Table of Contents Praise Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction EVERYONE WANTS TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT LEADERSHIP TEN TRUTHS ABOUT LEADERSHIP YOU MATTER TRUTH ONE - YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE WHATEVER YOU NEED YOU ALREADY HAVE LEADER ROLE MODELS ARE LOCAL YOU ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT LEADER TRUTH TWO - CREDIBILITY IS THE FOUNDATION OF LEADERSHIP CONSTITUENTS HAVE CLEAR EXPECTATIONS OF THEIR LEADERS CREDIBILITY TIES IT ALL TOGETHER CREDIBILITY MATTERS BELIEVE IT WHEN YOU SEE IT TRUTH THREE - VALUES DRIVE COMMITMENT LISTEN TO YOUR INNER SELF YOU COMMIT TO WHAT FITS DISCOVER WHAT MATTERS IT’S NOT JUST YOUR VALUES TRUTH FOUR - FOCUSING ON THE FUTURE SETS LEADERS APART LEADERS LOOK LONG-TERM YOU HAVE TO SPEND MORE TIME IN THE FUTURE INSIGHT: EXPLORE YOUR PAST EXPERIENCE OUTSIGHT: IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES FORESIGHT: BE OPTIMISTIC TRUTH FIVE - YOU CAN’T DO IT ALONE YOU HAVE TO MAKE A HUMAN CONNECTION YOU HAVE TO HEAR WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING UNITE PEOPLE AROUND A SHARED VISION MAKE OTHERS FEEL STRONG AND CAPABLE BRING IT OUT OF OTHERS TRUTH SIX - TRUST RULES INCREASE YOUR TRUST, INCREASE YOUR INFLUENCE YOU HAVE TO ANTE UP FIRST YOU HAVE TO SHOW THAT YOU CAN BE TRUSTED COMMUNICATE WITH A NEED-TO-SHARE MENTALITY TRUTH SEVEN - CHALLENGE IS THE CRUCIBLE FOR GREATNESS BRICK WALLS TEST COMMITMENT STRENGTHEN RESILIENCE GET GRITTY FAILING IS LEARNING TRUTH EIGHT - YOU EITHER LEAD BY EXAMPLE OR YOU DON’T LEAD AT ALL SEEING IS BELIEVING LEADERS GO FIRST ADMIT YOUR MISTAKES TRUTH NINE - THE BEST LEADERS ARE THE BEST LEARNERS LEARNING IS THE MASTER SKILL ADOPT A GROWTH MINDSET DELIBERATE PRACTICE IS REQUIRED SUPPORT HELPS TRUTH TEN - LEADERSHIP IS AN AFFAIR OF TH E HEART LOVE IS THE SOUL OF LEADERSHIP SHOW THEM THAT YOU CARE FALL IN LOVE WITH WHAT YOU DO PROMOTE THE POSITIVE EPILOGUE ABOUT THE AUTHORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX More praise for The Truth About Leadership “I love The Truth About Leadership. Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner spell out ten fundamental truths about leadership and every one of them is right on. If you want to do a fact check on your leadership expertise, read this book!” —Ken Blanchard, co-author, The One Minute Manager® and Leading at a Higher Level “The Truth About Leadership is a rare and wonderful book that will become an essential guidebook for leaders in every sector at every level, at any point on their journey to leadership. Thank you, Jim and Barry, for sharing The Truth with us. There is no greater gift.” —Frances Hesselbein, president and CEO, Leader to Leader Institute “Kouzes and Posner take a truly bold step in their new book about leadership fundamentals. Its impact comes from its relentless focus on what transcends time and endures globally in the arena of leadership, and in the compelling stories and illustrations that remind us all of what matters most.” —Jon R. Katzenbach, co-author, Leading Outside the Lines and The Wisdom of Teams “This book is exactly what it purports to be: the ‘truth’ about leadership. It is exactly the right length, it covers everything it should, and leaves nothing out. Having read scores of books on the subject, I can comfortably say, it is the best one out there.” —Ken Wilcox, president and CEO, SVB Financial Group “In our work in government and leadership development, Kouzes and Posner’s The Leadership Challenge has been our primary leadership guide. As our daughters begin to immerse themselves in Americorps and the world of work, we’re sharing The Truth About Leadership with them. We’re confident that these readable stories of everyday leaders and time-tested and research-tested principles will practically and intellectually arm them to change the world.” —Jennifer Granholm, Governor, State of Michigan, and Dan Mulhern, First Gentleman, State of Michigan, and author of Everyday Leadership “If Kouzes and Posner have any say in it, disjointed, prize-oriented, and loveless leaders will become a thing of the past. They provide us with a recipe for successful leadership by asking all of us to lead with passion, be an example, and make sure we’re passionate about what we do.” —John Hope Bryant, author, Love Leadership and founder, chairman, and CEO, Operation HOPE “The Truth About Leadership focuses not just on what it takes to be a brilliant leader, but on what qualities our leaders must embody to create a better world. Its focus on values, commitment, and trust will help you be the type of leader who succeeds—and the type of leader the world needs most.” —Jeffrey Hollender, cofounder, Seventh Generation and co-author, The Responsibility Revolution “Upon finishing this book, I could not help but wish that the ten truths had been articulated so clearly throughout my career. I cannot think of any experiences in my career that have not called on some or all of them. As importantly as I reflect on my many mistakes, I can see where I was breaking one or more of these rules. This is a book that I would recommend people read several times throughout their career.” —Michael Schriver, president, DFS Group Ltd. “No matter where you are in your leadership journey—taking the first step or reflecting on your progress—you will benefit greatly from reading this book. This is an essential guidebook that breaks down exactly what it takes to earn the right to lead others. These fundamental truths are presented in a way that is practical, straightforward, and highly engaging, and will be just as relevant thirty years from now as they are today.” —John E. Rooney, president and CEO, U.S. Cellular “Reading this book made me feel as if I was in a conversation that I did not want to end. While there are many solid books about leadership, The Truth About Leadership is now the first book I will give others on their leadership journey.” —Teresa Roche, vice president and CLO, Agilent Technologies “The glory of Kouzes and Posner’s new book, The Truth About Leadership, isn’t just in the ideas— you expect this kind of wisdom from the two most influential writers on leadership in our time—but in the voices and the data. You hear from everyday folks, not just the famous, about what it’s like to be a successful leader in real-life settings. As for the numbers, has there ever been a leadership book so firmly grounded in empirical data drawn from literally millions of leaders?” —Michael S. Malone, editor-in-chief of Edgelings.com and author, The Future Arrived Yesterday “Leadership matters... still. Another classic by Posner and Kouzes on the one topic that has impacted everyone, told in a very compelling and meaningful way. They have identified the most important characteristics of leadership that have withstood the test of time and captured them in this easy-toread and captivating book.” —Sonia Clark, leader of Talent Strategy, Juniper Network “Jim and Barry have written another masterful book to help us mere mortals on the never-ending journey of understanding what it takes to be a leader. I love this book because of its pragmatic approach, and because it seems to explain so simply the stuff that we intuitively know but somehow don’t always keep at the front of our mind.” —Greg Bourke, director, Human Resources, Vodafone Hutchison Australia “The Truth About Leadership should be a must-read for leaders and aspiring leaders. It offers timeless advice and insight, and real-world examples that anyone can relate to.” —Charles Mak, Morgan Stanley’s head of Private Wealth Management for Asia Copyright © 2010 by JosseyBass. All rights reserved. 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JosseyBass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact JosseyBass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956- 7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002. JosseyBass also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kouzes, James M., 1945The truth about leadership : the no-fads, heart-of-the-matter facts you need to know / James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-470-63354-0 (hardback) 1. Leadership. 2. Executive ability. I. Posner, Barry Z. II. Title. HD57.7.K684 2010 658.4’092—dc22 2010018715 HB Printing For Amanda and Nick. Our own next-generation leaders. INTRODUCTION WHAT EVERYONE WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT LEADERSHIP We’ve been traveling the world for three decades now, constantly researching the practices of exemplary leadership and the qualities people look for and admire in the leaders they would willingly follow. During and after our seminars and presentations, people ask us a lot of different questions, but there’s always one thing that they all want to know: “What’s new?” No matter the age of the audience, the type of organizations they come from, or their nationalities, everyone wants to know what’s changed since we first started studying leadership. They want to know how things are different now compared to how they were five, ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. So we tell them. We tell them how the context of leadership has changed dramatically since we first asked people in the early 1980s to tell us about their personal best leadership experiences and about their most admired leaders. For example, we talk about how global terrorism has heightened uncertainty as political landscapes have changed. How global warming and scarcity of natural resources have made regions of the world unstable and created the need for more sustainable products and lifestyles. How the global economy has increased marketplace competition in the neighborhood and around the world and how financial institutions have exploded, imploded, and risen like phoenixes from the ashes. How the always-on, 24/7, click-away new technologies have both connected and isolated people, as their capacity for speed cranks up the world’s pace. We describe how the workforce has also changed from what previous generations knew, becoming increasingly diverse, multicultural, dispersed, horizontal, and distributed—and, consequently, requiring more collaboration than competition. We (and other writers) have explored how nationality and culture matter in ways that require greater sensitivity to interpersonal relationships, how the days of a homogeneous workforce are over, and how the newest generation to enter the workforce (the Millennials) place fresh demands on their organizations (but, of course, so did the Gen-Xers, Boomers, and Traditionalists before them). Bob Dylan’s song “The Times They Are A-Changin”’ continues to get airtime. But we also tell them something else. We tell our audiences that as much as the context of leadership has changed, the content of leadership has not changed much at all. The fundamental behaviors, actions, and practices of leaders have remained essentially the same since we first began researching and writing about leadership over three decades ago. Much has changed, but there’s a whole lot more that’s stayed the same. EVERYONE WANTS TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT LEADERSHIP Initially we set out to write a new book aimed squarely at emerging leaders in the Millennial generation. Millennials are an influential group and on the cusp of replacing Baby Boomers as a game-changing force due to their size and position. Now that Millennials are entering organizations in increasingly large numbers, many leaders with whom we work are sensing a noticeable shift in their workplaces, forcing them to reconsider their leadership practices. They’ve grown intensely curious about generational differences, and they’ve kept asking our advice on how they and their young colleagues should lead in these changing times. Since we’ve worked with college students and young leaders throughout our careers and have had a lot of first-hand experience with generational issues, we thought we could make a contribution to the growing literature on the subject. (And we were more than likely influenced by the fact that we’re also parents of Millennials.) So we did what we’ve done in the past, as all good researchers and academics do: We conducted a study and gathered data. We brought together several focus groups of Millennials and explored their life experiences, their values, their perspectives on the world, and what they wanted to know about leadership that would better prepare them for their place and responsibility in the world. We expanded our research to include a broader sample of Millennials, and we presented them with the following scenario: “Imagine you’re sitting in a meeting with a group of your colleagues. The door to the conference room opens. In walks someone you’ve never met before, and that person says, ‘Hi, I’m your new leader.’ What questions immediately come to mind that you want to ask this person?” As we reviewed the questions Millennials wanted to ask a new leader, an important insight emerged. We found that their concerns and issues were not all that different from those we’d heard from their older sisters and brothers, and even their moms and dads when they’d responded to the same question. They wanted to know what every other generation wanted to know. Age made no difference. This observation was powerfully reinforced when we analyzed the most current data from the Leadership Practices Inventory, our 360-degree leadership assessment tool. Looking at data from over a million respondents, we discovered that age makes no difference in explaining why leaders are effective or ineffective. When it comes to generating positive work attitudes, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Traditionalist, a Boomer, a Gen-Xer, or a Millennial. Good leadership is good leadership, regardless of age. It became very apparent once again that the context of leading may change a lot, but the content of leading changes very little. At about this same time we were deeply honored and humbled to learn that the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) was going to present us with their annual award for Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance. The award is given, they said, “in recognition of an exceptional contribution of sustained impact to the field of learning and performance.” It was presented to us at the 2009 Annual ASTD Conference and Expo, and we were asked to conduct an educational session based on our work. In light of the career-spanning nature of the award, we thought it’d be appropriate to craft a presentation around ideas that we’d been developing, talking about, and writing about since the beginning of our collaboration and research. As we culled through our decades of research, interviews, and data, we found a few kernels of lasting truth, and we entitled our presentation “Enduring Leadership Truths.” As is customary at these kinds of conferences, participants were asked to complete an evaluation of the session. We were a bit nervous about how folks would receive a “retrospective” on our work. After all, this was a group of experienced and seasoned training and development professionals, and sometimes they can be a critical crowd. But we were pleasantly surprised by the feedback we received, particularly the responses to one item. Everyone (yes, 100 percent of the audience) agreed with the statement: “I learned something from this presentation that was new and I can use.” To us, these truths were foundational, critical, but not necessarily new. But when presented on their own, without fads or fanfare, leaders and trainers alike found them fresh and useful. It caused us to think that perhaps there was a need for a book that would make a few bold statements about what research has shown to be true about leadership over the years. And that perhaps, when presented in this way, this would be a new and refreshing look at the topic. We’re reminded of a time we shared the platform with renowned leadership educator Ken Blanchard at an association meeting. In the middle of responding to an audience question one of us was saying, “I don’t know what you call something that’s been the same for twenty-five years, but... ,” and Ken interrupted, exclaiming, “I’d call it the truth.” It was a moment of clarity. We began to see that we shouldn’t be shy about saying that some things about leadership just don’t change that much over time, if at all, and that those things need to be understood for what they are—the truth. After the ASTD experience, it became readily apparent to us that we should write a book that focuses not so much on anything new, but rather speaks directly to what endures and is timeless. While context changes, while global and personal circumstances change, the fundamentals of leadership do not. We thought it was just as important in these changing times to remind people of what endures as it was to talk about what has been disrupted. We wanted to make certain that the lessons we included not only withstood the test of time but also withstood the scrutiny of statistics. So we sifted through the reams of data that had piled up over three decades and isolated those nuggets that were soundly supported by the numbers. This is a collection of the real thing —no fads, no myths, no trendy responses—just truths that endure. This book reveals the most important things that we’ve learned since we began our collaboration. It’s a collection of fundamental principles that inform and support the practices of leadership. These are lessons that were true thirty years ago, are true today, and we believe will be true thirty years from now. They speak to what the newest and youngest leaders need to appreciate and understand, and they speak just as meaningfully to the oldest leaders, who are perhaps re-purposing themselves as they transition from their lengthy careers to other pursuits in volunteer, community, or public sectors. Entrepreneurs need to appreciate what we have learned, just as do people leading established enterprises. These lessons ring true on athletic fields and in the halls of government, and they make as much sense in the United States, China, Brazil, the European Union, India, or any other global address that you can imagine. This book does not pretend to be an exhaustive list of everything you ever wanted to know about leadership. There are other truths that we are likely to uncover. In the last two years alone we’ve analyzed over one million responses to our Leadership Practices Inventory from over seventy countries. That’s a lot of data points. We’ve just scratched the surface of our own data, let alone the research from others, and the evidence continues to mount. For those who have read our prior works, some of this may sound familiar. It should. But three things make this book different from our previous ones. First, this is a bolder book. We’re taking a stand that our research supports each and every claim. Second, it’s based on data we didn’t have when we wrote our other books. Over the past few years we’ve been able to accumulate a lot more information and a lot more cases. Third, it’s a more global and a more crossgenerational book. The stories and examples we share come from around the world and encompass three generations of leaders. We know that you’ll be the judge, but if you’ve read our other works we still think you’ll find many new and useful insights among these enduring truths. The truths we’ve written about in this book are things you can count on. They are realities of leadership that will help you to think, decide, and act more effectively. They provide lessons that will sustain you in your personal and professional development. They are truths that address what is real about leadership. TEN TRUTHS ABOUT LEADERSHIP In this book we’ll explore ten fundamental truths about leadership and becoming an effective leader. We write with the perspective of an emerging leader— someone new in the role or making the transition to leadership for the first time —but the ideas are just as relevant to those with years of leadership experience. They apply to those who are continuing to hone their skills and to those who’ve had no prior training. They are also relevant to those who want to be more capable in coaching others to be more effective leaders. The first truth is that You Make a Difference. It is the most fundamental truth of all. Before you can lead, you have to believe that you can have a positive impact on others. You have to believe in yourself. That’s where it all begins. Leadership begins when you believe you can make a difference. The second truth is that Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership. You have to believe in you, but others have to believe in you, too. What does it take for others to believe in you? Short answer: Credibility. We’ve said it many times, but we need to say it again, especially in these times when people have become cynical about their leaders and institutions: If people don’t believe in you, they won’t willingly follow you. The third truth is that Values Drive Commitment. People want to know what you stand for and believe in. They want to know what you value. And leaders need to know what others value if they are going to be able to forge alignments between personal values and organizational demands. The fourth truth is that Focusing on the Future Sets Leaders Apart. The capacity to imagine and articulate exciting future possibilities is a defining competence of leaders. You have to take the long-term perspective. Gain insight from reviewing your past and develop outsight by looking around. You Can’t Do It Alone is the fifth truth. No leader ever got anything extraordinary done without the talent and support of others. Leadership is a team sport, and you need to engage others in the cause. What strengthens and sustains the relationship between leader and constituent is that leaders are obsessed with what is best for others, not what is best for themselves. Trust Rules is the sixth truth. If you can’t do it alone and have to rely on others, what’s needed to make that happen? Trust. Trust is the social glue that holds individuals and groups together. And the level of trust others have in you will determine the amount of influence you have. You have to earn your constituents’ trust before they’ll be willing to trust you. That means you have to give trust before you can get trust. The seventh truth is that Challenge Is the Crucible for Greatness. Exemplary leaders—the kind of leaders people want to follow—are always associated with changing the status quo. Great achievements don’t happen when you keep things the same. Change invariably involves challenge, and challenge tests you. It introduces you to yourself. It brings you face-to-face with your level of commitment, your grittiness, and your values. It reveals your mindset about change. Truth number eight reminds you that You Either Lead by Example or You Don’t Lead at All. Leaders have to keep their promises and become role models for the values and actions they espouse. You have to go first as a leader. You can’t ask others to do something you aren’t willing to do yourself. Moreover, you have to be willing to admit mistakes and be able to learn from them. Truth number nine is that The Best Leaders Are the Best Learners. You have to believe that you (and others) can learn to lead, and that you can become a better leader tomorrow than you are today. Leaders are constant improvement fanatics, and learning is the master skill of leadership. Learning, however, takes time and attention, practice and feedback, along with good coaching. It also takes willingness on your part to ask for support. The tenth truth is that Leadership Is an Affair of the Heart. It could also be the first truth. Leaders are in love with their constituents, their customers and clients, and the mission that they are serving. Leaders make others feel important