The Leadership Challenge. Posner Barry Z.

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.”

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      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.

      The Five Practices Make a Difference

      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.

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