Читать книгу The Leadership Challenge - Posner Barry Z. - Страница 7

Exemplary leader behavior makes a profoundly positive difference in people's commitment and motivation, their work performance, and the success of their organizations. That's the definitive conclusion from analyzing responses from nearly three million people around the world using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) to assess how often their leaders engage in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. Those leaders who more frequently use The Five Practices are considerably more effective than their counterparts who use them less frequently.

In these studies, the leader's direct reports complete the LPI indicating how frequently they observe their leader engaging in the specific behaviors associated with The Five Practices. In addition, they respond to ten questions regarding (a) their feelings about their workplace, for example, levels of satisfaction, pride, and commitment, and (b) assessments about their leader on such things as trustworthiness and overall effectiveness. There is an unambiguous relationship between how engaged

Figure 1.1 The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership Impacts the Engagement Level of Direct Reports

people are and how frequently they observe their leaders using The Five Practices, as shown in Figure 1.1. Nearly 96 percent of direct reports who are most highly engaged (i.e., in the top third of the distribution) indicate that their leaders very frequently or almost always use The Five Practices. In contrast, less than 5 percent of direct reports are highly engaged when they indicate that their leaders seldom use The Five Practices (at best, only once in a while). The differential impact is huge.

In addition, respondents provide information about who they are and their organizational context. Multivariate analyses show that individual characteristics and organizational context combined explain less than 1 percent of the distribution connected with the engagement levels of their reports, while The Five Practices account for nearly 40 percent of the variance. How their leaders behave significantly influences engagement, and is independent of who the direct reports are (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, or education), or their circumstance (e.g., position, tenure, discipline, industry, or nationality). How their leader behaves is what makes a difference in explaining why people work hard, their commitment, pride, and productivity.

The more you use The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, the more likely it is that you'll have a positive influence on other people and the organization. That's what all the data adds up to: if you want to have a significant impact on people, on organizations, and on communities, you'd be wise to invest in learning the behaviors that enable you to become the very best leader you can. Moreover, the data clearly shows that how strongly direct reports would “recommend their leader to a colleague” directly links with the extent to which they report their leader using The Five Practices.

Many scholars have documented that leaders who engage in The Five Practices are more effective than those who don't.9 This is true whether the context is inside or outside the United States, in the public or private sector, or within schools, healthcare organizations, business firms, prisons, churches, and so on. Here are just a few examples of the impact of leaders who use The Five Practices more frequently than their counterparts:

▶ Create higher-performing teams

▶ Generate increased sales and customer satisfaction levels

▶ Foster renewed loyalty and greater organizational commitment

▶ Enhance motivation and the willingness to work hard

▶ Facilitate high patient-satisfaction scores and more effectively meet family member needs

▶ Promote high degrees of student and teacher involvement in schools

▶ Enlarge the membership size of their religious congregations

▶ Reduce absenteeism, turnover, and dropout rates

▶ Positively influence recruitment yields

While The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership don't completely explain why leaders and their organizations are successful, it's very clear that engaging in them makes quite a difference no matter who you are or where you are located. How you behave as a leader matters, and it matters a lot. Furthermore, evaluations of the effectiveness of the leader by their direct reports, and others, correlate directly with how frequently The Five Practices are used.

Consider these findings at a macro level. Researchers examined the financial performance of organizations over a five-year period and compared those that constituents rated senior leaders as actively using The Five Practices with organizations whose leaders were significantly less engaged in The Five Practices. The bottom line: net income growth was nearly eighteen times higher, and stock price growth was nearly three times greater for those publicly traded organizations whose leadership strongly engaged in The Five Practices than their counterparts.10