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

By James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner

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Introduction

Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about relationships, trust, and the ability to mobilize others toward a shared vision of a better future.

The most significant contribution you can make as a leader 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.

What the world needs are leaders who can unite us and ignite us.

Chapter I: When Leaders Are at Their Best

What do leaders actually do when they’re operating at their highest level? Through thousands of case studies, clear patterns emerge—practices that anyone can learn and apply.

When Leaders Are at Their Best

At the very beginning of any leadership journey, it’s about getting to know each other personally. It’s about knowing who these people are that are working with you—knowing their values, what they love to do, what they care about, and what they stand for. Introduce yourself not as a leader or strategist, but as a real human trying to have a greater experience in life and trying to make the world a better place.

Make sure that those who do the giving are refueled with the energy they need to keep on giving. Hold regular meetings where you highlight what everyone is working on and look into problems, successes, lessons learned, and even failures. During these meetings, look for “praise moments” where you can draw attention to exemplary behaviors in front of everyone. When people see the successes and hear the positive feedback, it creates momentum.

Find as many excuses as possible to celebrate successes. It’s important that people feel recognized, rewarded, and valued for the difference they make. When you recognize what is working well and creating success, you 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. The more successful you are as a leader, the more good you can do.

The Five Practices Explained

Model the Way: To effectively Model the Way, you must first be clear about your own guiding principles. You must clarify your values by finding your voice. People follow the person first, then the plan.

Inspire a Shared Vision: You can’t command commitment; you have to inspire it. You have to enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations. Paint a picture of the future so compelling that others want to join you in creating it.

Challenge the Process: Challenge is the crucible for greatness. Every single personal-best leadership case involves a change from the status quo. Not one person achieves a personal best by keeping things the same. Regardless of the specifics, they all involve 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 your laboratory, and exemplary leaders use it to conduct as many experiments as possible.

Enable Others to Act: Leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. You cannot do it alone. The best leaders make others feel strong and capable.

Encourage the Heart: 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. Celebrate the values and victories, and people will have the heart to continue.

Chapter II: Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership

Before you can lead, people must believe in you. Credibility is the foundation upon which all leadership is built.

Leaders mobilize others to want to struggle for shared aspirations. This means that, fundamentally, leadership is a relationship. It is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow.

To build trust and credibility, spend time getting to know your team members individually. Sit with them to understand their desires, needs, and plans. For the first month in a new leadership role, spend most of your time learning and trying to understand what each person aspires to and enjoys doing.

You cannot gain the respect of your team without respecting them and allowing them the freedom to take ownership of their projects. In meetings, when questions are asked, even though you could provide the answer yourself, refer questions to your team members. Encourage them to take initiative. Act as an advisor on projects, and let ownership remain with the individual.

What People Want in a Leader

Research involving thousands of business and government executives reveals four characteristics that people consistently look for in leaders they would willingly follow:

1. Honest: Selected more often than any other characteristic. Over 80 percent of constituents want their leaders to be honest above all else. If people anywhere are to willingly follow someone—whether into battle or the boardroom—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.
2. Competent: This refers to your track record and ability to get things done. People demand a base level of understanding of and relevant experience in the fundamentals of your industry, market, or professional environment.
3. Inspiring: People expect their leaders to be excited, energetic, and positive about the future. People are most likely to believe what you are saying when they sense that you truly believe it.
4. Forward-looking: Leaders must 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. People want their leader to communicate what the organization will look like, feel like, and be like when they arrive at their destination. They want it described in rich detail so they’ll know when they’ve arrived and can select the proper route for getting there.

These four prerequisites have stood the test of time and geography—they rank consistently at the top across different countries, cultures, ethnicities, organizational functions, genders, levels of education, and age groups.

The Impact of Credibility

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, 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

How do people know credibility when they see it? They use phrases like: “They practice what they preach.” “They walk the talk.” “Their actions are consistent with their words.” “They follow through on their promises.” “They do what they say they will do.”

Always be diligent in guarding your credibility. Your capacity to take strong stands, to challenge the status quo, and to point in new directions depends upon being highly credible.

Practice I: Model the Way

Leadership is first about who you are, then about what you do. Before you can lead others, you must be clear about your own values and demonstrate them consistently through your actions.

Chapter III: Clarify Values

What would you say if someone asked 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 you to focus and make choices among a plethora of competing theories, demands, and interests.

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. Don’t let your stated values become empty words—bridge that gap through daily action.

Finding Common Ground

Leaders build on agreement. Before beginning any project, take time to understand who your team members are. Have them complete questionnaires covering topics such as where they grew up, favorite food, hobbies—and also questions that dig deeper, asking about the type of work they like and don’t like, the role they usually play on teams, and what they respect in managers and teammates.

