Introduction
The Leadership Challenge is built on evidence. For more than thirty years, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner have asked people to describe the time they did their best as a leader. They call these stories Personal-Best Leadership Experiences. Thousands of those stories, along with millions of survey responses, gave them the framework at the center of this book: The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. The examples that follow are real people doing real things.
Why does it matter? Because the most significant contribution leaders make isn’t to today’s bottom line. It’s to the long-term growth of people and institutions, so they can adapt, change, prosper, and grow. You don’t just owe it to yourself to become the best leader you can possibly be. You owe it to the people who follow you. They’re expecting you to do your best. We need leaders who can unite us and ignite us.
Chapter 1 — When Leaders Are at Their Best
One leader, starting a big project with a new team, put it simply: “At the very beginning of a journey like this, it’s about getting to know each other personally.” For him, that means learning what the people beside him value, what they love to do, and what they stand for. It also means introducing himself not as the leader, but as a real human trying to make the world a better place.
Another leader, Brian, makes sure the people who do the giving get refueled so they can keep on giving. Each week, his leadership team holds a standup meeting to go over what everyone’s working on, including problems, lessons learned, and even failures. They also look for “praise moments,” chances to point out great work in front of everyone. When people see the successes and hear the praise, it creates momentum. When you recognize what’s working, people are more likely to do it again.
Stories like these came up again and again in the research. When leaders make extraordinary things happen, they do five things. Kouzes and Posner call them The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. Each practice gets two chapters in this summary, starting with Chapter 3.
Does any of this really matter? The data says yes. How leaders behave makes a profoundly positive difference in people’s commitment, motivation, and performance. That’s true no matter the people’s age, education, job, industry, or country. What the leader does is what best explains why people work hard and take pride in their work. So why would anyone choose to follow you in the first place?
Chapter 2 — Credibility Is the Foundation of Leadership
Leadership is a relationship between those who want to lead and those who choose to follow. A manager named Bobby knew his new team would have to learn to trust one another. So for his first month, he sat down with each person to learn what they wanted, what they needed, and what they enjoyed doing. He knew he couldn’t earn their respect without respecting them first.
Then he gave them room. In management meetings, when someone asked a question he could’ve answered himself, Bobby usually passed it to someone on his team. He acted as an adviser and let the ownership stay with them. That’s the point. You earn leadership from the people you hope to lead. Every day, they decide whether to give you their full talent, time, and energy. In the end, leaders don’t decide who leads. Followers do.
So what do people want in a leader they’d willingly follow? Kouzes and Posner asked people to pick, from a list of twenty traits, the seven they most look for and admire. Four stay at the top across countries, cultures, genders, and ages. People want a leader who is honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking.
Honesty comes first in every survey. Over 80 percent of people want their leaders to be honest above all else. Following someone you believe is dishonest has a hidden cost. You realize you’ve compromised your own integrity. Over time, you lose respect for the leader, and then you lose respect for yourself.
Competent means having a track record of getting things done. Inspiring means being excited and positive about the future. People believe what you say when they sense you truly believe it. Fear works the other way. It makes people keep their heads down and stay out of the way. Fear may bring compliance, but it never creates commitment. And forward-looking means having a point of view about where things are headed. People want you to describe what the organization will look like, feel like, and be like in six quarters or six years, in enough detail that they’ll know when they’ve arrived.
Put those four together and you get credibility, the foundation of leadership. It’s what the authors call their First Law of Leadership: If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message. When people see their manager as highly credible, they’re proud to say where they work, and they feel a sense of ownership. When they don’t, they produce only when watched, work mainly for the money, and praise the organization in public while criticizing it in private.
How do people spot credibility? They say things like “They practice what they preach” and “They do what they say they will do.” That’s the Second Law of Leadership: Do What You Say You Will Do. It’s also where the first practice, Model the Way, begins. Before you can do what you say, you have to know what you believe.
Chapter 3 — Clarify Values
Modeling the Way starts with a simple question. If someone asked, “What’s your leadership philosophy?” could you answer right now? If you can’t, you should be able to. If you can, reaffirm it every day. In chaotic times, deeply held values help you choose among all the demands pulling at you.
