Percentage of Respondents Selecting Each Characteristic
Characteristic 1987 1995 2002 2007 2012
HONEST 83 88 88 89 89
FORWARD-
LOOKING
62 75 71 71 71
COMPETENT 67 63 66 68 69
INSPIRING 58 68 65 69 69
Intelligent 43 40 47 48 45
Broad-minded 37 40 40 35 38
Fair-minded 40 49 42 39 37
Dependable 33 32 33 34 35
Supportive 32 41 35 35 35
Straightforward 34 33 34 36 32
Cooperative 25 28 28 25 27
Determined 17 17 23 25 26
Courageous 27 29 20 25 22
Ambitious 21 13 17 16 21
Caring 26 23 20 22 21
Loyal 11 11 14 18 19
Imaginative 34 28 23 17 16
Mature 23 13 21 5 14
Self-Controlled 13 5 8 10 11
Independent 10 5 6 4 5
Note: These percentages represent respondents from six continents: Africa,
North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. The majority of
respondents are from the United States. Because we asked people to select
seven characteristics, the total adds up to more than 100 percent.
TABLE 1.2 Characteristics of Admired Leaders
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Although every characteristic receives some votes, meaning that each is important to some people, what is most evident and striking is that over time, four, and only four, have always received more than 60 percent of the votes (with the exception of Inspiring in 1987). And these same four have consistently been ranked at the top across different countries.14
What people most look for in a leader (a person whom they would be willing to follow) has been constant over time. And our research documents that this pattern does not vary across countries, cultures, ethnicities, organizational functions and hierarchies, genders, levels of education, and age groups. For people to follow someone willingly, the majority of constituents believe the leader must be
• Honest • Forward-looking • Competent • Inspiring
These investigations of desired leader attributes demonstrate consistent and clear relationships with what people say and write about their personal-best leadership experiences. The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership and the behaviors of people whom others think of as exemplary leaders are complementary perspectives on the same subject. When they’re performing at their peak, leaders are doing more than just getting results. They’re also responding to the expectations of their constituents.15
As the themes of being honest, forward-looking, competent, and inspiring, are woven into the subsequent chapters on The Five Prac- tices, you’ll see in more detail how exemplary leaders respond to the expectations of their constituents. For example, leaders cannot
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G E Model the Way without being seen as honest. The leadership practice
Inspire a Shared Vision involves being forward-looking and inspir- ing. When leaders Challenge the Process, they also enhance the perception that they’re dynamic and competent. Trustworthiness, often a synonym for honesty, plays a major role in how leaders Enable Others to Act, as does the leader’s own competency. Likewise, leaders who recognize and celebrate significant accomplishments— who Encourage the Heart—show inspiration and positive energy, which increases their constituents’ understanding of the commit- ment to the vision and values. When leaders demonstrate capacity in all of The Five Practices, they show others they have the compe- tence to make extraordinary things happen.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: CREDIBILITY IS THE FOUNDATION
The top four characteristics—honest, forward-looking, competent, and inspiring—have remained constant in the ever-changing and turbulent social, political, and economic environment of the past thirty years. The relative importance of each has varied somewhat over time, but there has been no change in the fact that these are the four qualities people want most in their leaders. Whether they believe that their leaders are true to these values is another matter, but what they would like from them has remained the same.
These four consistent characteristics are descriptively useful in and of themselves—but there’s a more profound implication revealed by these data. Three of these four key characteristics make up what communications experts refer to as “source credibility.” In assessing the believability of sources of communication—whether news
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reporters, salespeople, physicians, or priests; whether business man- agers, military officers, politicians, or civic leaders—researchers typi- cally evaluate them on three criteria: their perceived trustworthiness, their expertise, and their dynamism. People who are rated more highly on these dimensions are considered by others to be more credible sources of information.16
Notice how remarkably similar these three characteristics are to the essential leader qualities of being honest, competent, and inspir- ing—three of the top four items continually selected in surveys. Link the theory to the data about admired leader qualities, and the strik- ing conclusion is that people want to follow leaders who are, more than anything, credible. Credibility is the foundation of leadership. Constituents must be able, above all else, to believe in their leaders. For them to willingly follow someone else, they must believe that the leader’s word can be trusted, that she is personally passionate and enthusiastic about the work, and that she has the knowledge and skill to lead.
