Explaining Workplace Engagement and Commitment
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35 Demographics
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States, the public or private sector, or within schools, health care organizations, business firms, prisons, churches, and the like.10 Leaders who use The Five Practices more frequently than their coun- terparts, for example,
• 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 • More successfully represent their units to upper management • Facilitate high patient-satisfaction scores and more effectively
meet family member needs • Promote high degrees of involvement in schools • Enlarge the size of their religious congregations • Increase fundraising results and expand gift-giving levels • Extend the range of their agency’s services • Increase retention, reducing absenteeism and turnover • Positively influence recruitment rates
Over a five-year period, the financial performance of organiza- tions where senior leaders were identified by their constituents as “strongly” engaged in using The Five Practices were compared with those organizations whose leadership was significantly less engaged in The Five Practices.11 The bottom line? Net income growth was nearly eighteen times higher, and stock price growth nearly three times higher, than their counterparts for those publicly traded organizations whose leadership was highly engaged in The Five Practices.
Although The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership don’t completely explain why leaders and their organizations are success- ful, it’s very clear that engaging in them makes quite a difference no
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G E matter who you are or where you are located. How you behave as a
leader matters, and it matters a lot. Embedded in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership are
behaviors that can serve as the basis for learning to lead. We call these The Ten Commitments of Leadership (Table 1.1). They focus on actions that you need to apply to yourself and that you need to take with others. These Ten Commitments serve as the template for explaining, understanding, appreciating, and learning how leaders get extraordinary things done in organizations, and we discuss each of them in depth in Chapters Two through Eleven.
Before delving into The Five Practices and The Ten Commit- ments further, however, we’d be remiss if we didn’t consider leader- ship from the standpoint of the constituent. So, what do people look for in a leader? What do people want from someone whose direction they’d be willing to follow?
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Model the Way