Kouzes and Posner call this finding your voice. People can only speak the truth when they speak in their true voice. If you just repeat what others say, no one can commit to you, because they don’t know who you are or what you believe.
But your own values aren’t enough. In too many organizations, there’s a huge gap between the values on paper and what people think they can use in their daily work. Leaders close that gap by building on agreement. Before one project began, a manager had each team member fill out a questionnaire. It started with where they grew up, their favorite food, and their hobbies. Then it went deeper: the kind of work they liked and didn’t like, the role they usually played on teams, and what they respected in managers and teammates.
Conversations like that help people find more meaning in their work. They see how what they do connects with who they are, and that goes much deeper than any talk about tasks and rules. You can’t mandate unity. You forge it by involving people. They have to believe you’ll be caring and constructive as you look for common ground together. Once you’ve named the values you share, the harder part begins: living them where everyone can see.
Chapter 4 — Set the Example
No one will believe you’re serious until they see you doing what you’re asking of others. The research backs this up. The more often people see their leaders follow through on promises, the more they trust management.
People watch a few signals closely: how you spend your time, the words you use, how you handle surprises, and how open you are to feedback. How you spend your time is the single clearest sign of what’s important to you. Whatever your values are, they have to show up on your calendar and your meeting agendas if people are going to believe they matter.
Your questions send signals too. Ask, “What have you done today to partner with a colleague?” and you’re saying teamwork matters. Ask, “What have you done today to cut costs?” and you’re sending a very different message. Good questions point people toward what matters, and they force you to listen. If you really want to know what people think, ask their opinion before giving your own.
Feedback is harder. It pulls on two basic needs: the need to learn and grow, and the need to be accepted just as you are. So even a gentle suggestion can feel threatening, and many leaders avoid asking for feedback because they’re afraid of feeling exposed. But a willingness to seek feedback and change because of it predicts future success as a manager. And when you make it easy for people to give you feedback, they’re more likely to accept yours. Just be sure to act on it. If you don’t, people will stop giving it. They’ll assume you think you’re smarter than everyone else, or that you just don’t care.
Stories carry values further than rules do. You can’t order people to “be more creative” or “start loving your job.” You can’t even get them to follow the rules, because nobody reads the rulebook. But people will read a story about a guy who broke the rules and got fired, or a woman who followed them and got a raise. Research shows people remember stories faster and more accurately than policies or data.
One leader noticed that if you read the annual reports of ten big companies, almost all their values sound the same. The difference is whether the words turn into practices. So keep your promises, tell the stories, and act on the feedback you get. Once people trust that you live what you say, you can ask them to look ahead with you.
Chapter 5 — Envision the Future
The second practice is Inspire a Shared Vision. Call it vision, purpose, mission, legacy, or calling. The idea is the same. To lead, you have to be able to imagine a positive future. When you care deeply about the future you want, you’re far more likely to take the first step. If you have no idea what you hope for, you might not even see the opportunity right in front of you.
And it can’t be your dream alone. Everyone wants tomorrow to be better than today. Shared visions attract more people and hold up better under pressure than visions owned by a few. Every leader needs a theme, a central message people picture whenever they think about the future.
Where does a vision come from? Start by looking back. Your central theme has probably been with you a long time, and the past reminds you how long big goals can take. Then pay attention to the present. Create some white space on your calendar. Remember that your devices have an off switch. As one leader put it, “You have to make time to step back and ask yourself, ‘What’s the big story that cuts across all these little facts?’” Listen to what people are talking about, what they need, and what gets in their way. Listen for what’s not being said, too.
Then find something that matters so much you’ll put in the time, live through the setbacks, and make the sacrifices. Without a cherished dream, you can’t spark anything in yourself or anyone else. People think most highly of leaders who talk about the “why” of work, and not just the “what.”
That why has to include them. People commit most fully when you listen deeply and help them reach their own goals. They want work that fits their values, makes a real difference, helps them grow, and makes them feel trusted. As one executive said, “Leaders make others feel important and needed.” So don’t hand a vision down from the top. Involve people in shaping it.
Chapter 6 — Enlist Others
Enlisting others takes more than logic. You have to reach people’s hearts as well as their minds. Researchers have found that stressing the why, as in “Why are we doing this, and why does it matter?”, activates the brain’s reward system. It raises people’s effort and how they feel about their work.
