“The Leadership Challenge isn't theory. It's insight based on rigorous and extensive research. And for me, the most profound insight is a very simple one: the importance of defining your own personal values and aligning your leadership style around them. As the leader of a large sales organization, I've seen firsthand how powerful that type of authentic leadership can be at all levels.”
The Leadership Challenge
Sixth Edition
How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations
James M. Kouzes
Barry Z. Posner
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Cover design: Wiley
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Copyright © 2017 by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Introduction
Making Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations
The Leadership Challenge is about how leaders mobilize others to want to get extraordinary things done in organizations. It's about the practices leaders use to transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards. It's about leadership that makes a positive difference in the workplace and creates the climate in which people turn challenging opportunities into remarkable successes.
The publication of this edition of The Leadership Challenge marks thirty years since the book was first published. We've spent nearly four decades together researching, consulting, teaching, and writing about what leaders do when they are at their best and how everyone can learn to become better leaders. We're honored by the reception we've received in the professional and business marketplace and blessed that students, educators, and practitioners continue to find that The Leadership Challenge is both conceptually and practically useful.
We persist in asking today the same basic question we asked in 1982 when we started our journey into understanding exemplary leadership: What did you do when you were at your personal best as a leader? We've talked to men and women, young and old, representing just about every type of organization there is, at all levels, in all functions, from many different places around the world. Their stories, and the behaviors and actions they've described, have resulted in the creation of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® framework described in this book. When leaders do their best, they Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart.
The Leadership Challenge is evidence-based. Analyzing thousands of case studies and millions of survey responses resulted in The Five Practices framework. The hundreds of examples in this book, of real people doing real things, document the practical nature of the model. Each chapter provides fresh and original data on the impact that the behavior of leaders has on engagement and performance.
With each new edition, we get clearer about the leadership actions that make a difference. We reiterate what's still important, discard what's not, and add what's new. We contemporize the framework and freshen up the language and point of view so that the book is highly relevant to current circumstances and conditions. And, we are more authoritatively prescriptive about the best practices of leaders. The more we research and write about leadership, the more confident we become that leadership is within the grasp of everyone. The opportunities for leadership are boundless and boundaryless.
With each new edition, we also get to address a new audience, and sometimes even a new generation of emerging leaders. That opportunity motivates us to collect new cases, examine new research findings, and talk with people we haven't heard from. It encourages us to perform a litmus test of relevance on our results: Does this model of leadership continue to make sense? If we started all over again, would we find new leadership practices? Would we eliminate any of the practices? In this regard, we are aided by the ongoing empirical data provided by the online version of the Leadership Practices Inventory.® This inventory, which assesses The Five Practices, provides more than 400,000 responses annually, and keeps us on guard and on target in identifying the behaviors that make a difference.
We know that all of you face vexing issues that not only make leadership more urgent, but also require you to be more conscious and conscientious about being a leader. Others are looking to you to help them figure out what they should be doing and how they can develop themselves to be leaders. You don't just owe it to yourself to become the best leader you can possibly be. You owe it to your constituents. They are also expecting you to do your best.
How do you become the kind of leader people want to follow? How do you get other people, by free will and free choice, to move forward together in pursuit of a common vision? How do you mobilize others to want to struggle for shared aspirations? These are only some of the important questions we address in The Leadership