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 their work 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.

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.

Chapter IV: Set the Example

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.

Signal-Sending Actions

The most significant ways you can demonstrate that you live your values are:

• How you spend your time and what you pay attention to: This 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 you use: The words and phrases you choose affect people’s self-images and responses to what’s going on around them. They help build the frame around people’s views of the world, so be mindful of your word choices.
• The questions you ask: If you ask, “What have you done today to partner with a colleague on getting the work done?” you signal the importance of collaboration. If you ask, “What have you done today to reduce costs?” you send a very different message. Questions direct attention to the values that deserve attention and how much energy should be devoted to them.
• How you handle critical incidents: Critical incidents are events that offer the chance to improvise while still staying true to your values. The way you handle these incidents—how you link actions and decisions to shared values—speaks volumes about what’s important.
• Your openness to feedback: If you are genuinely interested in what other people think, ask their opinion, especially before giving your own.

Asking Better Questions

Questions develop people. They help people escape the trap of their mental models by broadening their perspectives and taking responsibility for their viewpoints. Asking relevant questions also forces you to listen attentively to what your constituents are saying.

Seeking and Using Feedback

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 or gentle suggestion can leave a person feeling angry, anxious, or threatened. One major reason that leaders aren’t proactive in asking for feedback is their fear of feeling exposed.

However, 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 this 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 people will accept honest feedback from you.

Teaching Through Stories

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

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 someone who broke the rules and got fired, or someone who followed the rules and got a raise. Stories are more effective than rulebooks.

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 data combined with a story.

Values are important, but too many values are just words. If you looked at the annual reports of ten major companies, almost all the values would be the same. But when you go inside those companies, you often see that the words don’t translate into practices. Close that gap by making values visible through action and story.

Practice II: Inspire a Shared Vision

Leaders see possibilities that others don’t. But vision without buy-in is just a dream. Your job is to paint a picture of the future so compelling that others want to help create it.

Chapter V: 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 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. 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 visions that are exclusive to only a few. You have to make sure that what you can see is also something that others can see.

Every leader needs a theme, an orienting principle around which to 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?

Finding Your Vision

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

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

Attend to the present: Set aside time each day to stop doing “stuff.” Create 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. 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 gets in the way of doing their best? What do they think should be changed? Listen also to the weak signals, to what’s not being said. What does all this tell you about where things are going?

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

Find your passion: 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, or a cherished dream, you can’t ignite the spark necessary to energize aspirations and actions.

Connecting to Others’ Aspirations

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 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.

Leaders make others feel important and needed. You won’t find the keys to devoted effort from focusing simply on pay, benefits, or even plush working conditions.

Chapter VI: Enlist Others

Whether you’re trying to mobilize thousands of people in a community or one person in the workplace, to enlist others you must appeal to common ideals and animate the vision.

To make extraordinary things happen, 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.

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.

Lessons from Great Communicators

When people analyze what makes inspiring communication effective, they observe these patterns:

• Appeal to common interests and traditional values
• Use images and word pictures that the audience can relate to
• Make references that are credible and hard to argue against
• Make it personal—mention your own experiences and struggles
• Include everybody—different backgrounds, all ages, both genders
• Use repetition of key phrases and ideas
• Express the same ideas in different ways
• Be positive and hopeful
• Be honest that it won’t be easy
• Shift focus from “I” to “we”
• Speak with genuine emotion and passion

You have to show people that it’s not about you, or even the organization, but about them and their needs. To enlist others, you need to help them see and feel how their interests and aspirations align with the vision.

The Power of Imagery

Visions with image-based words are more powerful than abstract statements. When leaders include vivid images in their communications, they’re transporting people to the future by telling snippets of a compelling story—a story that captures events that have yet to unfold.

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, machine metaphors, spiritual metaphors. They influence 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.

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 this: when asked about Paris, France, people call out the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Seine, delicious food, wine, and romance—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—sights, sounds, tastes, smells, tactile sensations, and feelings.

Energy and Enthusiasm

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

Individuals who are perceived as charismatic are simply more animated than others. 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. Thinking isn’t nearly enough to get things moving.

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

Practice III: Challenge the Process

Every personal best involves change. Leaders don’t wait for opportunities—they seek them out, question the status quo, and constantly look for ways to improve.

Chapter VII: 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. The study of leadership is the study of how people guide others through adversity, uncertainty, and significant challenges.

There’s 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 the organization for innovative ways to improve,” the more strongly they agree that their leader is effective.

Seize the Initiative

Begin by brainstorming “what would we change if anything was possible.” 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 originate 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.