and are gracious in showing their appreciation. Love is the motivation that energizes leaders to give so much for others. You just won’t work hard enough to become great if you aren’t doing what you love. YOU MATTER As we do in all of our writings and presentations, we endeavor to make our ideas accessible—easy to understand and simple to translate into action—and we continue to provide encouragement for getting started on the path of becoming a better leader. Doing so begins with you, your desire and commitment. We have never said it would be easy. We both know from our own personal experiences —and humbling ones at times at times—that it is much easier to write about leadership than it is to practice leadership. This isn’t a “How To” or “Made Easy” or “For Dummies” approach to leadership—it is a book about fundamentals. And fundamentals are the necessary building blocks to greatness. You can’t fast-track your way to excellence. Leadership is a demanding, noble discipline not to be entered into frivolously or casually. It requires an elevated sense of mastery. And, you can do it. It’s a matter of technique, of skill, of practice. It’s also a matter of desire and commitment. There are enduring truths about leadership. You can gain mastery over the art and science of leadership by understanding them and attending to them in your workplace and everyday life. As always, we thank you for taking the time to consider our ideas. We are joined in a common cause with you to increase the quantity and the effectiveness of leaders in the world. The truth is that we need your exemplary leadership now more than ever. James M. Kouzes Barry Z. Posner July 2010 TRUTH ONE YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE Everything you will ever do as a leader is based on one audacious assumption. It’s the assumption that you matter. Before you can lead others, you have to lead yourself and believe that you can have a positive impact on others. You have to believe that your words can inspire and your actions can move others. You have to believe that what you do counts for something. If you don’t, you won’t even try. Leadership begins with you. The Truth Is That You Make a Difference. It is not a question of “Will I make a difference?” Rather, it’s “What difference will I make?” Consider the experience of Melissa Poe.1 In 1989 Melissa, then a fourth-grader in Nashville, Tennessee, became very concerned about the natural environment and the kind of world she and her friends might live in if people didn’t start paying attention to their everyday actions. After seeing a television program about pollution that portrayed a very scary future, Melissa asked the question, “Will the future be a safe place to live in when I get older?”2 She decided she had to do something about it. That night she wrote a letter to President George Bush, Sr., asking him to help stop pollution. At the time, Melissa believed the only way to stop pollution was to get everyone involved and that the only way to get everyone involved was to get someone everyone listened to involved. For twelve weeks she didn’t hear back, but Melissa knew the pollution problem wouldn’t wait. So she started to do other things to get people’s attention. At home Melissa and her family started recycling, turning lights and faucets off when they weren’t in use, and planting trees. She wrote more letters to more politicians such as her local mayor, congressmen, and senators. She called up the local television station and did an on-camera commentary. She wrote to her newspaper. She did everything she could think of to help get people’s attention. Melissa also started a club called Kids F.A.C.E. (Kids For a Clean Environment) so that her friends, who’d been asking how they could help, could do projects together like writing letters, planting trees, and picking up litter. “We knew we were doing small things, but we also knew it took a bunch of small things to make a big difference,” she told us. When she still hadn’t heard back from the President after several weeks, Melissa, realizing he was a busy man, felt she needed to do more to get him to see her letter. She decided to make her letter bigger so he couldn’t miss it. She called a local billboard company in her hometown of Nashville and asked whether they would put a billboard up with her letter to the President. The company donated the billboard to Melissa. However, Melissa knew the President would not see her billboard unless it was in Washington, D.C., where the President lived. Again, she called her local billboard company to ask for help. While they couldn’t put up a billboard in Washington, D.C., they were able to connect Melissa to another billboard company that could. In a matter of six months, over 250 billboards were put up all over the United States, including at least one in each state and one just a mile from the White House. Almost immediately, Melissa began receiving letters from other kids who were as concerned as she was about the environment. They wanted to help. By the time she finally received a response from the President—a disappointing form letter—she no longer needed the help of someone famous to get her message across. Melissa had found within herself the personal power to inspire others to become involved and make a difference. In January, just six months after she began her journey to get people’s attention about the environment, Melissa appeared on the Today show to tell her story. It is here that Kids F.A.C.E. grew from a local club to a national organization. Membership swelled. As the organization grew, Melissa’s first Kids F.A.C.E. project, a recycling program at her school, led to a manual full of ideas on how to clean up the environment. Then there were other challenges over the years, such as the One in a Million campaign, a successful project that engaged over one million kids to plant one million trees by 2000. Starting with just six members at her elementary school, Kids F.A.C.E. grew to more than two thousand club chapters in twenty-two countries and more than 350,000 members during the time Melissa was president. (Today there are 500,000 members.) At age seventeen, she stepped aside, joined the board, and handed over the reins to two fifteen-year-olds, saying she was too old for the job. She wanted the organization to always be in kids’ hands so that there was always a club for kids and by kids. WHATEVER YOU NEED YOU ALREADY HAVE Is Melissa a leader? Can someone at age nine or seventeen demonstrate the practices of exemplary leadership? Aren’t those abilities reserved for people mainly in senior positions in big-time organizations? Yes, yes, and no. Yes, Melissa is a leader. Yes, you can demonstrate leadership at any age. No, leadership is not about some position in an organization and clearly not just for those in senior positions. Too often images of who’s a leader and who’s not are all mixed up in preconceived notions about what leadership is and is not. Conventional wisdom portrays leadership as something found mostly at the top. Myth and legend treat leadership as if it were the private reserve of a very few charismatic men and women. Nothing is further from the truth. Leadership is much more broadly distributed in the population, and it’s accessible to anyone who has passion and purpose to change the way things are. Fast-forward now to June 4, 2009, twenty years after Melissa Poe wrote that letter to the President of the United States. On that night Melissa Poe Hood— she’s grown up now, graduated from college, married, and is working—received the Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). In acknowledging the honor, here’s the advice she gave the college women student leaders in the audience: Change does not begin with someone else. Change begins in your own backyard, no matter your age or your size. I had no idea that one simple action could change my life so much. Most journeys start this way, with simple motivation and a choice to do something or not. You never know where one step will take you, and you never know where the next one will lead. The difference with being a leader is that you take the step; you take the journey. The greatest obstacle you will ever encounter is yourself. Just like Dorothy never knew that she always had the ticket home, the Scarecrow always had a brain, the Tin Man always had a compassionate heart, even the Cowardly Lion had courage. Everything you need to be a successful leader you already have: your intelligence to see an issue and a way to fix it, your heart to stay motivated, and your courage not to give up. You can’t look for the man behind the curtain to solve your concerns. Everything you need you already have. It’s all about taking the first step.3 Melissa’s message shines the spotlight on the first enduring leadership truth. You don’t have to look up for leadership. You don’t have to look out for leadership. You only have to look inward. You have the potential to lead others to places they have never been before. A nine-year-old Melissa looked inward and found a leader. You can do the same. Leadership begins with you. LEADER ROLE MODELS ARE LOCAL We’ve been gathering stories about personal best leadership experiences, including this one from Melissa, for three decades. The people we’ve talked to come from every type of organization, public and private, government and NGO, high-tech and low-tech, small and large, schools and professional services. They are young and old, male and female, and from every ethnic group. They represent every imaginable vocation and avocation. They reside all over the globe. Leaders are found everywhere. Demographics play no role in whether or not someone is going to become an exemplary leader. After examining the immense variety of stories from so many different people and places, it has also become crystal clear that leadership is not a birthright. It’s not about position or title. It’s not about power or authority. It’s not about celebrity or wealth. It’s not about being a CEO, president, general, or prime minister. It’s not about being a superstar. And it’s most assuredly not about some charismatic gift. Over the last couple of years, we analyzed data from over a million people around the globe to assess the practices of leaders. The numbers reveal that the behavior of leaders explains more about why people feel engaged and positive about their workplaces than any particular individual or organizational characteristic. Factors like age, gender, ethnicity, function, position, nationality, organizational size, industry, tenure, and education together account for less than 1 percent of the reason that people feel productive, motivated, energized, effective, and committed in their workplaces. The leaders’ behaviors, on the other hand, explain nearly 25 percent of the reason.4 Leadership is not about who you are or where you come from. It’s about what you do. When we first reported on Melissa’s story in 1993, we had no idea that in 2009 she’d be a Woman of Distinction. Neither did she. But Melissa knew then, and she knows now, that leadership begins with taking that first step. Here’s something else to consider. For a long time now we’ve been asking people about the leader role models in their own lives. Not well-known historical leaders, but leaders with whom they’ve had personal experience. We’ve asked them to identify the person they’d select as their most important role model for leadership, and then we’ve given them a list of eight possible categories from which these leaders might come. They can choose from business leader, community or religious leader, entertainer or Hollywood star, family member, political leader, professional athlete, teacher or coach, or other/none/not sure. Take a look at the results.5 Data on Leader Role Models Role Model Category Respondent Age Category 18 to 30 Over 30 Family member 40% 46% Teacher or coach 26% 14% Community or religious 11% 8% Business leader 7% 23% Political