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
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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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