Constituents also must believe that their leader knows where they’re headed and has a vision for the future. An expectation that their leaders be forward-looking is what sets leaders apart from other credible individuals. Compared to other sources of information (for example, journalists and TV news anchors), leaders must do more than be reliable reporters of the news. Leaders make the news, inter- pret the news, and make sense of the news. Leaders are expected to have a point of view about the future and to articulate exciting pos- sibilities. Constituents want to be confident that their leaders know where they’re going.
Even so, although compelling visions are necessary for leader- ship, if you as a leader are not credible, the message rests on a weak and precarious foundation. You must therefore be ever diligent in guarding your credibility. Your ability to take strong stands,
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your being highly credible. You can never take your credibility for granted, regardless of the times or of your expertise or authority. If you ask others to follow you to some uncertain future––a future that may not be realized in their lifetime––and if the journey is going to require sacrifice, isn’t it reasonable that constituents should believe in you?
The consistency and pervasiveness of these findings about the characteristics of admired leaders––people who would be willingly followed––are the rationale for The Kouzes-Posner First Law of Leadership:
If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message.
When we’ve surveyed people about the extent to which their immediate manager exhibited credibility-enhancing behaviors, the results strongly supported this “law.”17 When people perceive their immediate manager to have high credibility, they’re significantly more likely to feel proud about their organization, feel a high degree of team spirit, feel a strong sense of ownership and commitment to the organization, and be motivated by shared values and intrinsic factors. What happens when people don’t feel that their immediate manager has much credibility is that they start looking for other jobs, they feel unsupported and underappreciated, and they express being motivated primarily by external factors like money and ben- efits (which are never enough). Clearly, credibility makes a differ- ence, and leaders must take this personally. Loyalty, commitment, energy, and productivity depend on it. Consider for a moment what researchers studying soldiers serving in “hot-combat” zones discov- ered about what it takes to influence people to risk injury and even
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death to achieve the organization’s objectives. Soldiers’ perceptions of their leader’s credibility, the evidence shows, determines the actual extent of influence that leader can exercise.18
The data confirm that credibility is the foundation of leadership. But what is credibility behaviorally? In other words, how do you know it when you see it?
We’ve asked this question of tens of thousands of people around the globe, and the response is essentially the same, regardless of how it may be phrased in one company versus another or one country versus another. Here are some of the common phrases people use to describe credible leaders:
“They practice what they preach.” “They walk the talk.” “Their actions are consistent with their words.” “They put their money where their mouth is.” “They follow through on their promises.” “They do what they say they will do.”
The last is the most frequent response. When it comes to decid- ing whether a leader is believable, people first listen to the words, then they watch the actions. They listen to the talk, then they watch the walk. They listen to the promises of resources to support change initiatives, then they wait to see if the money and materials follow. They hear the pledge to deliver, then they look for evidence that the commitments are met. A judgment of “credible” is handed down when words and deeds are consonant. If people don’t see consistency, they conclude that the leader is, at best, not really serious or, at worst, an outright hypocrite. If leaders espouse one set of values but person- ally practice another, people find them to be duplicitous. If leaders
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with their livelihood and even their lives. This realization leads to a straightforward prescription for the
most significant way to establish credibility. We refer to it as The Kouzes-Posner Second Law of Leadership:
You build a credible foundation of leadership foundation when you DWYSYWD—Do What You Say You Will Do.
DWYSYWD has two essential parts: say and do. The practice of Model the Way links directly to these two dimensions of the behavioral definition of credibility. Modeling is about clarifying values and setting an example for others based on those values. The consistent living out of values is the way leaders demonstrate their honesty and trustworthiness. It’s what gives them the moral author- ity to lead. And that’s where we begin our discussion of The Five Practices. In the next two chapters, we examine the principles and behaviors that bring Model the Way to life.