leader 4% 4% Professional athlete 3% 0% Entertainer 2% 0% None/not sure/other 7% 4% Regardless of whether one is under or over thirty years of age, when thinking back over their lives and selecting their most important leader role models, people are more likely to choose a family member than anyone else. Mom and Dad, it turns out, are the most influential leaders after all. In second place, for respondents thirty years of age and under, is a teacher or coach, and the third spot goes to a community or religious leader. For the over-thirty crowd, a business leader is number two. But when we probe further, people tell us that a business leader really means the person who was an immediate supervisor at work, not someone in the C-suite. In third position is a teacher or coach. And in the fourth spot are community and religious leaders. What do you notice about the top groups on the list? You should notice that they’re the people you know well and who know you well. They’re the leaders you are closest to and who are closest to you. They’re the ones with whom you have the most intimate contact. And they’re the people you meet early in your lives. If you’re in a role that brings you into contact with young people on a regular basis—say a parent, teacher, coach, or counselor—keep this observation in mind. Someone is looking to you right now for leadership. Notice also how few people find leader role models among those who get all the media attention. No more than 4 percent look up to politicians, professional athletes, or entertainers as their leader role models. You can’t measure leadership in column inches or Google search results. You can’t measure it in bling, entourages, or gold medals. You can’t measure it in fame or fortune. You measure it by the actions people you know take that cause you to look to them for guidance along the important journeys in your life. Leader role models are local. You find them close to where you live and work. YOU ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT LEADER You also definitely find leader role models “close to home” in your organization. The media, and many leadership gurus, focus a lot of attention on people at the top of organizations—founders, CEOs, generals, presidents, and the like. They make it seem as if these top dogs are the only ones responsible for everything that’s great, and everything that’s lousy, about organizations. It’s a subtle thing, but it perpetuates the trickle-down theory of leadership: all things start at the top and trickle down to the bottom. But, when you actually look at the data, you see a very different picture. The leader who has the most impact on your day-to-day behavior is, in fact, not the CEO, the COO, the CFO, or any other C—unless, of course, you report directly to that person. The leader who has the most influence over your desire to stay or leave, your commitment to the organization’s vision and values, your ethical decisions and actions, your treatment of customers, your ability to do your job well, and the direction of your career, to name but a few outcomes, is your most immediate manager. We’ve been tracking the impact leaders have on their constituents and the organization for many years. As we’ve already mentioned, we’ve analyzed data from well over a million respondents, and hundreds of other researchers have used our model and the Leadership Practices Inventory6 to gather data from thousands more. The findings from all these studies point to one very clear conclusion: Managers, volunteers, pastors, government administrators, military officers, teachers, school principals, students, and other leaders who use The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® are seen more frequently by others as better leaders. For example, they: • More successfully meet job-related demands • More effectively represent their units to upper management • Create higher-performing teams • Increase sales and customer satisfaction levels • Foster renewed loyalty and greater organizational commitment • Increase motivation and the willingness to work hard • Facilitate high patient satisfaction scores and meet family member needs • Promote high degrees of involvement and engagement in schools • Enlarge the size of their congregations • Expand fundraising results and gift-giving levels • Extend the range of their agencies’ services • Reduce absenteeism, turnover, and dropout rates • Positively influence recruitment rates • Earn higher scores on measures of leader credibility Additionally, people working with leaders who demonstrate The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® are significantly more satisfied with the actions and strategies of their leaders; they feel more committed, excited, energized, influential, and powerful; and they are more productive. In other words, the more you engage in the practices of exemplary leadership, the more likely it is that you’ll have a positive influence on others in the organization. All this means that, if you’re a manager, to your direct reports you are the most important leader in the organization. You have much more impact than your CEO on your direct reports’ day-to-day performance. And, if that’s the case, isn’t it your responsibility to be the best leader you can be? You are accountable for the leadership you demonstrate. THE FIVE PRACTICES OF EXEMPLARY LEADERSHIP® The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership is the model of best-practices leadership that emerged from our research.7 These five “practices” (not “laws” or “principles”) are 1. Model the Way 2. Inspire a Shared Vision 3. Challenge the Process 4. Enable Others to Act 5. Encourage the Heart And even if you are not in a management position, there is really no escape. No matter what your position is, you have to take responsibility for the quality of leadership people experience. No one made Melissa Poe the leader. She took personal responsibility for doing something about a serious problem she recognized and started leading. No one can make you a leader, either. You have to take that first step for yourself. You have to be willing to take actions that others will want to follow. After all, if you aren’t willing to follow yourself, why would anyone else want to? Also keep in mind that you have the chance to truly change a life. As the author Marianne Williamson has written: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. . . . Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. . . . And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.8 You have the chance to make the world a better place as a result of what you do. What could be more rewarding than that? The Truth Is That You Make a Difference. Somewhere, sometime, the leader within you may get the call to step forward—for the school, the congregation, the community, the agency, the company, the union, or the family. By believing in yourself and in your capacity to lead, you open yourself to hearing the call. You open yourself to making a difference in the world. TRUTH TWO CREDIBILITY IS THE FOUNDATION OF LEADERSHIP Leadership begins with you and your belief in yourself. Leadership continues only if other people also believe in you. All the programs to develop leaders, all the courses and classes, all the books and tapes, all the blogs and websites offering tips and techniques are meaningless unless the people who are supposed to follow believe in the person who’s supposed to lead. The Truth Is That Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership. This is the inescapable conclusion we’ve come to after thirty years of asking people around the world what they look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly follow. The key word in the preceding sentence is “willingly.” It’s one thing to follow someone because you think you have to “or else,” and it’s another when you follow a leader because you want to. What does it take to be the kind of person, the kind of leader, others want to follow, doing so enthusiastically and voluntarily? It turns out that the believability of the leader determines whether people will willingly give more of their time, talent, energy, experience, intelligence, creativity, and support. Only credible leaders earn commitment, and only commitment builds and regenerates great organizations and communities. CONSTITUENTS HAVE CLEAR EXPECTATIONS OF THEIR LEADERS Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. You can’t have one without the other. Leadership strategies, tactics, skills, and practices are empty without an understanding of the fundamental dynamics of this relationship. In every relationship people have expectations of each other. Sometimes these expectations are clearly voiced, and other times they’re never discussed, but nonetheless expectations are present in every human relationship. In 1980 we became curious about what constituents expected from their leaders. Most of the leadership literature talked about what leaders expected of their followers, but we wanted to know what followers expected of their leaders. We wanted to know the values, personal traits, or characteristics people looked for and admired in someone they would be willing to follow.1 Since that time we’ve surveyed tens of thousands of people around the world asking them to select the qualities that they most wanted in a leader. Year after year the results of our research have been striking in their regularity. And year after year they do not vary significantly by demographical, organizational, or cultural dimensions. It has become quite clear, as the data in the table below illustrates, that there are a few essential “character tests” someone (you) must pass before others are willing to grant the designation of leader. Characteristics of Admired Leaders Percentage of Respondents Selecting Each Characteristic Characteristic Percentage Selecting Honest 85 ForwardLooking 70 Inspiring 69 Competent 64 Intelligent 42 Broad-Minded 40 Characteristic Percentage Selecting Dependable 37 Supportive 36 Fair-Minded 35 Straightforward 31 Determined 28 Cooperative 26 Ambitious 26 Courageous 21 Caring 20 Loyal 18 Imaginative 18 Mature 16 Self-Controlled 11 Independent 6 Note: We asked each respondent to select seven characteristics out of twenty, so the total percentage adds up to more than 100 percent. These percentages represent respondents from six continents: Africa, North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. The majority of respondents are from the United States. Although every characteristic received some votes, and therefore each is important to some people, what is most striking and most evident is that only four qualities have continuously received an average of over 60 percent of the votes. Before anyone is going to willingly follow you—or any other leader—he or she wants to know that you are honest, forwardlooking, inspiring, and competent. Before they are going to voluntarily heed your advice, take your direction, accept your guidance, trust your judgment, agree to your recommendations, buy your products, support your ideas, and implement your strategies, people expect that you will measure up to these criteria. And our research documents this consistent pattern across countries, cultures, ethnicities, organizational functions and hierarchies, gender, and educational and age groups. But what do these criteria really mean? Being honest means telling the truth and having ethical principles and clear standards by which you live. People need to believe that your character and integrity are solid. They need to believe that you are worthy of their trust. To be honest with others also requires being honest with yourself and taking stock of what is truly important to you. It means understanding what stirs your personal passion and what’s worth making painful sacrifices for. You have to be candid with yourself about your strengths and limitations. You have to know in your heart that you truly believe