Create forums that meet after every event to brainstorm on how you could do things better next time. Invite the team to give their opinions and suggestions, and encourage them to share what they might have read about or experienced elsewhere. Create a digital diary for the team to pitch new ideas, get into the details of the ones they decide to try out, and generate a log of what they’ve learned from those experiences.

Stretching People

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 people master the situation and build self-confidence, move the bar upward.

Connect people with role models from whom they can start learning. 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.

Intrinsic Motivation

The strongest motivation to deal with challenge and the uncertainties of life and work comes from inside people, not from 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 people 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 social conditions? Why do they risk their lives to save others? Extrinsic rewards can’t explain these actions. Leaders tap into people’s hearts and minds, not merely their hands and wallets.

Exercise Outsight

According to global studies 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 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. This kind of novelty is vital 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, 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.

Research finds 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.

Taking Different Perspectives

One way to open yourself up to new information is by taking multiple perspectives. Three approaches:

1. Take the perspective of someone who frustrates or irritates you, and consider what that person might have to teach you
2. Listen to what other people have to say—listen to learn rather than to change their perspective
3. Seek out the opinions of people beyond your comfort zone, folks you don’t typically talk with

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. 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, visits to competitors, and the like.

Chapter VIII: Experiment and Take Risks

Making extraordinary things happen requires that you generate small wins and learn from experience.

The Power of Small Wins

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?”

Building Psychological Hardiness

There are three key factors to building psychological hardiness: commitment, control, and challenge.

Commitment: To turn adversity into advantage, you need first to commit yourself to what’s happening. Become involved, engaged, and curious. You can’t sit back and wait for something to happen.

Control: Take control of your life. 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.

Challenge: View challenge as an opportunity to learn from both negative and positive experiences.

While there is a 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.

Quantity Leads to Quality

Consider this experiment: a ceramics teacher divided students into two groups. The first group could earn better grades by producing more pots (thirty for a B, forty for an A), regardless of quality. The second group’s 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 careful and deliberate in making the best pots.

The surprising finding: 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.

Learning from Experience

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 researchers call a growth mindset—the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Compare 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 will make you any better than you naturally are.

Curiosity has, quite literally, been the key to success for many leaders—and also the key to their happiness. Asking questions is how you express curiosity, which sparks interesting thoughts and builds collaborative relationships.

Don’t waste the tough times. When setbacks and disappointments come, you’re a lot more teachable. Through setbacks you learn more, and make more advances, than through the good times.

Grit and Resilience

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from setbacks and continue to pursue a vision of the future—what researchers call grit. Grit is defined simply as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” It entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. It involves setting goals, being obsessed with an idea or project, maintaining focus, sticking with things that take a long time to complete, and overcoming setbacks.

When someone fails, 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 continue. 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.

Practice IV: Enable Others to Act

You can’t do it alone. The best leaders make others feel strong and capable, fostering collaboration and building trust so that everyone can contribute their best.

Chapter IX: Foster Collaboration

Leaders 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 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.

Building Trust

Self-disclosure is one way that you go first in building trust. 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.

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 openness to their ideas and interest in their concerns, people will be more open to yours.

Active Listening

Active listening involves more than simply paying attention. The best listeners do much more than remain silent while the other person talks. They demonstrate that they are listening by asking questions that “promote 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.

Take the time to schedule lunches with people to get to know who they are as individuals instead of just talking about work. These initial actions pique interest in you as a leader, and people begin to slowly listen to your thoughts and seek your advice more frequently because of the strong foundational relationship built at the beginning.

Aspire to be remembered for how you served your team, 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. They have to feel that you care about their best interests.

These same skills of nonjudgmental listening show up in 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, 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.

Creating Collaborative Conditions

To create conditions in which people know they can count on each other, you need 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 to your own behavior.

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 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. Until you see someone’s face, they are not a real person to you.

Chapter X: Strengthen Others

To strengthen others, you must enhance their self-determination and develop their competence and confidence.

What Makes 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.”

What Makes 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.

The Freedom to Choose

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, you can reduce the sense of powerlessness and stress that people feel and increase their willingness to exercise their capabilities more fully.

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. 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. 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.

Building 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 (as projects, not tasks)
• Provide greater freedom of access, vertically and horizontally, inside and outside the organization

Developing Competence

When high challenges are matched with high skills, then 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 you might 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 trade-offs being made constantly at every level. When reasons behind decisions are not shared, the decisions seem arbitrary and possibly self-serving.

Provide sufficient information so that people feel that they have the perspective of owners in making decisions. This 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—because they believe in their skills and decision-making abilities.

View your role as needing to move from pushing (your agenda), which operates from a fixed mindset, to pulling (their agenda), which generates a growth mindset.