Kouzes and Posner have asked thousands of people to listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and say why it still moves them. People said he used familiar pictures, like family and children. He included everybody. He repeated key lines like “Let freedom ring.” He was hopeful, but he didn’t promise it would be easy. He shifted from “I” to “we.” And he spoke with emotion because he truly felt it. The speech wasn’t about him. It was about his listeners and their hopes.
So speak in pictures. A vision statement isn’t really a statement at all. It’s a picture of the future, and people have to be able to see it in their mind’s eye. When people hear the words “Paris, France,” they call out the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, good food, wine, and romance. No one calls out the population or the gross domestic product. We remember what we can see, hear, taste, and feel.
Your energy matters too. When researchers studied people others call charismatic, they didn’t find a magic personality trait. Those people were simply more animated. They smiled more, spoke faster and more clearly, and moved more. To be willing to change, people have to feel something. Thinking isn’t nearly enough.
But none of it works if it’s fake. The first requirement for enlisting others is being genuine. Let your passion show in a way that’s true to who you are. And once people can see the future, the next step is changing the present.
Chapter 7 — Search for Opportunities
The third practice is Challenge the Process. When Kouzes and Posner asked people about their personal bests, they didn’t ask about change. People could pick any leadership experience at all. Yet every one of them talked about a time of change. Not one person achieved a personal best by keeping things the same. Leadership means shaking up business as usual. And the more often people see their leader looking outside the organization for ways to improve, the more effective they rate that leader.
It starts with taking the initiative. New jobs are perfect for this. As a leader named Emily noticed, they’re the times when you’re expected to ask, “Why do we do this?” Studies find that business breakthroughs often start with someone asking why a problem exists. Another leader built this into her team’s routine. After every event, she held a meeting to brainstorm how the next one could be better, and she kept a digital diary of the team’s ideas and lessons.
Help people stretch, but raise the bar a little at a time. Set it too high and they’ll fail, and if they fail too often, they’ll quit trying. And remember that the strongest motivation comes from inside people. Studies show that leaning on outside rewards can actually lower performance. When it comes to excellence, it isn’t “What gets rewarded gets done.” It’s “What is rewarding gets done.” Why else would people volunteer to fight fires or risk their lives for others?
The other half of this practice is what the authors call outsight, looking outside yourself for ideas. A global study of CEOs found that the best new ideas come from outside the organization, from customers, suppliers, and partners. Your brain works against you here. It’s built for efficiency, so it takes shortcuts and screens out what doesn’t fit. Seeing something new firsthand shakes you up in ways a conference room discussion can’t.
So widen your view. Ask what someone who frustrates you might teach you. Listen to learn, not to win. Talk to people you don’t usually talk to. And expect pushback. A leader named Clay learned that you’ll likely get shot down when you propose a change, maybe more than once. Good leaders keep bringing new solutions until the problem is solved. Of course, spotting an opportunity is only half the job. Next you have to try something.
Chapter 8 — Experiment and Take Risks
Big changes feel overwhelming, so leaders break them into small wins. A small win is “a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.” It makes a project feel doable and keeps the cost of failing low. When people don’t feel overwhelmed, their energy goes into the work instead of wondering, “How will we ever solve that problem?”
A ceramics teacher once split his class into two groups. The first group would be graded on how many pots they made, thirty for a B and forty for an A. The second group would be graded only on quality. The first group got right to work, turning out pot after pot. The second group worked carefully, trying to make the best pots. To the teacher’s surprise, the students who made the most pots also made the best ones. All that practice taught them how the kiln really worked.
So keep your eyes on progress. People naturally focus on the gap between where they are and where they want to be. Look instead at how far you’ve come. Stay involved and curious instead of sitting back. Take control where you can, even if not every attempt works. And treat every challenge as a chance to learn.
Learning is the heart of it. Being able to reflect on your experiences and then change how you act is the single best predictor of success in a new management job. As one leader said, “I think of my failures as a gift. Unless you view them that way, you won’t learn from failure.” That starts with what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset, the belief that your basic qualities can grow with effort. People with a growth mindset believe anyone can learn to lead better. People with a fixed mindset think leaders are born, not made.