what you are saying. Being forwardlooking means having a sense of direction and a concern for the future of the organization. Whether it’s called a vision, a mission, or a personal agenda, the message is clear: You must know where you’re going if you expect others to willingly join you on the journey. But it’s not just your vision that others care to know. They also expect that you’ll be able to connect your image of the future to their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. People won’t willingly follow you until they can see how they share in the future you envision. Being inspiring means sharing the genuine enthusiasm, excitement, and energy you have about the exciting possibilities ahead. People expect you to be positive, upbeat, and optimistic. Your energy signals your personal commitment, and your optimism signals your hope. Others need you to encourage them to reach higher, engage more fully, and put forth greater effort. They need to see and feel your passion for the cause. After all, if you display little or no passion, why should anyone else? If you want others to voluntarily engage in challenging pursuits, then you have to uplift your constituents’ spirits. You have to give them reason to believe that tomorrow will be even better than today. Being competent refers to your track record and your ability to get things done. People have to believe that you know what you are talking about and that you know what you are doing. They want to be confident that you have the skills and abilities to follow through on the promises that you make, but also that you have the self-confidence to admit that you don’t know something but are capable of learning. Competence inspires confidence that you will be able to guide the enterprise, large or small, in the direction in which it needs to go. Leadership competence is different from technical competence. You don’t have to be the most skilled engineer to lead a high-technology company, for instance, but you do need to be able to mobilize the best efforts of your engineers to get extraordinary things done. Being honest, forwardlooking, inspiring, and competent are the qualities that the majority of your constituents look for in you. They are at the core of others’ expectations. They are the basic measures of whether others will consider you to be the leader they’d willingly follow. CREDIBILITY TIES IT ALL TOGETHER These four characteristics of admired leaders—being honest, forwardlooking, inspiring, and competent—have remained constant over more than thirty years of economic growth and decline; the surge in new technology enterprises; the birth of the World Wide Web; the further globalization of business and industry; the ever-changing political environment; the expansion bursting and regeneration of the Internet economy; three wars; and the worst recession since the Great Depression. The relative importance of the most desired qualities has varied somewhat over time, but there has been no change in the fact that these are the four qualities people want most in their leaders. This list of four consistent findings is useful in and of itself. You can use it in selection, recruitment, orientation, assessment, and retention of leaders. You can use it for your own development. You can use it when you go to the polling booth to vote. But there’s a more profound implication revealed by this research. Three of these four key characteristics make up what communications experts refer to as “source credibility.” In assessing the believability of sources of communication—whether from newscasters, salespeople, physicians, priests, business managers, military officers, politicians, or civic leaders—researchers typically evaluate them on three criteria: their perceived trustworthiness, expertise, and dynamism. Those who are rated more highly on these dimensions are considered to be more credible sources of information.2 Notice how strikingly similar these three characteristics are to the essential leader qualities of honest, competent, and inspiring—three of the top four items selected in our research. We’ve found in our investigation of admired leadership qualities that, more than anything, people want to follow leaders who are credible. Credibility is the foundation of leadership. (Indeed, this is so fundamental to understanding the effectiveness of leaders that we’ve even written an entire book on it!3) Above all else, people must be able to believe in their leaders. They must believe that your word can be trusted, that you are personally passionate and enthusiastic about the work that you’re doing, and that you have the necessary knowledge and skill to lead. In addition to the three factors that measure source credibility, the vast majority of constituents have one other expectation of leaders. They expect leaders to be forwardlooking. People must also believe that you know where you are headed and have a vision for the future. Being forwardlooking sets leaders apart from other credible people, and it also makes personal credibility even more important to leaders. Compared to other sources of information (for example, news anchors), leaders do more than reliably report the news. Leaders make the news and interpret the news. This makes your job as a leader different from those in the role of individual contributor. People in other roles are not expected to be forwardlooking, but you are. As a leader, you are expected to have a point of view about the future. You are expected to articulate exciting possibilities about how today’s work will result in tomorrow’s world. This expectation that you should be forwardlooking reveals how important it is for you to be diligent in building and sustaining your personal credibility. Your ability to take strong stands, to challenge the status quo, and to point people in new directions depends on just how credible you are. If you are highly credible, people are much more likely to enlist in your campaign for the future. But if others don’t believe in you, then the message you are delivering about an uplifting and ennobling future rests on a weak and precarious foundation. People may actually applaud your vision of the future but be unwilling to follow you in that direction. They may agree that what you are saying needs to be done, but they just won’t have the faith and confidence that you are the one to lead them there. We refer to this principle as The Kouzes-Posner First Law of Leadership: If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message. CREDIBILITY MATTERS At this point, you might very well say, “So what? I know someone who is in a position of power, or I know people who are enormously wealthy, and I don’t find them credible. Does credibility really matter? Does it make a difference?” It’s a legitimate concern, so we empirically studied the question of whether or not credibility matters in leading others to get extraordinary things done. Because our concern is everyday leadership, we decided to ask questions about leaders who are close to home. While it’s great sport to explore the credibility of top management, elected officials, or other highly visible leaders, we wanted to know more about how credibility influenced the work of the average person in a typical organization. So we asked people to think about the actions of their immediate managers when responding to our survey questions. We asked organization members to rate their immediate managers on the extent to which they exhibited credibility-enhancing behaviors, and then we asked the respondents to indicate how they felt about certain aspects of their work and their organizations. In these studies we find that when people say their immediate manager exhibits 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, and have a sense of ownership of the organization. On the other hand, when people say their manager exhibits low credibility they’re significantly more likely to produce only if they are watched carefully, are 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, and feel unsupported and unappreciated. James Stout, an international MBA student, underscored these findings when he summed up the conclusion he came to after interviewing the leader he most admires. He told us that he realized leadership was a reciprocal relationship. Regardless of level, people look for the same qualities in leaders, he observed. The expectations go both ways, and you get what you expect. “Consequently,” he said, “leaders at the highest levels greatly influence the development of leadership in their organizations by demonstrating qualities that set the tone for emerging leaders.” If leaders in the most senior positions live up to the exemplary standards, he observed, “the organization experiences a constant elevation of strong leadership as senior leaders pull their constituents upward toward similar standards.” A culture of leadership excellence and integrity is created when people at all levels genuinely expect each other to be credible, and they hold each other accountable for the actions that build and sustain credibility. Credibility makes the difference between being an effective leader and being an ineffective one. Credibility will determine whether others want to follow you or not. You must take this personally. The loyalty, commitment, energy, and productivity of your constituents depend on it. And the effect of personal integrity of leaders goes far beyond employee attitudes. It also influences customer and investor loyalty. People are just more likely to stick with you when they know they are dealing with a credible person and a credible institution. In business, and in life, if people don’t believe in you, they won’t stand by you. BELIEVE IT WHEN YOU SEE IT The data confirms that credibility is the foundation of leadership. But what is credibility behaviorally? How do you know it when you see it? In asking this question worldwide, the answer we heard is essentially the same, regardless of how it may be phrased in one company versus another or one country versus another. The universally common refrain is “They do what they say they will do.” Arthur Taute, a registered professional engineer and most recently CEO of Vela VKE (South Africa), said: “Leadership means being absolutely honest and helping others to do as I do, not simply to do what I say.” Credibility, as Arthur points out, doesn’t come from giving orders; it comes from aligning your actions and your words. Indeed, when it comes to deciding whether a leader is believable, you first listen to the words, but then you watch his or her actions. You listen to the talk, and then watch the walk. For example, you hear the promises of resources to support change initiatives, and then you wait to see whether the money and materials follow. A judgment of “credible” is handed down when words and deeds are consonant. This realization leads to a straightforward prescription for establishing credibility. It’s The Kouzes-Posner Second Law of Leadership: DWYSYWD, or Do What You Say You Will Do. This is precisely what Wesley Lord learned from his own personal best leadership experience as the coxswain for the local rowing club. “I would never ask them to do something I wouldn’t be willing to do myself,” he told us. “They knew that if I asked them for something that I would be willing to the same if they asked me.” The Truth Is That Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership. If you are going to lead, you must have a relationship with others that is responsive to their expectations that you are someone they can believe in. If people are going to willingly follow you, it is because they believe you are credible. To be credible in action, you must do what you say you will do. That means that you must be so clear about your beliefs that you can put them into practice every day. The consistent living out of values is a behavioral way of demonstrating honesty and trustworthiness. It proves that you believe