PRACTICES OF EXEMPLARY LEADERSHIP
In undertaking the transformation at Zeno, Barby Siegel seized the opportunity to change business as usual. And although Barby’s story is exceptional, it is not singular. We’ve been conducting original global research for more than thirty years, and we’ve discovered that such achievements are actually commonplace. When we ask people to tell us about their personal-best leadership experiences—experi- ences that they believe are their individual standards of excellence— there are thousands of success stories just like Barby’s.2 We’ve found them in profit-based firms and nonprofits, agriculture and mining, manufacturing and utilities, banking and health care, government and education, the arts and community service, and many, many others. These leaders are employees and volunteers, young and old, women and men. Leadership knows no racial or religious bounds, no ethnic or cultural borders. Leaders reside in every city and every country, in every function and every organization. We find exem- plary leadership everywhere we look.
And we’ve also found that in the best organizations, everyone, regardless of title or position, is encouraged to act like a leader. That’s because in these places, people don’t just believe that everyone can make a difference; they act in ways to develop and grow people’s talents, including their leadership capabilities. Joon Chin Fum-Ko, director of people development and engagement at Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, underscores this thinking when she explains how they are “working to build an organization and culture where everyone feels that they are leaders, regardless of what they do, and appreciates that what each one of us does has an impact, even a legacy.”
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We first asked people in the early 1980s to tell us what they did when they were at their “personal best” in leading others, and we continue to ask this question of people around the world. After analyzing thousands of these leadership experiences, we discovered, and continue to find, that regardless of the times or setting, people who guide others along pioneering journeys follow surprisingly similar paths. Although each experience was unique in its individual expression, there were clearly identifiable behaviors and actions that made a difference. When making extraordinary things happen in organizations, leaders engage in what we call The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. They
• Model the Way • Inspire a Shared Vision • Challenge the Process • Enable Others to Act • Encourage the Heart
These leadership practices are not the private property of the people we studied. Nor do they belong to a few select shining stars. Leadership is not about who you are; it’s about what you do. The Five Practices are available to anyone who accepts the leadership challenge—the challenge of taking people and organizations to places they have never been before, of doing something that has never been done before, and of moving beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Although the context of leadership has changed dramatically since we first began our research thirty years ago, the content of leadership has not changed much at all. The Five Practices frame- work has passed the test of time. Our research tells us that the fundamental behaviors and actions of leaders have remained
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G E essentially the same and are as relevant today as they were when we
first began our study of exemplary leadership. You’ve already learned how one leader (Barby Siegel) used The
Five Practices to lead her colleagues and organization to greatness, and how she and they are not ready to rest on their laurels. In the remainder of this chapter, we briefly introduce each of The Five Practices and provide short examples that demonstrate how leaders across a variety of circumstances use them to make the extraordinary happen. When you explore The Five Practices in depth in Chapters Two through Eleven, you’ll find over a hundred more examples from the real-life experiences of people who have taken the leadership challenge.
Model the Way
Titles are granted, but it’s your behavior that earns you respect. This sentiment was shared across all the cases we collected. David Kim, senior operations manager with Siemens Ultrasound, reflecting on his personal-best leadership experience, remarked that “Everybody is a leader whether you supervise a group of people or not. Even as an individual contributor when I transitioned into the corporate world from the army, I continued to display leadership and take initiative to get the job done. Titles don’t make you a leader. It’s how you behave that makes a difference.” Exemplary leaders know that if they want to gain commitment and achieve the highest standards, they must be models of the behavior they expect of others.
To effectively Model the Way, you must first be clear about your own guiding principles. You must clarify values by finding your voice. Dave Halvorson, staff engineer with Intel, observed that “you do not need to be a manager with direct reports to be a leader, but you do have to know what your values and guiding principles are.” Alan
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Spiegelman, veteran wealth management adviser with Northwestern Mutual, reinforced Dave’s point when he told us, “Before you can be a leader of others, you need to know clearly who you are and what your core values are. Once you know that, then you can give those values a voice and feel comfortable sharing them with others.” But your values aren’t the only values. On every team, and in every organization and community, others also feel strongly about matters of principle. As a leader, you also must affirm the shared values of the group.
Eloquent speeches about common values aren’t nearly enough, however. Leaders’ deeds are far more important than their words when constituents want to determine how serious leaders really are about what they say. Words and deeds must be consistent. Exem- plary leaders set the example by aligning actions with shared values. Through their daily actions, they demonstrate their deep commit- ment to their beliefs and those of the organization. Dr. Jiangwan Majeti’s experience as research project manager at Amgen under- scores this observation: “Leading by example is more effective than leading by command. If people see that you work hard while preach- ing hard work, they are more likely to follow you.” One of the best ways to prove that something is important is by doing it yourself and setting an example. Jiangwan’s actions spoke volumes about how the team needed to “take ownership of things they believed in and valued,” because there wasn’t anything that she asked others to do that she wasn’t willing to do herself.
Inspire a Shared Vision
People describe their personal-best leadership experiences as times when they imagined an exciting, highly attractive future for their organizations. They had visions and dreams of what could be. They
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confident in their abilities to make extraordinary things happen. Every organization, every social movement, begins with a dream. The dream, or vision, is the force that creates the future. For Taryn Walker, product manager at Kaiser Permanente, this meant “remain- ing focused on the long-term vision and constantly reminding others (often when they became discouraged) of the ultimate outcome and how important this was.”
Leaders envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. You need to make something happen, to change the way things are, to create something that no one else has ever created before. Much as an architect draws a blueprint or an engineer builds a model, you need to have a clear vision of what the results should look like before starting any project. You also have to be able to connect it to the past, to the history that got you to where you are. In starting the “Thinker’s Club” at Juniper Networks, for example, Vittal Krishnamurthy imagined “that one day it would be a hub for innovative thinking, where people brainstorm on some of the most difficult issues and seek innovative solutions, and the go-to place where creative solutions emerge.” He wanted to improve the quality of people’s lives by making them creative thinkers, but he also real- ized that however noble this aspiration, visions seen only by leaders are insufficient to create an organized movement or a significant change in a company.
You can’t command commitment; you have to inspire it. You have to enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspira- tions. This means, as Rajan Prajapat, product manager at Google, pointed out, “that you have to have a vision in mind and be clear about why it’s important to you. And you need to be equally clear about why it should matter to those you’re sharing your vision
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with.” Rupessh Roy, project manager at NetLogic Microsystems, realized in his personal-best leadership experience that people have to believe that you understand their needs and have their interests at heart. “You need to have clear goals and a vision to make a posi- tive difference,” he said, “and you have to be able to share that vision with others and get them to believe in it.” Unity of purpose is forged when you show your constituents how the dream is a shared dream and how it fulfills the common good. When you express your enthu- siasm and excitement for the vision, you ignite that passion in others.
