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The Leadership Challenge

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


The Management Pocketblog is absolutely bristling with articles about leadership and leadership models. There is a roundup of some of the best at the end of this one and we will make use of them in the exercises within this blog. So, for the Pocket Correspondence course, I want to look at a different model: sometimes called ‘The Leadership Challenge’ after the book that introduced it, and more properly known as ‘The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership’.

The authors, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, researched thousands of personal case studies to extract five core behaviours which they believe represent leadership at its best. These five practices therefore represent a ‘behavioural model’ of leadership, rather than a style or traits based model. The behaviours fulfil five essential roles of a leader.

Along with the model, they have developed a wealth of evaluation and developmental tools that form one of the most coherent packages available to managers who want to develop as leaders.

The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership

The Leadership Challenge

I don’t want to say too much about this excellent model directly, because it would be wrong to infringe upon the authors’ copyright. Instead, I want to use this module for self study.

Exercise 1: Learn about The Leadership Challenge

If you aspire to lead, then this is essential reading and the authors have written a number of books and proprietary resources that are available from your favourite booksellers. But they also make a a wealth of valuable material available for you to look at on their website, at: http://www.leadershipchallenge.com.

Exercise 2: Compare and Contrast

Another well-known and valuable role-based model of leadership is John Adair’s Action Centred Leadership. Take a look at it in the earlier blog post: Team Leadership.  What features do they share, and what does each offer to complement the other?

Take a look too, at the four common abilities of a leader in Manager to Leader: Warren Bennis (Part 2). How does this model fit with your emerging understanding?

Exercise 3: Traits and Styles

Thinking about styles of leadership, take a look at the earlier blog in The Pocket Correspondence Course, Situational Leadership. And, whilst there are few formal models about the traits of leaders, the Pocketblog Aubrey and Maturin, Arthur and Merlin highlights the different traits of fictional pairings, both of whom show different styles of leadership: Aubrey and Maturin, Arthur and Merlin, Kirk and Spock, and Holmes and Watson.

Further Reading

  1. The Leadership Pocketbook
  2. The Management Models Pocketbook
    Specifically covers the Leadership Continuum and Action Centred Leadership

The best Pocketblogs about Leadership

  1. Situational Leadership
  2. The Science of Leadership: Warren Bennis (Part 1)
  3. Manager to Leader: Warren Bennis (Part 2)
  4. The Apprentice and Five Levels of Leadership
    (Jim Collins’ ‘Good to Great’)
  5. Team Leadership
    (John Adair’s ‘Action Centred Leadership’)
  6. Aubrey and Maturin, Arthur and Merlin
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Situational Leadership

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


Last week’s Pocketblog looked at the importance of balance in your management style. This is also true, of course, of leadership. One of the things I said was:

There is no ‘right’ style of management. We each need to find the right balance, that works for us. We also need to adapt that balance to each individual and to changing circumstances.

The concept of adapting our style is at the core of models of situational leadership. There are many variants – lots of which are commercially protected. Each offers a process for two things.

Process 1: Evaluate the performance of the person you want to lead or manage

Most models focus on the person, in the context of the situation, looking principally at:

  1. How skilled, experienced, and able the person is, to fulfil their task
  2. How keen, motivated and confident the person is, to fulfil their task

From these they place the person on a continuum, or into one of a number of boxes (most often four)

Process 2: Apply the right style of leadership or management to situation

The second process is to select a style of leadership or management that fits the ability and motivation of the person. You can do this easily by turning up or down the amount of:

  1. Technical support, guidance and direction to account for the level of expertise
  2. Emotional support, praise and reassurance to account for the level of enthusiasm

The simplest models are therefore based on four simple boxes.

Generic Situational Leadership Model

The Grand-daddy of situational leadership models, however, is not commercially protected and is described fully in The Management Models Pocketbook. It was developed by Robert Tannenbaum and Warren Schmidt and published in a 1958 Harvard Business Review article. Their ‘Leadership Continuum’ has seven, rather than four, levels and a wider range of factors, like your own personal style, organisational culture, time pressures and risk.

