Love 'Em And
Lead 'Em
Liberating the Leader in
Everyone—for a Healthier World
Jim Kouzes'
research over the years has taught him a few things.
First and foremost is the idea that leadership is
everyone's business. And despite dramatic changes in
speed and connectivity over the past years, Kouzes
believes, and his research shows, that what it takes to
be an exemplary leader remains the same: Challenge the
process, inspire a vision, model the way, encourage the
heart and enable others to act. This is the key to
unleashing the leadership potential within everyone to
build stronger organizations, communities and a healthier
world.
Kouzes is a preeminent researcher,
award-winning writer and highly sought-after teacher in
the field of leadership. Kouzes' research with Barry
Posner began in 1983 and led them to create a leadership
model that has been embraced by over 1 million people
around the world. Kouzes is chairman emeritus of
tompeters!company and co-author with Posner of several
best-selling books on leadership, including "The
Leadership Challenge."
In a recent interview with AQP's Executive
Director Kevin McManus, Kouzes offers insight into what
leadership really means, the power of an inspiring vision
and answers the age-old question of whether good leaders
are born or made.
Kouzes: Our data
suggests that it's about where it was when we started 20
years ago. That can be taken as good news or bad news. We
take it as good news in some respects because we also
know that people are much more sophisticated about
leadership. Part of this is due to the fact that the
information is so readily available. It's so easy to
gather data about someone on a topic that more and more
people are aware of. Also, more and more people have been
trained in leadership and we are experiencing a
significant increase in that demand. There's another
potential explanation. Tiger Woods was recently
interviewed in Time magazine where he talked about the
experience of changing his swing. He said something to
the effect that the score isn't necessarily the best
measure of being a better golfer. While we may not have
seen scores change all that much, it is true that people
are better leaders because they're more knowledgeable
about the topic. People are trying more and practicing
more and experimenting more. We probably see more
examples of really great leadership than we may have in
the past.
NFC: What, in your
mind, has changed in regard to effective leadership
practices over the last 10 years?
Kouzes: That
question is something Barry Posner and I discussed just a
month ago as part of our work on the third edition of
"The Leadership Challenge." What Barry and I have said in
a number of pieces recently is that the five fundamental
practices of exemplary leadership have not changed per
our research for the entire time that we've been
conducting it. Neither has what followers or constituents
expect from their leaders. So the critical question about
what's changed is really about the context of leadership.
We all know that speed has increased significantly. I'm
not sure that the magnitude of the change that we're
experiencing is any greater than my grandmother
experienced in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a young
girl when she was growing up and experienced two World
Wars, and went from no electricity to electricity to
telephones and to computers. But the speed with which we
seem to be operating is one of the more significant
things. The other clearly important revolution is that
we're all so well connected, at least in the
industrialized world.
NFC: Because of the
increased use of e-mail and intranets in organizations,
we tend to spend less time interacting face-to-face, and
instead spend more time working with each other
"screen-to-screen." What are your thoughts on the impact
that this shift could have on leadership?
Kouzes: The five
practices of exemplary leadership as we've outlined
(challenge the process, inspire a vision, model the way,
encourage the heart and enable others to act) are
predicated on a lot of face-to-face interaction. It's our
belief that leadership is a relationship, the foundation
of relationships is trust, and trust is not built
virtually. Trust cannot be built virtually.
NFC: Why do you say
that?
Kouzes: The
Internet is not designed as a medium to promote trust
building. It can sustain it once some initial trust is
built, but we are still able to use false names, we can't
be seen, there are a lot of questions about security, or
some people don't want you to know who they are.
Consequently, there are a lot of barriers to building
trust. Once trust is built, however, effective
communication can occur. I'll give you an example. I have
a friend I've known since 1960; he lives in Finland. Otto
and I used to communicate by letter and we'd send each
other letters occasionally-maybe just three times a year.