in the path you have taken and are progressing forward with energy and determination. We’ll explore both of these expectations more fully in other chapters in this book. TRUTH THREE VALUES DRIVE COMMITMENT Imagine you’re sitting in a meeting with a group of your colleagues. The door to the conference room opens and in walks someone you’ve never met before who says, “Hi, I’m your new leader.” What questions immediately come to mind that you want to ask this person? We presented this scenario in the introduction and use it regularly as part of our ongoing leadership research. People have lots of questions they would want to ask, but by far the most frequently asked is: “Who are you?” People want to know your values and beliefs, what you really care about, and what keeps you awake at night. They want to know who most influenced you, the events that shaped your attitudes, and the experiences that prepared you for the job. They want to know what drives you, what makes you happy, and what ticks you off. They want to know what you’re like as a person and why you want to be their leader. They want to know whether you play an instrument, compete in sports, go to the movies, or enjoy the theater. They want to know about your family, what you’ve done, and where you’ve traveled. They want to understand your personal story. They want to know why they ought to be following you. So if you are the new leader who walks into that room one day, you’d better be prepared to answer the “Who are you?” question. And to answer that question for others, you first have to answer it for yourself. In one of our leadership workshops, our colleague Spencer Clark explained himself to students in the following way: I am the chief learning officer for Cadence Design Systems. I was a division president for Black & Decker and a general manager for General Electric. But these [job titles] are not who I am. If you want to know who I am, you need to understand that I grew up in Kentucky. That I was one of four sons, and we lived on a sharecropper’s farm and slept in a home that had no inside plumbing. Who I am is not simply what I do. Knowing who I am has been enormously helpful in guiding me in making decisions about what I would do and how I would do it. As Spencer makes clear, his job resume says very little about who he is and why he makes the decisions he makes and takes the actions he takes. He knows that there is far more to him than his work history, the titles he’s had, and the positions he’s held. In order for Spencer to become the leader that he is, he had to dig beneath the surface and find out more about those events that shaped him, the beliefs that informed him, and the values that guided him. He also knows that it’s helpful for others to understand those same things before they can commit to his leadership decisions and actions. What’s true for Spencer is true for you. Before you can effectively lead others, you have to understand who you are, where you come from, and the values that guide you. The Truth Is That Values Drive Commitment. You cannot fully commit to something that isn’t important to you—no one can. You can’t fully commit to something that doesn’t fit with who you are and how you see yourself. In order to devote the time, to expend the energy, and to make the sacrifices necessary, you have to know exactly what makes it worth doing in the first place. In one of our workshops, Olivia Lai told us that she was initially a little taken aback when we asked her to write about her personal best leadership experience: “Here I am, at twenty-five years of age, with four years of work experience. How could I possibly have a personal best in leadership?” After further reflection, she realized that, It wasn’t all that hard to figure out what my personal best was and write about it. Even more surprising is that it became clear that leadership is everywhere, it takes place every day, and leadership can come from anyone. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have the title of “manager,” “director,” “CEO,” to go with it. In the end, that’s all they are . . . titles on business cards and company directories. Being a true leader transcends all that. Becoming a leader is a process of internal self-discovery. In order for me to become a leader and become an even better leader, it’s important that I first define my values and principles. If I don’t know what my own values are and determine expectations for myself, how can I set expectations for others? How will I convey confidence, strong will, and empathy? Without looking within myself, it’s not possible for me to look at others and to recognize their potential and help others become leaders. Through her own process of self-discovery, Olivia, like Spencer, realized one of the most fundamental lessons on learning to lead. Becoming a leader begins when you come to understand who you are, what you care about, and why you do what you do. This is a journey that all leaders must take. Your ultimate success in business and in life depends on how well you know yourself, what you value, and why you value it. The better you know who you are and what you believe in, the better you are at making sense of the often incomprehensible and conflicting demands you receive daily. Do this, or do that. Buy this, buy that. Decide this, decide that. Support this, support that. You need internal guidance to navigate the turbulent waters in this stormy world. A clear set of personal values and beliefs is the critical controller in that guidance system. LISTEN TO YOUR INNER SELF Another one of the emerging leaders we interviewed told us exactly why it’s so important to be clear about your beliefs. “You have to understand what you really believe deeply,” she said. “People won’t follow you, or even pay much attention to you, if you don’t have any strong beliefs.” She explained to us in very personal and poignant ways how she had grown up in a culture that stereotyped women and devalued them. For a long time she had, as she phrased it, “ignored my heart and didn’t listen to my own voice.” But as she engaged in her own leadership development she began to ... . . . understand that everyone has beliefs and values, and that in order for people to lead they’ve got to connect with them and be able to express them. This means that I have to let people know and understand what my thoughts are so that I can become a good leader. How can others follow me if I’m not willing to listen to my own inner self? Now, I let others know what I think is important and how hard I’m willing to fight for my values. If you are ever to become a leader whom others willingly follow, you must be known as someone who stands by his or her principles. But, as Spencer, Olivia, and other leaders have discovered for themselves, first you have to listen to your inner self in order to find them. There are a lot of different interests out there competing for your time, your attention, and your approval. Before you listen to those voices, you have to listen to that voice inside that tells you what’s truly important. Only then will you know when to say “yes” and when to say “no”. . . and mean it. Values represent the core of who you are. They influence every aspect of your life: your moral judgments, the people you trust, the appeals you respond to, the way you invest your time and your money. And in turbulent times they provide a source of direction amid all the depressing news and challenging personal adversities. Early on in our research, we had the chance to interview Arlene Blum, the leader of the first all-women’s team to ascend Annapurna. Climbing mountains is clearly a challenging, often treacherous undertaking, so she ought to know what it takes to stay motivated when times get tough. In these kinds of difficult circumstances, Arlene says, “As long as you believe what you’re doing is meaningful, you can cut through the fear and exhaustion and take the next step.” It takes more than toughness to keep going when the going gets tough. It’s also vital that you find purpose and significance in what you do. This is a lesson all leaders must learn. To act with integrity, you must first see clearly. Just as sunlight burns away the morning fog, the more light you shine on what you stand for, what you believe in, and what you care about, the more clearly you’ll see those road signs pointing in the direction you want to go. Clarity of values gives you the confidence to take the right turns, to make the tough decisions, to act with determination, and to take charge of your life. YOU COMMIT TO WHAT FITS It’s vitally important that you understand the power of personal values clarity. It’s important to your individual effectiveness, your leadership effectiveness, and the effectiveness of those you lead. There is a significant measurable impact on people’s performance when values are personally clear. Take a look at Figure 3.1 and see what we discovered.1 Figure 3.1 The Impact of Values Clarity on Commitment Along the vertical axis is the extent to which people report being clear about their organization’s values. Along the horizontal axis is the extent to which these same people report being clear about their own personal values. We correlated these responses with the extent to which people said they were committed to the organization as measured on a scale of 1 (low) to 7 (high). We’ve organized the data into four cells, each representing a level of clarity from low to high on personal and organizational values. The numbers in each of the four cells represent the level of commitment people have to their organizations as it relates to the degree of their clarity about personal and organizational values. Notice the quadrant in which people feel the most committed. It’s the upper right, with a score of 6.26—high clarity about organizational values and high clarity about personal values. Not surprising. We’d all expect that. Now notice the lowest level of commitment. It’s high clarity about organizational values, low clarity about personal—4.87. Actually, that score is not statistically significant from the low-low quadrant—4.90. Finally, look at where the secondhighest level of commitment is with a score of 6.12. It’s low clarity about organizational values but high clarity about personal values. At first, this was somewhat jarring to us. You can see that the impact of being very clear or not about the organization’s values doesn’t seem to make much difference in how committed people are to their organizations. But notice what happens when people are clear on their personal values. First, they are significantly more committed to their organizations, and second, their commitment is not affected by the extent to which they are clear about the organization’s values. There is no statistically significant difference in the responses of those high on both versus those only high on personal values clarity. What does all this mean? Essentially, clarity about personal values has the most significant impact on employees’ feelings about their work and what they’re doing in the workplace. This is not to say that shared values don’t matter. Our research and that of others suggests that they do. People want to be part of something bigger than themselves. What it does say, however, is that people cannot commit fully to anything unless it fits with their own beliefs. In response to a question about the important leadership lessons he learned over his career, Unilever CEO Paul Polman said, “If your values, your personal values, are aligned with the company’s values, you’re probably going to be more successful longer term than if they are not. If they are not, it requires you to be an actor when you go to work or to be a split personality.”2 Being an actor or having a split personality aren’t on the list of attributes of a credible leader, so making sure that your values and the organization’s values are aligned is essential to maintaining your integrity. DISCOVER WHAT MATTERS Elaine Fortier, a Silicon Valley veteran, has experienced the ups and downs, booms and busts of the world of high technology. When we interviewed her, she made the following observation about dealing with the challenges she faced during one of the worst downturns in the economy, “Yes, it’s tough right now, but it’s all part of the adventure. The pioneers crossed the Rocky Mountains in covered wagons, so this is really a walk in the park, isn’t it?” Then she went on to tell us about her own personal challenges and the evolution of her philosophy of leadership. “I realized that there was no magic that was going to happen, she told us. “It was now up to me to decide, ‘What’s my framework for living?”’ After over three decades of leadership research, we can say with absolute certainty that Elaine is one-hundred percent correct—you have to decide what matters to you. The very first step on your leadership development journey is to search for your answer to the question, “What’s my framework for living?” You have to find your own true voice. You cannot speak in someone else’s. You have to speak in your own. You cannot ask someone else to choose your values for you. You have to choose them for yourself. Finding your voice is not like finding your keys. You don’t just go looking for it by rummaging through the drawers in your house and hoping it’ll turn up. English-born poet and organizational consultant David Whyte has written that the “voice throws us back on what we want for our life. It forces us to ask ourselves Who is speaking? Who came to work today? Who is working for what? What do I really care about?”3 What do you really care about? Is it success, wealth, family, freedom, growth, love, power, spirituality, trust, wisdom, health, honesty? None of these? All of these? Other values? In the English language there are between 150 and 250 words that represent values, depending on whose research you follow. None of us can be guided by all of them, so we have to make some choices. Which five, six, or seven of these many possibilities best speak to your strongly held and enduring beliefs? Which serve as your guides in making decisions about which job to take or which organization to join? Which enable you to make the tough calls on things like completing the important work project or attending your child’s school play? There’s an exercise in our workshops in which we give participants a set of values cards.4 Much like a deck of playing cards, each card has only one value written on it. We ask everyone to go through the deck, picking out the cards with values that are most meaningful to them, eventually choosing fifteen. Once they have those in front of them, we ask them to further narrow that list down to their top five values. It forces each person to weigh each value in comparison to all the others. While all are valid (and there are no wrong answers), people see for themselves how their own system of values comes together. Reactions run the gamut of emotions, but everyone who has gone through this exercise gains greater clarity about the values that should guide their actions and decisions. Consider what Sharon Neoh, consultant at Accenture, told us she learned when we challenged her to think about her values: I was quite bothered [at first]. . . . I had never before asked myself when I had last demonstrated one of the values I had circled and found it difficult to find those situations. I came to the realization that I did not have a clear perspective on my list of values. That night, I went back home and looked over the list again and tried to think of situations where I had demonstrated any one of those values and asked myself over and over again whether that was something important to me. This exercise helped me identify values that were important to me. What I can do is identify the values that are important to me and try my best to act consistently against that set of values, understanding that they may evolve in the future as I grow, mature, and experience more of life. Take the time, like Sharon and Elaine did, to discover and identify the values that matter and should guide your decisions and actions. IT’S NOT JUST YOUR VALUES As important as it is that you forthrightly articulate the principles for which you stand, by no means does this suggest that your job is then to get other people to comply with what you say. You are a leader, remember, not a dictator. Leading others is definitely not about getting others to conform to your point of view. Conformity produces compliance, not commitment. Unity is essential, and unity is forged, not forced. Carlo Argiolas, with Medtronic in Italy, explained to us: The first step is to make clear your own personal values and the second step is to listen to others and to observe others in order to understand their values and aspirations. The last step is to communicate and paint a vision that everyone in the proper context can recognize as his or her own vision. The data showing that personal values drive commitment is just as true for your constituents as it is for you. You can’t commit everyone to a list that you came up with in private and then expect them to enthusiastically endorse it. What you espouse, as Carlo points out, must resonate with the aspirations of others. People won’t fully commit to the group and organization if they don’t sense a good fit with who they are and what they believe. There seems to be this myth about leadership that what you are supposed to do is ascend the mountain, gain enlightenment, descend with the tablets, and then proclaim the truth to your followers. Nothing could be more damaging to the work of a leader. Leadership is more often about listening than telling. Your task is to gain consensus on a common cause and a common set of principles. You need to build and affirm a community of shared values. The Truth Is That Values Drive Commitment. You can only fully commit to organizations and other causes when there is a good fit between what you value and what the organization values. That means that to do your best as a leader you need to know who you are and what you care about. You need a set of values that guide your decisions and actions. To discover who you are and what you care about, you need to spend some time on the inner work of a leader —in reflection on finding your voice. And keep in mind that it’s not just your values that matter. What is true for you is true for others: they too must find a fit with who they are and what they value. Credible leaders listen, not just to their own aspirations, but also to the needs and desires of others. Leadership is a relationship, and relationships are built on mutual understanding. TRUTH FOUR FOCUSING ON THE FUTURE SETS LEADERS APART We’ve all had a glimpse of the future. You know, that time when you imagined running your own business, or that dream of traveling to an exotic place, or that bold idea for a game-changing new product, or that burning desire to earn an advanced degree, or that sense of purpose you felt when you signed up for the sustainability campaign, or that calling to join a cause and make this a better planet, or that uplifting sense you had when picturing kids playing in a neighborhood without fear. All of us dream of what might come to pass some day. Leaders take these dreams seriously and act to make them happen. Remember that scenario about the new leader walking into the room and announcing that she was our new leader? The first question people had was, “Who are you?” The second-most-common question people want an answer to is: “What’s your vision?” People do not have this question for their teammates. It’s a question reserved for leaders. People want to know where you’re going. They want to know the kind of future you have in mind. The Truth Is That Focusing On the Future Sets Leaders Apart. The capacity to imagine and articulate exciting future possibilities is the defining competence of leaders. Leaders are custodians of the future. They are concerned about tomorrow’s world and those who will inherit it. They ask, “What’s new? What’s next? What’s going to happen after the current project is completed?” They think beyond what’s directly in front of them, peer into the distance, imagine what’s over the horizon, and move forward toward a new and compelling future. As you make the transition to leading, keep in mind that your constituents want to know your hopes, your dreams, and your vision. They want to know where you plan to take them. They want to share in that glimpse of the future. LEADERS LOOK LONG-TERM Having surveyed thousands of people on what they want in their leaders, in someone they would willingly follow, the quality of being forwardlooking is second only to being honest as their most admired leader quality. On average, 70 percent of respondents select it. In Asia, Europe, and Australia, the preference for forwardlooking is several percentage points higher than it is in the United States. We’ve also asked a similar question about what people look for in their colleagues (someone you would like on your team) and the responses to this question have revealed a telling and vital distinction between leaders and individual contributors. Using the identical list of desirable qualities, the number one requirement of a leader, being honest, was also the top-ranking attribute of a good colleague. But, the second-most-desirable quality of a leader—being forwardlooking—was nowhere near the top of the list for colleagues. In fact, forwardlooking was not even in the top ten attributes of a colleague. It was selected by only 27 percent of the respondents, whereas 70 percent of those same respondents wanted it in a leader. That’s a difference of 43 percentage points! No other quality we’ve studied showed such a dramatic difference between leader and colleague. Moreover, we found, not surprisingly, that the importance of being forwardlooking increased with age, work experience, and level in the organizational hierarchy. For example, while only about one-third of undergraduate college students ranked forwardlooking among their most important attributes, over 90 percent of senior executives had it on their lists. In a related study we found that the desirability of thinking about legacies—an extension of being forwardlooking—is important to the majority of managers at every level but becomes even more important as you move up the ladder of responsibility. Younger leaders, however, rarely stop to reflect on their longterm contributions to society and the workplace. They’re much more concerned about the present. What is the difference between being present-oriented and being futureoriented, and why is it so important for leaders? Take, for example, Angela Gu, when she was in her first year as assistant controller, overseeing the accounts payable function in Finance for Wal-Mart China. While Wal-Mart had opened eleven stores in six cities across China, they had expansion plans to triple the store count and enter into more new cities over the following three years. At that time the Finance Department was set up by city, and Angela could see that if the accounts payable function grew at the same rate as the company expanded they would grow from about two hundred people to over eight hundred people within a few years. She told us how she imagined the challenges and problems this would create for her area, “including the people management, procedural control and compliance, and costs related to personnel, travel, training, and telecommunications.” Anticipating the future challenges the company would face, Angela proposed an alternative to the CFO—a centralization initiative—and received approval to move ahead. The program involved all divisions in the home office and local cities, including human resources, merchandising, and operations, in addition to finance. The effort paid off almost immediately in terms of productivity, improved control, and