Practice V: Encourage the Heart

People need encouragement to keep going, especially when the climb is steep and the progress slow. Recognizing contributions and celebrating victories fuels the human spirit and builds community.

Chapter XI: Recognize Contributions

To recognize contributions effectively, you need to expect the best and personalize recognition.

The Power of Expectations

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 that to them—not just in your words but also through tone of voice, posture, gestures, and facial expressions.

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.

The Importance of Goals

Goals help you concentrate and avoid distractions. Goals give recognition context. They give people something to strive for, something important to attain—coming in first, breaking a record, setting a new standard of excellence.

The Need for Feedback

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. They prefer to know how they are doing, and no news has the same negative impact as bad news.

Stop serving the feedback sandwich—the traditional technique where you put praise on the top and bottom and stick criticism in between. The data shows that the feedback sandwich doesn’t taste as good as it looks. Here’s how to make feedback more constructive:

1. Explain why you’re 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.
2. Level the playing field. Because negative feedback can make people feel inferior, share how feedback has been helpful in your own career.
3. Ask if the person wants feedback. Once they take ownership of this decision, they’re less defensive about whatever you have to offer.

On leadership assessments, the behavior that leaders engage in least frequently is asking for feedback on how their 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’re most uncomfortable with. 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 something all leaders need to cultivate.

Making Recognition Personal

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’s 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.

Distributing Recognition

Consider this approach: instead of spending a few hundred dollars on recognition efforts yourself, split that money among several people and ask them to spend it over the course of a month to encourage the hearts of others. This multiplies the impact and involves more people in the culture of recognition.

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 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. When something really terrific happens, comment on it right away and to anyone who might be close enough to hear.

Research shows 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.

The Practice of Gratitude

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.

Chapter XII: Celebrate the Values and Victories

To celebrate effectively, you must create a spirit of community and be personally involved.

Public Recognition

Use regular monthly calls or meetings with your organization to shine the spotlight on people who have done exceptional work. Create simple programs where peers can nominate colleagues by filling out a brief form highlighting their contributions or achievements.

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” recognition 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—called “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.

Building Community

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, you build a culture in which people know that their actions and decisions are not being taken for granted.

Fun and Celebration

Every personal-best leadership experience is a combination of hard work and fun. Most people agree that without the enjoyment and 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.

Do small things such as taking the team out for a surprise lunch or letting team members leave early if they have something special happening. Let team members with children come in late or leave early on special occasions like birthdays. Scatter small and silly gifts with hidden jokes or meaning on everyone’s desks. Being personally involved at this level results in your team being completely dedicated to you. You become an inspiration, and that means they will work until all hours to ensure the project is completed.

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

Sometimes you need to have difficult conversations. When you do, be real with people. 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.

The Power of Stories

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

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. Listening to and understanding the stories leaders tell does more to inform people about the values and culture of an organization than company policies or employee manuals. 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.

Scheduling Celebrations

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, formalize it, announce it, and tell people how they become eligible to participate.

Create annual rituals that mark significant milestones. For instance, have an annual “New Year’s Eve” party on the last day of your fiscal year. Connect all offices by teleconference. Pop champagne and raise a virtual toast. Reflect on what you’ve accomplished, and talk about what’s ahead in the future. Then let all the offices continue with their own celebrations.

Chapter XIII: Leadership Is Everyone’s Business

Leadership is not a position reserved for a few. It’s a set of skills and behaviors that anyone can learn and practice. The question is not whether you will lead, but how well.

Your Most Important Role Models

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’s 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.

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 Difference Leaders Make

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.

Leadership Can Be Learned

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. Instead, you engage in experiences designed specifically to improve performance. 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 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, 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.

The Dangers of Excess

Any leadership practice can become destructive when taken to extremes. Virtues can become vices.

Model the Way taken too far: 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 cause you to be more concerned with style than substance.

Inspire a Shared Vision taken too far: 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 exciting possibilities that are just out of your sight or make you hang on too long to an old, tired, and out-of-date approach. Your own energy, enthusiasm, and charm may be so magnetic that others stop thinking for themselves and mindlessly agree with your perspective.

Challenge the Process taken too far: Taken to extremes, this 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.

Enable Others to Act taken too far: 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 it. Delegating power and responsibility can become a way of dumping too much on others when they’re not fully prepared to handle it.

Encourage the Heart taken too far: Constantly worrying about who should be recognized and when there should be celebrations can turn you into a gregarious minstrel. 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 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.

Questions for the Journey

As you continue your journey toward exemplary leadership, wrestle with these 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.

The Secret to Success

When asked about developing leaders, one experienced leader 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 when studying leadership. But after decades of research, through thousands of interviews and case analyses, this theme appears again and again. Many leaders use the word love freely when talking about their own motivations to lead.