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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.

A Field Guide for Leaders

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 Challenge. Think of the book as a field guide to take along on your leadership journey. Think of it as a manual you can consult when you want advice and counsel on how to make things happen and move forward.

Chapter One offers two case studies about Personal-Best Leadership Experiences. These stories took place in dissimilar locations and industries, involving different functions, people, and styles, but they both illustrate how The Five Practices apply whenever you accept the challenge of leadership. The chapter continues with an overview of The Five Practices and illustrates empirically that these leadership practices make a difference.

Asking leaders about their personal bests is important, but it's only half the story. Leadership is a relationship between leaders and followers. A more complete picture of leadership develops when you understand what people look for in someone they would willingly follow. In Chapter Two, we reveal the characteristics people value most in their leaders and share the voices of people explaining why these are important.

The ten chapters that follow describe the Ten Commitments of Leadership – the essential behaviors that leaders employ to make extraordinary things happen – and explain the conceptual principles that support each of The Five Practices. We offer evidence from our research, and that of others, to support the principles, provide examples of real people who demonstrate each practice in real life, and prescribe specific recommendations on what you can do to make each practice your own. A Take Action section concludes each of these chapters, suggesting what you need to do to make this leadership practice an ongoing and natural part of your behavioral and attitudinal repertoire. Whether the focus is your own learning or the development of your constituents – your direct reports, team, peers, manager, community members, and the like – you can take immediate action on every one of our recommendations. They don't require a budget or approval from anyone. They just require your personal commitment and discipline.

In Chapter Thirteen, we call on everyone to accept personal responsibility to be a role model for leadership. Through six editions, we continue to champion the view that leadership is everyone's business. The first place to look for leadership is within yourself. Accepting the leadership challenge requires reflection, practice, humility, and taking advantage of every opportunity to make a difference. As we have in every edition, we close with this conclusion: Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.

We recommend that you first read Chapters One and Two, but after that there is no sacred order to proceeding through the rest of this book. Go wherever your interests are. We wrote this material to support you in your leadership development. Just remember that each practice and commitment of leadership is essential. Although you might skip around in the book, you can't skip any of the fundamentals of leadership.

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The domain of leaders is the future. The work of leaders is change. The most significant contribution leaders make is not to today's bottom line; it is to the long-term development of people and institutions so they can adapt, change, prosper, and grow. Our ongoing aspiration is that this book contributes to the revitalization of organizations, to the creation of new enterprises, to the renewal of healthy communities, and to greater respect and understanding in the world. We also fervently hope that it enriches your life and that of your community and your family.

Leadership is important, not just in your career and within your organization, but in every sector, in every community, and in every country. We need more exemplary leaders, and we need them more than ever. So much extraordinary work needs to be done. We need leaders who can unite us and ignite us.

Meeting the leadership challenge is a personal – and a daily – challenge for everyone. We know that if you have the will and the way to lead, you can. You supply the will. We'll do our best to keep supplying the way.

James M. Kouzes

Orinda, California

Barry Z. Posner

Berkeley, California

April 2017