns explains that 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. McKinsey researchers have put it plainly: “Seeing and experiencing something firsthand can shake people up in ways that abstract discussions around conference room tables can’t.”
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 is by taking on multiple perspectives: take the perspective of someone who frustrates or irritates you and consider what that person might have to teach you; listen to learn rather than to change someone else’s perspective; and seek out the opinions of people beyond your comfort zone, folks you don’t typically talk with. As one leader, Clay, learned firsthand: “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, brainstorming sessions, and visits to competitors. Don’t let routines become ruts.
Chapter 8 — Experiment and Take Risks
Making extraordinary things happen requires generating small wins and learning from experience. A small win is “a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.” It identifies a place to begin. Small wins make a project seem doable — 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?”
Three key factors build psychological hardiness: commitment, control, and challenge. To turn adversity into advantage, you need first to commit yourself to what’s happening — to become involved, engaged, and curious, rather than sitting back and waiting for something to happen. You also need to take control of your life by making 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. And 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, concentrate instead on progress — not on the gap between aspirations and reality, but on how much you have advanced.
One ceramics teacher’s experiment captures the counterintuitive truth about improvement. At the beginning of the semester, he divided his students into two groups. He told the first group they could earn better grades by producing more pots — thirty for a B, forty for an A — regardless of quality. He told the second group that their grades depended solely on the quality of the pots they produced. Students in the first group got right to it, producing as many pots as possible, while the second group was 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. The practice of making lots of pots naturally resulted in better quality; these students became more familiar with the intricacies of the kiln and how various firing positions affected their products. Making more things, not agonizing over each one, was the path to excellence.
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. Think of failures as a gift. Unless you view them that way, you won’t learn from failure, and 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 mindset — the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts — as opposed 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 already are.
Curiosity has, quite literally, been the key to many leaders’ success and happiness. Asking questions is how curiosity finds its expression — it sparks interesting thoughts and builds collaborative relationships. And don’t waste the tough times. As one leader put it: “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 — the capacity to recover quickly from setbacks and continue to pursue a vision of the future — is what Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, calls grit. She and her research colleagues define grit 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.” When someone fails, consider the situational circumstances that contributed and convey the belief that this particular situation is likely to be temporary, not permanent. Breed a growth mindset when reaching milestones by attributing success to the hard work and effort of the individuals in the group, and bolster resilience 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.
Chapter 9 — Foster Collaboration
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 others’ lack of trust in them. People perceived as trusting, by contrast, are sought out more as friends, more frequently listened to, and subsequently more influential. As one chief people officer put it, “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 — and people need to see it in your actions: 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. A study involving nearly 3,500 participants in a coaching skills development program found that the best listeners 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” — you feel you can bounce ideas off of them.
Take the time to schedule lunches with people to get to know who they are as individuals, not just as contributors to a project. These initial actions build a foundational relationship that makes people more willing to listen to your thoughts and seek your advice. Aspire to be remembered for how you served your 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, frustrations, and dreams, they have to believe that you’ll be caring and constructive in your responses — and that you care about their best interests. The 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. Research has 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.
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. Wharton professor Adam Grant argues in Give and Take 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 turns out to be 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, put it: “Until you see someone’s face, they are not a real person to you.” 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. Structure projects so that there is a common goal that requires cooperation, making sure that people understand how they are interdependent with one another.
Chapter 10 — Strengthen Others
Strengthening others means enhancing self-determination and developing competence and confidence. The contrast between what makes people feel powerless and what makes them feel powerful is instructive. People feel powerless when no one is interested in their opinion, when they have no input into decisions that affect their work, when a manager argues with them in front of colleagues, when their decisions aren’t supported after a manager has said they would be, when someone else takes credit for their work, when essential information is withheld, or when they are given responsibility without the authority to hold others accountable. They feel powerful when all important information and data are shared with them, when they can exercise discretion about how to handle a situation, when they make decisions about key aspects of a project, when the organization invests resources in helping them learn, when management publicly expresses great confidence in their ability, and when a manager takes the time to let them know how they are doing and where they could improve.
Freedom is the ability to make choices. People who perceive they don’t have any choices feel trapped, and like rats in a maze 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 their capabilities more fully. Give people choices, let them make decisions on their own, and then it becomes quite difficult to blame “the company” when things don’t go their way. 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 about 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. 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. Fostering individual accountability can take concrete forms: making certain that everyone, no matter the task, has a customer; substantially increasing signature authority at all levels; removing or reducing unnecessary approval steps; broadly defining jobs as projects rather than tasks; and providing greater freedom of access, vertically and horizontally, inside and outside the organization.
When high challenges are matched with high skills, the deep involvement that sets flow apart from ordinary life is likely to occur. Have people solve problems so they can use their skills and develop new ideas on how to make operations better. Once they are confident and have solved a problem, have them teach the entire team how to solve that problem. This training exercise does much more for the team than most leaders imagine — while walking through the problems with the team, other team members become very engaged, and you can 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 constant trade-offs being made 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. Provide sufficient information so that people feel they have the perspective of owners in making decisions — this fosters greater competence and enhances 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, because they believe in their skills and decision-making abilities. The role of a coach is to move from pushing — operating from the coach’s agenda, which operates from a fixed mindset — to pulling, which generates a growth mindset by working from the player’s own agenda. Peter Drucker captured the shift: “The leader of the future asks; the leader of the past tells.” Asking gives others the room to think and to frame issues from their perspective. Asking indicates an underlying trust in people’s abilities, shifts accountability, and creates almost immediate buy-in for the solution — after all, it becomes their idea. Asking also puts you in a coaching position, which frees you up to think more freely and strategically. Ask questions; stop giving answers.