Now I can send Otto e-mail on a daily basis if I feel
like it. My trust and my relationship with him, however,
were built 40 years ago when he lived in my house for one
year as a foreign exchange student. I wouldn't be
communicating with Otto in the same way now as if someone
else sent me an e-mail and asked me a question. I may not
distrust that person, but the willingness to work with
that person on an ongoing basis will only happen when I
know that person on a face-to-face basis
first.
NFC: Dr. Stephen
Covey states that trust is a function of both character
and competence. Would you say your definition of trust is
very similar to that?
Kouzes: Actually,
the word I prefer to use is credibility, which consists
of three components. From our research, there are four
qualities that people look for in a leader. The first of
those is honesty, the second is competence and the third
is inspiring. The fourth quality people look for in a
leader is being forward-looking. Three of those four
characteristics comprise credibility. Honesty is very
similar to what researchers who study credibility call
"source credibility"-the believability of the source of
the information. Their term is trustworthiness as
compared to honesty. The second is "expertise"-our word
is competence; and the third is "dynamism"-our word is
inspiring. So of the four things people look for and
admire in a leader, three of them add up to credibility.
We often say credibility is the salvation of
leadership.
NFC: From your perspective, how is credibility
different from competence?
Kouzes: The word
credit comes from the word credo, which means "I
believe." The way I like to define credibility is by
looking at different degrees of it. I might trust someone
to house sit for me-water my plants, feed my animals,
give them their medication, make sure that the lights are
on or off. But it's unlikely I would trust that same
person to do open heart surgery. What differentiates
leaders from other credible people is still being
forward-looking. Somewhere between 75 and 95 percent of
people are looking for that in a leader. And it is
something that any leader has to pay attention to in the
long run if they are going to be viewed as a leader. None
of that has changed.
NFC: Having used
your concepts to train other leaders, I find it
interesting to observe how they are manifested in the
political arena. What leadership observations have you
made during this election year?
Kouzes: For one, it
was interesting to observe how Al Gore was able to pull
even with Bush on the whole issue of trust, which some
people refer to as character. Trust was no longer an
advantage to Bush. Bush then changed his tactics to deal
with the whole issue of substance, content and strategy
by issuing a specific proposal for policies, which in
some respects falls under the area of being
forward-looking as a leader. What is it that I promise
you will happen in my administration four years from now
or eight years from now? It is the 'forward-looking'
characteristic that differentiates leaders from other
credible people. Once the credibility playing field was
leveled, they had to build on that foundation. People are
going to start making their choices based less on
character, trustworthiness or honesty issues, as all of
those tend to get lumped together.
NFC: Would you say
that on the average, even with downsizing, that there are
more leaders, either formal or informal, in organizations
now than there were 10 years ago?
Kouzes: Leadership
is now being seen more and more as everyone's business.
In the current issue of Fast Company magazine, Robert
Rice has a cover story and he says what I've been saying
for a long time: Leadership is everyone's business. One
of the most difficult things for senior level people to
accept is that anyone can lead. There are leaders of both
genders at every level in every community, in every
country and in every type of organization. Just because
someone doesn't have a title doesn't mean they can't be a
leader, or that they are not a leader now. It's the
organizations that have difficulty in recognizing that
leadership can come from anywhere. We are seeing more and
more organizations promote that, and yet when people talk
about leadership, they often still refer to top
management and still look at it hierarchically. So while
there are more leaders, including those emerging in every
field at very young ages, it is still difficult to
overcome the myth of leadership as being something
associated with a level or title.
NFC: What are your
thoughts on the age-old question concerning whether good
leaders or managers are "born or made"?
Kouzes: I've never
been asked if managers are born or made, but I've been
asked if leaders are born or made. To answer this
question, I tell the story of a time when I was observing
6-year-olds play soccer and I thought back to when I was
that age 49 years ago. I never played soccer when I was
6-I didn't play soccer until I was a senior in college.
In thinking about this, I began to ask myself and have
others ask themselves, "Why is it that I never learned to
play soccer at 6?" Then I asked them, "Did any of you
ever think that maybe when I was 6 or you were 6, we just
didn't have the genes for soccer, but now these
6-year-olds do?" People would say, "No, we hadn't thought
that." Did somehow the gene for soccer magically migrate
to this country and end up in our genes? From an
evolutionary standpoint, this is virtually impossible.
