Читать книгу The Leadership Challenge - Posner Barry Z. - Страница 6

In undertaking their leadership challenges, Brian and Anna seized the opportunity to change business as usual. And while their stories are exceptional, they are not unlike countless others. We've been conducting original global research for over thirty years, and we've discovered that such achievements are commonplace. When we ask leaders to tell us about their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences – experiences that they believe are their individual standards of excellence – there are thousands of success stories just like Brian's and Anna's. We've found them in profit-based firms and nonprofits, agriculture and mining, manufacturing and utilities, banking and healthcare, government and education, and the arts and community service. These leaders are employees and volunteers, young and old, women and men. Leadership knows no racial or religious bounds, no ethnic or cultural borders. Leaders reside in every city and every country, in every function and every organization. We find exemplary leadership everywhere we look. We've also found that in excellent organizations, everyone, regardless of title or position, is encouraged to act like a leader. In these places, people don't just believe that everyone can make a difference; they act in ways to develop and grow people's talents, including their leadership. They don't subscribe to the many myths that keep people from developing their leadership capabilities and organizations from creating leadership cultures.4

One of the greatest myths about leadership is that some people have “it” and some don't. A corollary myth is that if you don't have “it,” then you can't learn “it.” Neither could be further from the empirical truth. After reflecting on their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences, people come to the same conclusion as Tanvi Lotwala, revenue accountant at Bloom Energy: “All of us are born leaders. We all have leadership qualities ingrained. All that we need is polishing them up and bringing them to the forefront. It is an ongoing process to develop ourselves as a leader, but unless we take on the leadership challenges presented to us on a daily basis, we cannot become better at it.”

We first asked people in the early 1980s to tell us what they did when they were at their “personal best” in leading others, and we continue to ask this question of people around the world. After analyzing thousands of these leadership experiences, we discovered, and continue to find, that regardless of the times or settings, individuals who guide others along pioneering journeys follow surprisingly similar paths. Although each experience was unique in its individual expression, there were clearly identifiable behaviors and actions that made a difference. When making extraordinary things happen in organizations, leaders engage in what we call The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership®:

▶ Model the Way

▶ Inspire a Shared Vision

▶ Challenge the Process

▶ Enable Others to Act

▶ Encourage the Heart

These practices are not the private purview of the people we studied. Nor do they belong to a few select shining stars. Leadership is not about personality. It's about behavior. The Five Practices are available to anyone who accepts the leadership challenge – the challenge of taking people and organizations to places they have never been before. It is the challenge of moving beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary.

The Five Practices framework is not an accident of a special moment in history. It has passed the test of time. While the context of leadership has changed dramatically over the years, the content of leadership has not changed much at all. The fundamental behaviors and actions of leaders have remained essentially the same, and they are as relevant today as they were when we began our study of exemplary leadership. The truth of each individual Personal-Best Leadership Experience, multiplied thousands of times, and substantiated empirically by millions of respondents and hundreds of scholars, establishes The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership as an “operating system” for leaders everywhere.

In the remainder of this chapter, we introduce each of The Five Practices and provide brief examples that demonstrate how leaders, just like Brian and Anna, across a variety of circumstances use them to make extraordinary things happen. When you explore The Five Practices in depth in Chapters Three through Twelve, you'll find scores of illustrations from the real-life experiences of people who have taken the leadership challenge.

Model the Way

Titles are granted, but it's your behavior that earns you respect. When Terry Callahan asks, “How can I help you?” he means it. One example was while vice president for Miller Valentine Group, a real estate solution provider, they needed to make an important community grand-opening event happen in record time and it required an “all hands on deck” effort. What surprised the team the most was when Terry removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and literally got down and dirty as he started mulching the landscape. “Terry taught me that leadership is not about titles and ranks,” said one of his direct reports, “but about personal responsibility and setting a positive example.”5

This sentiment reverberated across all the cases we collected. “At the end of the day,” Toni Lejano, human resources manager at Cisco, recalled from her Personal-Best Leadership Experience, “leadership is all about how you behave that makes a difference.” Exemplary leaders know that if they want to gain commitment and achieve the highest standards, they must be models of the behavior they expect of others.

To effectively Model the Way, you must first be clear about your own guiding principles. You must clarify values by finding your voice. When you understand who you are and what your values are, then you can give voice to those values. As Alan Spiegelman, wealth management advisor with Northwestern Mutual, explained: “Before you can be a leader of others, you need to know clearly who you are and what your core values are. Once you know that, then you can give your voice to those values and feel comfortable sharing them with others.”