Tannenbaum & Schmidt - Leadership Continuum

Further Reading

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Authentic Leadership: Being Yourself, but with More Skill

Authentic Leadership

Authentic LeadershipAuthenticity has been a recurring theme in philosophy for a long as there have been philosophers. So, it was inevitable that leadership thinkers would pick up on the idea, to give us Authentic Leadership.

What’s perhaps more surprising is that it took until 2003 for this Big Idea to emerge. But, emerge it did, from US business-person and later academic, Bill George.

His book, ‘Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value‘ tried to re-set the needle on leadership styles following the failures of the dot.com boom and scandals like the Enron collapse. He followed it in 2008 by the even more successful ‘Discover Your True North: Becoming an Authentic Leader‘.

In an earlier article, we looked at the broader topic of authenticity. Here, we return to it, but with a focus on its role in leadership.

Continue reading Authentic Leadership: Being Yourself, but with More Skill

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Servant Leadership: Lightning Rod

Servant Leadership

Servant LeadershipServant Leadership is one of my personal favourite Big Ideas in the field of management and leadership. It’s been a discipline to push it this far back in our series of Big Ideas.

And we did cover Servant Leadership within our Management Thinkers series. The article on Robert Greenleaf describes the genesis of the idea.

So, in this article, I want to discuss the idea of Servant Leadership in the way I understand it, and introduce a second voice to Greenleaf’s: that of Max De Pree*.

Continue reading Servant Leadership: Lightning Rod

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Transformational Leadership: Values-driven Change

Transformational Leadership

Transformational LeadershipCan there be some big ideas that underpin the emergence of others? That’s a question that James McGregor Burns tackled in much of his writing. And the answer he gives us is ‘yes’. That big idea is Transformational Leadership.

It’s not surprising that leadership is a common topic for us, here at the Management Pocketblog. There must be a dozen different models to choose from among our articles. But Transformational Leadership is one we have returned to a number of times.

We do so, because it repays careful study. It is an idea that changed my thinking and has huge value for any manager or leader in business or public or community service.

Continue reading Transformational Leadership: Values-driven Change

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Authenticity – Congruence for the 21st Century

Authenticity

AuthenticityNobody likes a fraud… yet we tolerate them. Nobody wants to be a phoney… but we all let ourselves down on occasion. But regardless of our actions, we all value authenticity.

The challenge of course is not just to recognise it, and distinguish the authentic from the ersatz.

It’s to form a clear idea of what you mean by authenticity. Because in modern business and professional parlance, it’s become a bit of a chameleon.

Continue reading Authenticity – Congruence for the 21st Century

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Neuroleadership: The Appliance of Neuroscience to Leadership

Neuroleadership

Neuroleadership‘We’ve finally found our silver bullet‘ says one HR professional in a promotional video for a conference on Neuroleadership.

If that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine; perhaps it should. Silver bullets come from the same shop as snake-oil! So we have to ask,

‘how solid is one of the latest big ideas in management: neuroleadership?’

The principle, of course, is solid. Because what it seeks to do is bring the findings of neuroscience into the practice of leadership.

Continue reading Neuroleadership: The Appliance of Neuroscience to Leadership

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Situational Leadership

Situational Leadership
Situational Leadership
Situational Leadership

There are more models of leadership than you can shake a stick at. So how should you know which is the best? That’s the question that is answered by Situational Leadership.

The principle of Situational Leadership is simple. There is no one best approach to leadership. To lead well, you must adapt your approach to the situation.

Situational Leadership has deep roots. And let’s start by setting aside our certainty that people have been managing and leading by adapting their approach to the people in front of them, for centuries. The academic study of this approach goes back to the 1950s.

Continue reading Situational Leadership

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Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones: Authentic Leadership

Why should anyone be led by you?

It’s a fair question. And here’s another:

Why should anyone work here?