standardization, and established a platform for future efficiency-driven programs. Within a year the average number of accounts payable associates serving one store was reduced by 40 percent, and within three years, the actual headcount in accounts payable had been reduced by nearly 50 percent, despite the almost four-fold expansion of new stores. Angela explains: The initiative was quite new, with no other precedent to refer to, but the vision of a national accounts payable center excited me. You can always choose to follow whatever you have been doing—which demands from you no extra thinking or efforts—or you can focus on accomplishing something different which would do good for the enterprise. Being forwardlooking paid dividends for Angela and for Wal-Mart. This kind of anticipatory thinking can do the same for you. YOU HAVE TO SPEND MORE TIME IN THE FUTURE The challenge for young and aspiring leaders, like Angela, is to envision the future. Just as she did, you have to look beyond what’s in front of you and imagine the exciting possibilities that the future holds. Yet, in spite of the fact that being forwardlooking is the quality that most separates leaders from individual contributors, it’s something that too few fully appreciate and that too many devote almost no time to developing. If nothing is done to address this shortcoming, it will become a huge barrier to your future success. That’s because the challenge escalates with managerial level. Front-line leaders are expected to anticipate events only about three months down the road. Due to the timelines of their more complex projects, middle-level managers often need to look three to five years into the future. Those in the executive suite must focus on a horizon that’s ten or more years away. For example, the president of a division of an aerospace company told us he was bidding on a project that wouldn’t be completed for eighteen years. If you’re held hostage to the present, there’s no way you’ll be free to lead others to destinations that can’t be reached for many years. Crossing the chasm from individual contributor to leader requires fully embracing the need to develop the capacity to envision the future. Making the transition from average to exemplary leader, regardless of level, requires the dedication to master it.1 And how does a new leader develop the capacity to be forwardlooking? The answer is deceptively simple: spend more time in the future. You have to carve out more time each week to peering into the distance and imagining what might be out there. You have to spend the time today in order to have the time tomorrow. Sounds simple, right? All you have to do is spend time thinking deliberately about the future—anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple of hours a day, depending on your level. The trouble is, it’s not all that easy to do. Even the most experienced and senior executives struggle with it. Here’s a dose of reality: Researchers tell us that most top executives spend only about 3 percent of their time thinking about, and getting others on board with, the critical issues that will shape their business ten or more years down the road.2 That’s not nearly enough time. That’s why you have to be disciplined about this. Michael Hyatt, CEO of the publishing company Thomas Nelson, writes in his blog about why it’s so important for leaders to spend the time to create a compelling vision of the future: Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward. It provides meaning to the day-to-day challenges and setbacks that make up the rumble and tumble of real life. Michael then goes on to talk about how in tough economic times things get very tactical and focused on survival and how decisions become very pragmatic. After a while this short-term approach grinds us down. People lose sight of the bigger picture. Michael points out that: This is where great leadership makes all the difference. Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, “C’mon. We can do this!”3 It is your job as a leader to lift people’s sights and lift people’s spirits. You must remind others, who are often so mired in the day-to-day details of work and life that they lose their bearings, that there is a larger purpose to all this doing. You and they are working hard in order to build something different, to make something new, to create a better future. You are here to make a difference in the world. That’s why it’s important to invest the time today in tomorrow’s future. INSIGHT: EXPLORE YOUR PAST EXPERIENCE As surprising as it might seem, in aiming for the future you need to look back into your past. Looking backward can actually enable you to see farther than if you stare straight ahead. You also enrich your future and give it detail as you recall the richness of your past experiences. This was precisely the lesson realized by Jade Lui, recruitment consultant with Ambition Group, who told us that: “In order to look into the future I first needed to search my past for recurring lifelong themes. This gives me clarity on identifying the big picture but also understanding current trends.” For younger leaders it may be more difficult to look back—there’s just less past to recall—but it’s still important at any age to think about those repeating themes in your life, those messages you keep getting about what matters most. Your central theme in life more than likely wasn’t something that just occurred to you this morning. It’s been there for a long time. You may not have ever explored your past for a persistent and repeating ideal, but if you were to examine the recurring theme in your life, what might you find? What’s been that topic you keep coming back to again and again? What’s been that story you keep telling and retelling? For some it might be a concern for a healthy environment that keeps repeating itself. For others it might be open computer architecture, self-managed investing, the wireless Web, e-commerce, virtual learning, fair housing, affordable health care, safe schools, religious freedom, equal rights, global warming, or any number of possibilities. Search your past to find that theme. In addition to identifying themes in your life, there’s another benefit to looking back before looking ahead: You can gain a greater appreciation for how long it can take to fulfill your aspirations. There are many, many avenues for you to pursue. Indeed, there may actually be no end in sight. In your life you may have many dreams—and probably several that have no endings, but are noble aspirations to always be pursuing. OUTSIGHT: IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES Joe Fox, along with his older brother Avi, has been the founder of two industrychanging companies. Their first company was a pioneering online brokerage called Web Street, which was acquired by E-Trade Group in the early 2000s. Joe believes that you can’t force innovation and that you have to “observe the world with a fresh eye.”4 He describes how he got others to see the possibility that he saw, given the challenge of explaining something that had never existed before: I always use a pad of paper to lay out my five-year vision. With Web Street, I sketched the concept by drawing a computer screen—what you’ll see on it, what advantages it will offer consumers, and the different levels of service we’ll provide. I’d show them what it would look like three years from now, then five years from now. And that was before one line of code had been written. You have to know your product, what the industry is all about, and what you are going to do.5 As one of the leaders we interviewed said to us, “I’m my organization’s futures department.” All leaders should view themselves this way. Because being forwardlooking is the differentiating leadership credibility factor, you need to spend more time reading about, thinking about, and talking about the longterm view. Make it your business to spend time studying the future. Set up a futures research committee to study potential changes and developments in areas affecting your organization. Put together a team to continually track fifty or sixty publications that represent new thoughts on trends in your domain. Ask them to prepare abstracts of articles they think have relevance. A smaller team can then pull the abstracts into reports for use in planning and decision making. Or simply have all the people in your organization regularly clip articles from newspapers, magazines, and websites. Circulate the ideas generated and discuss the impact of trends on your products, services, technologies, and constituents. Use these discussions to help you and your organization develop the ability to think long-term. There are various ways you can classify and categorize the most significant business trends. The World Future Society recommends these six distinct categories: demographics, economics, government, environment, society, and technology to improve your understanding of the world around you.6 Scanning what’s going on today allows you to both look up from the short-term demands and look out toward the future so that you can begin to see how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together to form a picture of the future. FORESIGHT: BE OPTIMISTIC University of Southern California professor and leadership guru Warren Bennis suggests that “for leaders in today’s and tomorrow’s business climate” the appropriate motto is: “only the optimists survive.” Warren writes that: Limits, constraints, and reduced expectations are the conventional prescriptions for our time. True leaders, however, are able to see beyond an anemic zeitgeist in order to sense opportunities that can employ and house a multitude. Optimists have a sixth sense for possibilities that realists can’t or won’t see.7 Being optimistic doesn’t mean failing to face up to reality, hardship, and the struggles associated with getting extraordinary things accomplished. Indeed, the more you understand reality the more prepared you can be to act in ways that allow you to endure and even prosper in adversity. Medical researchers, for example, have found that when confronted with a diagnosis of terminal cancer some people live longer than others—and even longer than expected. Norman Cousins, former editor of Saturday Review and the author of more than twenty books, who himself had to deal with a terminal disease, studied those who beat the medical odds. He wrote about his own experiences and his research into what set apart the group of longer-term survivors, concluding that “They responded with a fierce determination to overcome. They didn’t deny the diagnosis. They denied the verdict that is usually associated with it.”8 The best leaders are like that. They define the reality of our illness, but defy the verdict that we are doomed. Psychologist Martin Seligman has found a dramatic difference between people who react to roadblocks with a sense of futility—pessimists—and those who react with a steely determination to master their destiny—optimists.9 Those who learn to be optimistic about life are far more likely to be successful than those who view the current events through the lens of a pessimist. This means that your outlook on the future, and on life in general, strongly influences you and your group’s success. In order to reach the top of that distant summit, you need to be optimistic, zestful, and energetic. You need to be curious about how things work and search for a deeper meaning and understanding of what’s going on around you. The Truth Is That Focusing On the Future Sets Leaders Apart. Your constituents expect you to know where you’re going and to have a sense of direction. You have to be forwardlooking; it’s the quality that most differentiates leaders from individual contributors. Getting yourself and others focused on the exciting possibilities that the future holds is your special role on the team. Developing the capaci...
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