Don’t waste the hard times, either. As a leader named Pat put it, “When the tough times hit, and the setbacks and the disappointments come, you’re a lot more teachable.” When your team fails, show them the setback is probably temporary. When they succeed, credit their hard work. Make it safe to experiment, and share what you learn. None of this works alone, though. Experiments take people who trust one another enough to try.
Chapter 9 — Foster Collaboration
The fourth practice is Enable Others to Act, and it starts with trust. People who can’t trust others don’t become leaders. They can’t stand depending on anyone, so they do all the work themselves or become micromanagers. Because they don’t trust others, others don’t trust them. People seen as trusting are the opposite. They’re sought out, listened to, and end up with more influence.
So you have to go first. Extend trust to others, even if they haven’t extended it to you. Open up about what you stand for, what you hope for, and what you will and won’t do. You can’t be sure people will appreciate it. But once you take the risk, they’re more likely to take it too.
Show concern for people. It’s one of the clearest signs that you can be trusted. Listen, pay attention to their ideas, help them solve problems, and be open to their influence. A study of nearly 3,500 people found that the best listeners did more than stay quiet. They asked questions that helped people discover something, and they offered suggestions. People called them “trampolines,” because you could bounce ideas off them.
One team described a new leader who scheduled lunches just to get to know them as people instead of talking about work. Because of that early groundwork, they slowly started asking for his advice. Every good leadership relationship has some friendship in it. Research shows that having a friend at work, and a friendly relationship with your boss, makes a workplace healthier and more productive.
Set up the work so people need each other, with shared goals that require cooperation. Wharton professor Adam Grant found that organizations full of “givers,” people who help others, consistently outperform those full of “takers.” And get people together face to face. As one product manager put it, “Until you see someone’s face, they are not a real person to you.” Trust gets people working together. The next step is making each of them stronger.
Chapter 10 — Strengthen Others
Think about a time you felt powerless at work. Kouzes and Posner asked people this. They felt powerless when no one listened to their opinions, when someone else took credit for their work, or when they got responsibility with no authority. They felt powerful when important information was shared with them, when they made key decisions, and when their manager publicly showed confidence in them.
The difference comes down to choice. People who feel they have no choices feel trapped. Like rats in a maze with no way out, they stop moving and eventually shut down. Give people real freedom, and they’re more willing to use all their abilities. It also gets hard to blame “the company” when things go wrong. If they don’t like how something’s done, they can do something about it.
But the power to choose comes with accountability. The more freedom people have, the more responsibility they have to accept. What about slackers? They don’t last long on a team with shared goals, because their teammates get tired of carrying the load. Either the slacker steps up, or the team wants that person gone.
Choice only helps if people have the skills to use it. One manager had team members solve real problems in their operations. Once they were confident, each one taught the whole team how to solve that problem. It turned out to be the best thing the manager did. You could see everyone’s confidence rise. Making people smarter is the job of every leader. Share the reasons behind your decisions, too, so people can think like owners.
Most of all, ask more than you tell. As Peter Drucker said, “The leader of the future asks. The leader of the past tells.” Asking gives people room to think. It shows you trust them, and it creates buy-in right away, because it’s their idea. And when people rise to the challenge, let them know you noticed.
Chapter 11 — Recognize Contributions
The final practice, Encourage the Heart, starts with expecting the best. Research on self-fulfilling prophecies shows that people tend to live up to what others expect of them. Expect people to fail, and they probably will. Expect them to succeed, and they probably will. When you believe in people, it shows in your tone of voice, your posture, and your face.
People also hunger for feedback. They want to know how they’re doing, and no news hurts as much as bad news. Adam Grant suggests you stop serving the “feedback sandwich,” where criticism is tucked between two slices of praise. Instead, explain why you’re giving the feedback, so people know you care. Share how feedback has helped you in your own career. And ask whether they want it, because once they choose, they’re less defensive.
Recognition has to be personal. One-size-fits-all recognition feels insincere, forced, and thoughtless. Spontaneous, unexpected rewards often mean more than formal ones, especially when they’re specific and come right after the behavior. One HR chief said the best kind is on-the-spot recognition: “When something really terrific happens, I comment on it right away and to anyone who might be close enough to hear.”