Chapter 11 — Recognize Contributions
Research on self-fulfilling prophecies provides ample evidence that people act in ways 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 that to them — not just in your words but also through tone of voice, posture, gestures, and facial expressions. Recognizing contributions begins not with a program but with a genuine belief in the people you are leading.
Ravi Gandhi, chief financial officer at United Auto Credit Corporation, uses a small system to stay mindful. “I use three pennies to help me practice encouragement,” he explained. When he gets into work, he sets three pennies on the left side of his computer, and during the day he looks for opportunities to recognize, thank, and encourage good work that people are doing around him. After encouraging someone, he moves a penny from the left side to the right. When not at his desk, he puts the pennies in his left pocket and moves them to the right pocket as he encourages people. This small reminder, he explains, “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 still in his left pocket, he calls his kids and friends on the way home and offers them some encouragement.
When people know that others are coming around to look for problems, they’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. They give recognition context — something to strive for, something important to attain: coming in first, breaking a record, setting a new standard of excellence.
Only those who receive positive feedback improve 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, and no news has the same negative impact as bad news. Wharton professor Adam Grant suggests stopping what he calls “the feedback sandwich” — the traditional technique of putting praise on top and bottom with criticism in between. The data shows the feedback sandwich doesn’t taste as good as it looks. Instead, explain why you are giving the feedback, because people are more open to criticism when they believe it’s intended to help them and you show that you care personally. Level the playing field by sharing how feedback has been helpful in your own career. Ask if the person wants feedback, because once they take ownership of that decision, they’re less defensive about whatever you have to offer.
On the Leadership Practices Inventory — a 360-degree leadership assessment tool — the behavior that leaders consistently report engaging in least frequently is asking for feedback on how their own actions affect other people’s performance. In other words, the behavior that most enables leaders to know how they’re doing is the behavior they are most uncomfortable with. A one-size-fits-all approach to recognition feels insincere, forced, and thoughtless. To encourage people to do their best, recognition must be personal, precise, and visible. Even a great reward, if given incorrectly, 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, one leader figured that if she took $300 of her own money and spent it on recognition efforts, it probably wouldn’t 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. As Sonia Clark, chief human resource officer with Oportun, explains: “The form of recognition that has the most positive influence, and that should be used most often, is on-the-spot recognition. 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. Maintain high expectations. Communicate your positive expectations clearly and regularly. 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
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.” The program is 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. Create “pay it forward” programs: a month after receiving an award, the recipient recognizes 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 — what psychologists call “emotional contagion” — 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 is a combination of hard work and fun. Most people agree 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, one leader whose approach stood out, 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, and 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 one member, “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. Sometimes the most personal involvement takes courage — having a difficult conversation, being real with people during hard times. People who perceive their colleagues as caring are most likely to be sought out for advice and be seen as a leader, and this, in turn, results in higher performance levels. Tell 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.” By telling stories, you accomplish the objectives of teaching, mobilizing, and motivating more effectively than you can through bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation or tweets on a mobile device. 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 birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries on your calendar. Do the same for 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. Whatever you wish to celebrate — honoring those who created the year’s breakthrough innovations, praising those who gave extraordinary customer service, thanking the families of your constituents for their support — formalize it, announce it, and tell people how they become eligible to participate. Zeno Media offers one model: an annual New Year’s Eve party every June 30th, the end of the fiscal year, with all offices connected by teleconference, champagne popped, and a virtual toast raised. CEO Barby Siegel reflects on what the team has accomplished and talks about what’s ahead. Then all the offices continue with their own celebrations. Calendar celebrations — and always look for the spontaneous opportunity to link shared values with victories.
Chapter 13 — Leadership Is Everyone’s Business
When people are asked to identify their most important leadership role model, regardless of age, they are more likely to choose a family member than anyone else. In second place, for those thirty years of age and under, is a teacher or coach. For the over-thirty crowd, it is a business leader — and upon probing further, people say that “business leader” really means an individual who was an immediate supervisor who essentially served as a teacher and coach in the workplace. The patterns are consistent: 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. 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 expert performers from good performers is devotion to deliberate practice. Practicing deliberately doesn’t mean you engage in just any activity — you engage in experiences designed specifically to improve performance, with a methodology and a very specific goal. And 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 again, until it’s automatic, and that takes hours of repetition. Let’s be realistic: deliberate practice isn’t much fun. What keeps top performers going during often-grueling practice sessions is not the enjoyment of the activity itself, but the knowledge that they are improving and getting closer to their dream of superior performance when it counts. There is no get-rich-quick, instant weight-loss program for leadership.
Any leadership practice can become destructive when taken to extremes. Virtues can become vices. An obsession with being seen as a role model can cause you to discount others’ views, close yourself to feedback, push you into isolation for fear of being “found out,” and leave you more concerned with style than substance. A singular focus on one vision of the future can blind you to other possibilities and to the realities of the present — and your energy, enthusiasm, and charm may be so magnetic that others stop thinking for themselves and mindlessly agree with your perspective. Challenging the process, taken to extremes, can create needless turmoil, confusion, and paranoia; routines matter, 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. An over-reliance on collaboration and trust may reflect an avoidance of addressing critical issues or providing negative feedback — delegating power and responsibility can become a way of dumping too much on others when they’re not fully prepared to handle it. And constantly worrying about who should be recognized and when there should be celebrations can turn you into a gregarious minstrel who has lost sight of the mission and any sense of urgency because you’re having so much fun. 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, 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. Do something every day to learn more about leading, and put those lessons into practice every day.
When asked how he’d go about developing leaders — whether in universities, in the military, in government, in the nonprofit sector, or in private business — John 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 most expect. But after studying leadership for over thirty years, through thousands of interviews and case analyses, this theme surfaces again and again. 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. 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.