These two strikingly simple and obvious questions have been answered rather well, by two British management thinkers, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones.

Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones - Authentic Leadership
Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones – Authentic Leadership

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones

Rob Goffee is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the London Business School and is a long term academic. Gareth Jones, on the other hand, has alternated between academic and corporate roles, teaching at LBS too, and also the University of East Anglia, Henley, INSEAD, and currently, IE Business School, in Madrid. But he has also held senior HR roles at Polygram and the BBC.

Authentic Leadership

Their first collaboration was a relatively unremarked book, called The Character of a Corporation. But it introduced ideas that they were to return to in their second, breakthrough book, and then again in their recent fourth book.

Their second book was called Why Should Anyone be Led by You? It introduced a mass business audience to the concept of Authentic Leadership. This was emphatically not their creation, tracking back to classical Greek thinking, and the Delphic injunction to first know yourself.

But their articulation struck a chord. It came at the right time and was delivered compellingly. Goffee and Jones argued that companies are led in far too much of a technocratic way, by people acting as managers and bureaucrats. They lack sufficient human connection with their people, and self awareness about their shortcomings.

Real leaders, they argued, are confident in who they are and what they stand for. They are not afraid to put that on show and constantly act with integrity in the way that they live the values they espouse. They are able to communicate well, and remain true to themselves, whilst still coping with and adapting to rapidly changing events. Consequently, they can inspire people to extraordinary levels of commitment.

Leading Clever People

The next book Goffee and Jones wrote addressed the challenges of leading an organisation or team made of smart, creative people. This is a typical challenge for many of today’s start-up businesses. It is also important for established businesses that want to bring together innovation teams, and for professional service businesses that want to create a great culture. The book is called Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People.

A summary of the do’s and don’ts might look like this:

Do

  • Explain and persuade
  • Use expertise
  • Give people space and resources
  • Tell them what
  • Give people time
  • Provide boundaries (simple rules)
  • Give recognition
  • Protect them from the rain
  • Talk straight
  • Give real world challenges with constraints
  • Create a galaxy
  • Conduct and connect
Don’t

  • Tell people what to do
  • Use hierarchy
  • Allow them to burn out
  • Tell them how
  • Interfere
  • Create bureaucracy
  • Give frequent feedback
  • Expose them to politics
  • Use bullsh*t or deceive
  • Build an ivory tower
  • Recruit a star
  • Take the credit as a leader

Creating an Authentic Organisation

Goffee and Jones’ latest book is Why Should Anyone Work Here? It applies many of their earlier ideas to making a great organisation. At its heart is a simple mnemonic that spells out the six ingredients they argue are needed for a ‘dynamic and future-fit’ workplace: DREAMS.

Difference

Diversity increases creativity, which decreases with uniformity. Don’t do diversity because legislation compels you to. Do it because it has a positive impact on the bottom line: more creativity, better decisions, happier workforce.

Radical honesty

(I know – a bit of a fix)

The more open and transparent you are, the happier people will feel. And if being open is likely to expose unfairness that will anger people, radical honesty will compel you to fix the problem, rather than hide it beneath dissembling..

“You need to tell someone the truth before someone else does,” said Jones. “Think of BP’s failure to control information after the [Deepwater Horizon] oil spill. Reputational capital is much more important and much more fragile than we ever thought.”

Extra value

(This acronym-building is tough!)

This is not just about improving the business; it’s about adding value to the people within your business… as a means of improving your business.

Authenticity

There it is… Their earlier work popularised the concept, so its front and centre here too.

But, reflecting on how the ideas have settled in over the years, Goffee and Jones note that in the US, authenticity is too often read as ‘be yourself… find your true north.’ But their view is that an effective leader needs to be ‘yourself more skilfully.’

Meaning

This is about ensuring everyone in the business understands the real purpose behind the tasks they do.

Simple rules

(one last shoe-horn!)