But we ask that question about leadership. Why do we ask
that about one set of skills and not another? We ask it
because we have built up all kinds of myths about
leadership, and it's to the advantage of some to maintain
those myths.
NFC: The tag line
for our conference next spring, which you will be
speaking at, refers to developing the leadership
potential in everyone. What do you think a leader's
primary roles or activities are in terms of helping
others progress toward their potential?
Kouzes: First of
all, we need to have a fundamental belief that leadership
is everyone's business. In research conducted with 18- to
32-year-olds on leadership role models, they were asked,
from whom they learned leadership or whom they look to
when they need role models. They say their family members
first at about 40 percent, teacher or coach second at 26
percent, and community leaders third at 11 percent.
Business leaders only gather 7 percent of 18- to
32-year-old votes, followed by entertainers, professional
athletes and political leaders. When we see this, we
ought to recognize that the powerful role models in our
lives are family members, teachers and community leaders.
In other words, the people closest to us. The major way
we can teach leadership to other people at any age is to
model the appropriate behavior. Even within large
corporations when you ask about where their leadership
role models come from, a 40-year-old will say family
members, followed by manager. So we are all powerful
influences on others when we act as good role
models.
NFC: What are some
of the ways in which a person can improve their
leadership skills?
Kouzes: Observation
is a major way-giving people the opportunity to observe
good leadership or giving people the opportunity to hang
out with leaders. Another simple exercise involves giving
someone an assignment to lead a meeting. I was talking to
a colleague of mine who is 50-years-old. He's a lifetime
blue-collar worker, and he has been successful in what he
does. He recently became the chair of his Homeowners
Association and realized that he never really had been in
a leadership role before. He told me about how people
would look to him and expect him to move the agenda
along, and that was something new to him. Well, instead
of waiting until one is 50, why not give people the
opportunity to chair a meeting at age 25, 20, or earlier
than that.
NFC: Leadership involves using skills that you
have to practice in order to get better. What are some
"training exercises" that one can do to improve their
leadership skills?
Kouzes: There are
many. Let's take "challenge the process" as an example.
If I were going to recommend one thing to do as practice
for challenging the process, I might suggest that they
begin or end a meeting with the question, "What in the
past week have you done to improve so that you're better
this week than last?" It'll take a while, maybe three or
four meetings, for people to really think you're serious,
but after a while people will start coming to meetings
with an answer to that question.
Another thing you could do to practice
"challenging the process" is to go shopping for ideas.
New ideas are more likely to come from outside the
organization than from inside the organization. The most
innovative companies are importers of ideas. That we know
from research. So if that's true, actively go shopping
for ideas from other places, from other industries, and
import them. The quality movement was not started in the
United States, even though two American men wrote the
seminal texts on it and were the leading thinkers. It
started in Japan and we imported it. We can do the same
with many other kinds of new technology.
NFC: What about
"inspiring a vision?" How can that leadership skill be
practiced?
Kouzes: I would
recommend that the first thing people do is listen to and
watch Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his "I Have a
Dream" speech. If you want to know the power that lies in
articulating an ideal image of the future for the common
good, listen to that speech. It's still, 29 or 30 years
later, considered by historians the most influential
single speech in the last 100 years.
NFC: After watching
Dr. King's speech practices, I am still left with the
question, "What does this look like for me in everyday
life?"
Kouzes: You have to
ask yourself exactly that question. There are three or
four fundamental questions to ask oneself, as far as
developing the ability to inspire vision. The first is,
"How much time do you spend on external issues?" The
second is, "What percentage of your time do you spend
thinking 5-10 years ahead?" and finally, "What percentage
of your time do you spend trying to get a common view of
the future instead of your own idiosyncratic view?" Every
leader needs to think through those three questions
because research shows that only 2.5 percent of a senior
executive's time was being spent on looking out, thinking
ahead, 5-10 years and then creating a common view. This
percentage is very low if forward-looking is what
differentiates leadership from other credible
people.
