The Leadership Challenge. Posner Barry Z.

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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

      The Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership

Embedded in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership are behaviors that can serve as the basis for becoming an exemplary leader. We call these The Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership (Table 1.1). They focus on behaviors and actions you need to be comfortable with engaging in. These ten commitments serve as the template for explaining, understanding, appreciating, and learning how leaders get extraordinary things done in organizations, and each of them is discussed in depth in Chapters Three through Twelve. Before we go into depth on each of these commitments, let's next consider leadership from the standpoint of the constituent. Leadership, after all, is a relationship. What do people look for in a leader? What do people want from someone whose direction they'd be willing to follow?

Table 1.1 The Five Practices and Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership

      Copyright © 1987 –2017. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. The Leadership Challenge. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce for educational purposes, contact the publisher, John Wiley & Sons.

      Chapter 2

      Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership

      The inescapable conclusion from analyzing thousands of Personal-Best Leadership Experiences is that everyone has a story to tell. Moreover, these experiences are much more similar in terms of actions, behaviors, and processes than they are different, regardless of context. The data clearly challenges the myths that leadership is something that you find only at the highest levels of organizations and society and that it's something reserved for only a handful of charismatic men and women. The notion that there are only a few great people who can lead others to greatness is just plain wrong. Likewise, it is wrong to suggest that leaders come only from large, or small, or already great, or new organizations, or from established economies, or from certain industries, functions, or disciplines. The truth is leadership is an identifiable set of skills and abilities that are available to anyone. It is because there are so many – not so few – leaders that extraordinary things happen on a regular basis in organizations, especially in times of great uncertainty.

      Another crucial truth that weaves itself throughout every situation and every leadership action is that Personal-Best Leadership Experiences are never stories about solo performances. Leaders never make extraordinary things happen all by themselves. Leaders mobilize others to want to struggle for shared aspirations, and this means that, fundamentally, leadership is a relationship. Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. You can't have one without the other. To lead effectively you have to appreciate fully the fundamental dynamics of the leader-constituent relationship. A leader- constituent relationship characterized by fear and distrust will never produce anything of lasting value. A relationship characterized by mutual respect and confidence will overcome the greatest adversities and leave a legacy of significance.

      That is precisely what Yamin Durrani told us about his relationship with СКАЧАТЬ