Ravi Gandhi, a chief financial officer, uses three pennies to remind himself. Each morning, he sets them on the left side of his computer. Every time he thanks or encourages someone, he moves a penny to the right. He says it keeps him mindful that “we live in an encouragement-starved world.” And if he ends the day with pennies still on the left, he calls his kids and friends on the way home and encourages them.
Another leader, the general manager of a TV station in Tulsa, figured that $300 of her own money wouldn’t reach many people. So she split it among fifteen people and asked each of them to spend their share over a month encouraging others. Top teams give three to six positive comments for every negative one. So make saying “thank you” a natural part of your day. Then take it one step further and celebrate together.
Chapter 12 — Celebrate the Values and Victories
Celebrations are the punctuation marks that make sense of the passage of time. Without them, there are no beginnings and endings. Life becomes an endless series of Wednesdays.
At Seagate Technology, sales executive Kurt Richarz uses monthly calls with the whole sales team to spotlight people who’ve earned “Standing Ovations,” nominated by their peers. When the spotlight shines on someone and others tell what they did, that person becomes a role model. They show how everyone should behave, and they prove it can be done.
Keep it public. Private rewards can motivate one person, but they do little for the team. People pick up the moods of those around them without realizing it, and watching someone get honored can affect your brain almost as if it happened to you. Public celebrations also build community. Employees with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be fully engaged. And studies of more than three million people show that social isolation is worse for your health than obesity or smoking.
Every personal-best story was a mix of hard work and fun. One leader named Jo would take her team out for a surprise lunch, or let people leave early when they had something special that evening. She left silly little gifts with hidden jokes on people’s desks. Her team was completely devoted to her, and they’d work until all hours to finish a project.
Be personally involved, especially in the hard times. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Tell the stories of people going above and beyond, and tell them firsthand. It’s the difference between “I saw it for myself” and “Someone told me about it.” And put celebrations on the calendar. The Zeno Group throws a New Year’s Eve party every June 30th, the end of its fiscal year. All the offices join the same call, pop champagne, and raise a toast while the CEO looks back at the year and ahead to what’s next. Moments like that remind everyone that leadership isn’t only for the person at the top.
Chapter 13 — Leadership Is Everyone’s Business
When Kouzes and Posner ask people to name their most important leadership role model, the top answer isn’t a famous CEO. It’s a family member, at every age. Next comes a teacher or coach for younger people, and a direct supervisor for people over thirty. People are watching you, whether you know it or not. You’re having an impact on them, whether you mean to or not.
That impact is huge. With their worst leaders, people say they used only about 31 percent of their talents. With their best leaders, they give more than three times as much. It shows up in who stays, too. People don’t quit companies as much as they quit their managers. One in two people have left a job at some point to get away from a boss. The truest test of your leadership is how well you bring out leadership in others.
The good news is that leadership can be learned. It’s a myth that you either have it or you don’t. Leadership is a set of skills, and any skill can grow with practice, feedback, role models, and coaching. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. But it takes deliberate practice, the kind designed to improve a specific skill and repeated until it’s automatic. Let’s be honest. That isn’t much fun. What keeps top performers going is knowing they’re getting better. There’s no instant weight-loss plan for leadership.
There’s another catch. Any of The Five Practices, pushed too far, can lead you astray. Focusing on being a role model can close you off to feedback. A single vision can blind you to other possibilities. Change just for the sake of change is as demoralizing as standing still. Leaning too hard on collaboration can become a way to avoid hard conversations. And too much celebrating can make you lose sight of the mission. The answer is humility. Exemplary leaders know they can’t do it alone.
So keep asking yourself the hard questions. What values should guide my decisions? How trustworthy am I? What can I do to keep hope alive, in others and in myself? And make leading a daily habit. Learn something about leading every day, and put it into practice that same day.
When the authors asked Major General John Stanford how he’d develop leaders, his answer surprised them. “I have the secret to success in life,” he said. “The secret to success is to stay in love.” Love, he said, gives you the fire to ignite other people. After more than thirty years of study, Kouzes and Posner kept hearing leaders use that word. It’s hard to picture anyone putting in the long hours it takes to do extraordinary things without their heart in it. The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations provide, and with the people they serve.