So how can I then increase the amount of time
I spend thinking outside my own organization? There's an
actual word in the dictionary called outsight. In order
to improve our ability to inspire a shared vision, we
have to have greater outsight, not just greater insight.
A lot of people think about vision as something where you
meditate. You think you have this flash of insight, but
it's really a flash of outsight-you see more things.
There's a lot of data to indicate that executives who
have more outside contacts and look at things other than
the day-to-day operations are more
forward-looking.
NFC: How do you get
executives to see the value of looking less at the
day-to-day operations and more at the "bigger
picture?"
Kouzes: I use
another analogy in the work I do. If you're driving fast,
and you hit a fog bank, what do you do? You're going to
slow down and be more cautious. When you can't see very
far ahead, you go slower. The organizations that will be
successful will figure out not only how to drive fast but
how to clear away the fog so they can see farther ahead.
And it's not all that difficult. There are labs where
they're doing research that's going to take 3-5 years to
bring any radically new technology to market, and 20
years before it'll be used by everyone. The Internet has
been around for a long time; it's only been in the last
five years that it has really begun to have an impact on
business and society. This isn't something magical-it's
being aware of what's going on right now and then
projecting out. People were enslaved not long before
Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his speech. He just
delivered something very powerful that people could get
attracted to and he was a role model of the kind of
behavior he expected of others-he went to jail, he
marched, he did all of those things.
NFC: It is one
thing to be able to effectively state your vision. How do
you get people to buy into it and live it?
Kouzes: A key thing
leaders need to do is get other people to have dialogue
about it. It's not about giving your mission statement.
It's really about having a dialogue with everyone else
about the future, presenting your excitement and
enthusiasm, and encouraging everyone else to do the same.
Inspiring a vision is the lowest scoring practice out of
the five. It has been throughout our years of research,
and it still is. It's the most difficult practice for
people to learn to do well. The practices people don't do
as well involve more emotion. If there's one major
"ah-ha" for us over time it's that things that require
more emotion are more difficult to do.
NFC: That can be
particularly challenging at work, where we tend to have a
predominance of negative emotion at times.
Kouzes: We're
running so fast and everything is so brief and
abbreviated that the richness of conversation that is
required to get people on board is difficult to do at
times. I have a simpler thing that I recommend people do.
At the end of every interaction you have with someone
else, whether that interaction lasts a few seconds, a few
minutes, or a few hours, ask yourself this question: "Is
this other person more capable or less capable as a
result of this interaction?" Every interaction is
important and that's true in all our lives. We're not
perfect and we can't always do this, but the more we can
catch ourselves and ask ourselves this question the
better.
NFC: A common
complaint leveled at leaders is that they don't practice
what they preach. How can we know when we are getting
better at executing another of your practices, modeling
the way?
Kouzes: Around
modeling I think there are two key elements and two
things to do. We know that credibility is the foundation
of leadership. When we ask people to tell us what
credibility is behaviorally, their main responses are:
"Do what you say you will do" and "Actions speak louder
than words." It's two parts. It's the words-what you say
you believe in and value-and it's also how well we model
the behaviors that accompany these words. If I say I
believe in quality, I believe in participation, I believe
in innovation and I believe in people feeling strong,
then how do I model those behaviors? Each of us should
periodically get our list of personal beliefs out and
review it. If we don't have such a list, we should create
one that states those things in which we believe and we
believe strongly. We should be able to articulate those
quite easily to other people. The second piece of that is
to do an inventory of how we spend our time, an audit of
our actions against our words. Time usage is the clearest
measure behaviorally anyone has of what they
value.
NFC: You referenced
a lot of different research and data in this interview.
When someone reads this article and says, "Hey, I'd like
to look at that in more detail," where do you suggest
they go to get the information?
Kouzes: The second
edition of "The Leadership Challenge" has a lot of the
updated credibility data. The best placeto go to get a
full look at everything is
www.theleadershipchallenge.com. Around November 1 there
should also be a leadership-learning site.
October
2000 News for A Change
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