Businesses need systems. But this too easily leads to over-bureaucratisation. Rules need to work for the business and enable staff to do what’s right, not just prevent every single possibility of doing wrong.

 

 

 

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James Kouzes and Barry Posner: Leadership Challenge

What is it that makes an exceptional leader?

This question has been asked time and again through the centuries. And it has been an enduring staple of managerial and business school education through the twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

So is it a surprise when a simple model, articulately expressed, leads to a 2 million-copy best-seller?

Perhaps not. But what makes James Kouzes’ and Barry Posner’s Leadership Challenge remarkable, is its longevity. In the light of the constant flow of new leadership ideas, a model that sells as well after thirty years, must have something valuable to offer.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner - Leadership Challenge
James Kouzes and Barry Posner – Leadership Challenge

James Kouzes

James (Jim) Kouzes was born. We know that. But there’s little biographical detail available to the casual researcher. He attended John F Kennedy’s inauguration as part of an Eagle Scout honour guard and was inspired by Kennedy’s ‘ask not what your country can do for you…’ sentiment.

So, following his graduation in 1967, with a BA in Political Science from Michigan State University, Kouzes joined the Peace Corps. He served for two years. On his return, he started a career in training and development, giving seminars for Community Action Agency staff and volunteers.

In 1972, Kouzes founded the Joint Center for Human Services Development at San Jose State University. He served there and at the School of Social Work, University of Texas, until 1980.

In 1981, he became Director of the Executive Development Centre at Santa Clara University, where he met Barry Posner. In 1988, he left, to become a Director at TPG/Learning Systems for 10 years, moving to become CEO and Chairman of the Tom Peters Company from 1998 to 2000.

Barry Posner

Barry Posner was born in 1949, and graduated with a BA in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970. He gained an MA in public Administration in 1972, from Ohio State University, and a PhD in Organisational Behaviour and Administrative Theory from The university of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1976.

From there, Posner joined the faculty of Santa Clara University, where he remains today, as Accolti Endowed Professor of Leadership, at the Leavey School of Business.

The Leadership Challenge

Working together to develop a talk on leadership, Kouzes and Posner developed their first surveys in 1983. These asked leaders what they were doing when they were at their best. In documenting the practices of exemplary leadership, they have to date surveyed over 75,000 respondents.

The burden of their work is the Leadership Challenges model, which articulates five practices. This has been documented in books, articles, and development tools like card-sets and 360-degree feedback surveys.

The original Leadership Challenge book was published in 1987, and the current sixth edition continues to be a big seller.

The Five Practices of Exemplary Leaders

Model the Way

Model the Way Leaders establish and work to a set of principles for how people should be treated. They create standards for how to do things, and set an example for others to follow. They recognise how bureaucracy can impede action, and so act to reduce unnecessary impediments to meaningful progress. They show people what they expect of them, and create opportunities for success.

Inspire a Shared Vision

Leaders are confident in their capacity to make a difference. They create a vision for the future of their organisation, which they use to inspire their followers. At their best, they influence through charisma, gravitas, and quiet persuasion.  But they also are aware of the need for practical efforts and so incite action too.

Challenge the Process

Leaders are never satisfied with the status quo. They look out for new ways to improve their organisation. This means experimentation and risk-taking. And because leaders know the nature of risk-taking, they are tolerant of failures and mistakes, treating them as learning opportunities.

Enable Others to Act

Leaders actively involve others to encourage collaboration and build effective teams. They know that mutual respect is crucial if they are to foster extraordinary efforts. So they build an atmosphere of trust and confidence. They empower and develop their team members, to make each person feel capable and trusted.

Encourage the Heart

The kind of changes extraordinary leaders try to make, are hard to accomplish and often risky. They therefore deploy high levels of emotional intelligence to keep motivation going and maintain resilience and determination. They recognise effort and celebrate achievements.

We also covered the Leadership Challenge in our Pocket Correspondence Course series, with three exercises to develop your understanding of leadership models by comparing this with others.

The Leadership Challenge: Interview with Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes

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