Arpana Tiwari, senior manager with one of the world's largest e-commerce retailers, found that “the more I spoke with others about my values, the clearer they became for me.” She realized, however, that her values weren't the only ones that mattered. Everyone on the team has principles that guide their actions and, as a leader, you must affirm the shared values of the group. This requires getting everyone involved in creating the values. Doing so, Arpana observed, “makes it relatively easy to model the values that everyone has agreed to.” Another benefit she realized was that “it is also less difficult to confront people when they make decisions that are not aligned. When a value is violated, leaders have to do or say something or they run the risk of sending a message that this is not important.” Therefore, leaders must set the example. Deeds are far more important than words when constituents want to determine how serious leaders really are about what they say. Words and deeds must be consistent.

Inspire a Shared Vision

People describe their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences as times when they imagined an exciting, highly attractive future for their organizations. They had visions and dreams of what could be. They had absolute and total personal faith in their dreams, and they were confident in their abilities to make those extraordinary things happen. Every organization, every social movement, begins with a vision. It is the force that creates the future.

Leaders envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. You need to have an appreciation of the past and a clear image of what the results should look like even before starting any project, much as an architect draws a blueprint or an engineer builds a model. As Ajay Aggrawal, information technology (IT) project manager with Oracle, said, “You have to connect to what's meaningful to others and create the belief that people can achieve something grand. Otherwise, people may fail to see how their work is meaningful and their contributions fit into the big picture.”

You can't command commitment; you have to inspire it. You have to enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations. Stephanie Capron, Ritzman Pharmacies vice president of human resources, told us how this family business, with over twenty-five locations, asked people within each location and every department to create a vision board of what they saw the future looking like, and then brought all of these together to create a shared vision (and new brand). “We painted a big picture,” she said, “and got everyone to see that picture so they could understand what great service looked and felt like, and their part in it.”6 Too many people think that the leader's job is to come up with the vision when the reality is that people, like those at Ritzman Pharmacies, want to be involved in the process. This grassroots approach is much more effective than preaching one person's perspective.

In these times of rapid change and uncertainty, people want to follow those who can see beyond today's difficulties and imagine a brighter tomorrow. As Oliver Vivell, senior director, corporate development at SAP, points out, “Others have to see themselves as part of that vision and as able to contribute in order to embrace the vision and make it their own.” Leaders forge unity of purpose by showing their constituents how the dream is a shared dream and how it fulfills the common good.

When you express your enthusiasm and excitement for the vision, you ignite that same passion in others. As Amy Matson Drohan, ON24's senior customer success manager, reflected on her Personal-Best Leadership Experience, she observed that: “You can't proselytize a vision that you don't full-heartedly believe.” Ultimately, she said, “The leader's excitement shines through and convinces the team that the vision is worthy of their time and support.”

Challenge the Process

Challenge is the crucible for greatness. Every single personal-best leadership case involved a change from the status quo. Not one person achieved a personal best by keeping things the same. Regardless of the specifics, they all involved overcoming adversity and embracing opportunities to grow, innovate, and improve.

Leaders are pioneers willing to step out into the unknown. However, leaders aren't the only creators or originators of new products, services, or processes. Innovation comes more from listening than from telling, and from constantly looking outside of yourself and your organization for new and innovative products, processes, and services. You need to search for opportunities by seizing the initiative and by looking outward for innovative ways to improve.

Leaders don't sit idly by waiting for fate to smile upon them; they venture out. Taking risks was what Srinath Thurthahalli Nagaraj recalled about his personal-best (and first) leadership experience in India with Flextronics. “When things did not work as expected,” Srinath explained, “we kept on experimenting and challenging one another's ideas. You have to make room for failure and more importantly the opportunity to learn from failure.” By making something happen, Srinath was able to move the project forward.

Because innovation and change involve experimenting and taking risks, your main contribution will be to create a climate for experimentation, the recognition of good ideas, the support of those ideas, and the willingness to challenge the system. One way of dealing with the potential risks and failures of experimentation is by constantly generating small wins and learning from experience. Pierfrancesco Ronzi, as the London-based engagement manager with McKinsey and Company, recalled how successfully turning around the credit process for a banking client in North Africa meant breaking the project down into parts so that they could find a place to start, determine what would work, and see how they could learn in the process of moving forward. “Showing them that we were able to make something happen,” he said, “was a significant boost to their confidence in the project and their willingness to stay involved.”

There's a strong correlation between the process of learning and the approach leaders take to making extraordinary things happen. Leaders are always learning from their errors and failures. Life is the leader's laboratory, and exemplary leaders use it to conduct as many experiments as possible. Kinjal Shah, senior manager at Quisk, told us how his personal best “taught me a lot. I stumbled at places, many times, and got up, dusted myself off, learned from it and tried to do better the next time around. I learned a lot, and the experience definitely made me a better leader.”

Enable Others to Act

Grand dreams don't become significant realities through the actions of a single person. Achieving greatness requires a team effort. It requires solid trust and enduring relationships. It requires group collaboration and individual accountability, which begins, as Sushma Bhope, co-founder of Stealth Technology Startup, appreciated, “by empowering those around you.” She concluded, just as many others had when reviewing their personal-best experiences, that “no one could have this done this alone. It was essential to be open to all ideas and to give everyone a voice in the decision-making process. The one guiding principle on the project was that the team was larger than any individual on the team.”

Leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. You have to engage all those who must make the project work – and in some way, all who must live with the results. General Wendy Masiello, director of the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency, articulated the importance of being “one team, one voice” to over 600 leaders at their World Wide Training Conference. To make this point, she asked everyone who had contracts with Lockheed Martin to stand. A third of the room stood. She said, “Look around the room at the people you need to team with during this conference. While in sessions sit together, meet together, and share your experiences and expertise.” She then asked those to stand who worked with Boeing, and then with Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and the like. Each time, she spoke the same message and you could hear the sighs as people recognized how they had not been operating as “One Team with One Voice.” As Wendy remarked, “This will only be achieved when we have developed greater relationships with one another.”7

Leaders appreciate that constituents don't perform at their best or stick around for very long if they feel weak, dependent, or alienated. When you strengthen others by increasing self-determination and developing competence, they are more likely to give it their all and exceed their own expectations. Omar Pualuan, head of engineering at RVision, reflecting on his Personal-Best Leadership Experience, realized that “letting each member of the team contribute to the project plan and make it their own was the most important tool for success.”

Focusing on serving others' needs rather than one's own builds trust in a leader. The more people trust their leaders, and each other, the more they take risks, make changes, and keep moving ahead. Leaders have to create an environment where, as Ana Sardeson, materials program manager at Nest, told us, “individuals are comfortable with voicing their opinions, because then the team feels empowered to take action. This level of comfort with decision making is paramount to creating a space that is conducive to collaboration.” She explained: “When the conversation shifts from a silo to an open and collaborative space, relationships become stronger and more resilient.” When people are trusted and have more information, discretion, and authority, they're much more likely to use their energies to produce extraordinary results.

Encourage the Heart

The climb to the top is arduous and steep, and people become exhausted, frustrated, and disenchanted, and are often tempted to give up. Genuine acts of caring draw people forward, which is an important lesson Denise Straka, vice president, corporate insurance with Calpine, took away from her Personal-Best Leadership Experience: “People want to know that their managers believe in them and in their abilities to get a job done. They want to feel valued by their employers, and acknowledging an accomplishment is a great way to demonstrate their value.”

Leaders recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence. It can be one to one or with many people. It can come from dramatic gestures or simple actions. It can come from informal channels, just as well as through the formal hierarchy. Eakta Malik, senior clinical research associate with a global medical device company, realizing that many people didn't feel sufficiently appreciated, and lacked a sense of team cohesiveness, organized some company-sponsored happy hours and team events, designed “for the team to unwind, get to know each other on a personal level, and to create a spirit of a community.” She publicly acknowledged her teammates' hard work in bi-weekly meetings, which, she explained, “really lightens up the mood. I used to think that having praise on a project looks better when it comes from a director/manager, but I learned that praising someone doesn't have to be connected with having a title for it to be meaningful.”

Being a leader requires showing appreciation for people's contributions and creating a culture of celebrating the values and victories by creating a spirit of community. One lesson that Andy Mackenzie, chief operating officer with BioCardia, learned from his Personal-Best Leadership Experience was to “make sure that you and the team are having fun. Every day won't be fun, but if it's all drudgery, then it's hardly worth getting out of bed for.”

Encouragement is, curiously, serious business because it's how you visibly and behaviorally link rewards with performance. Celebrations and rituals, when done in an authentic way and from the heart, build a strong sense of collective identity and community spirit that can carry a group through extraordinarily tough times. As Deanna Lee, director of marketing strategy with MIG, told us: “By bringing a team together after an important milestone, it reinforces the fact that more can be accomplished together than apart. Engaging one another outside of the work setting also increases personal connection, which builds trust, improves communication, and strengthens the bonds within the team.”

Recognitions and celebrations need to be personal and personalized. As Eddie Tai, project director with Pacific Eagle Holdings, realized, “There's no way to fake it.” In telling us about his experiences, he noted, “Encouraging the Heart might very well be the hardest job of any leader because it requires the most honesty and sincerity.” Yet this leadership practice, he maintained, “can have the most significant and long-lasting impact on those it touches and inspires.”

✭✭✭

These five leadership practices – Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart – provide an operating system for what people are doing as leaders when at they are at their best, and there's abundant empirical evidence that these leadership practices matter. Hundreds of studies have reported that The Five Practices make a positive difference in the engagement and performance of people and organizations.8 This is highlighted in the next section, and more of the research supporting this operating system is reported in subsequent chapters.