Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices transform leadership from an abstract concept into actionable skills for everyone at every level in an organization. These practices provide leadership training at every step of development.
Studies demonstrate that organizations where constituents highly evaluate leaders on these practices achieve far better results than those where leaders are less engaged with constituents.
Model the Way
People observe when leaders personify values they ascribe to and adopt those as their own. Great leaders recognize every interaction with their team members or customers is an opportunity to demonstrate these values; doing this face-to-face is easy enough, but leading a virtual or hybrid organization becomes much harder.
But it can be done. In their book The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner detail five essential practices of effective leadership: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act and Encourage the Heart. Their model was developed based on over 5 Million Surveys and numerous Studies; anyone can become an outstanding leader, regardless of job title, level or organization affiliation.
Model the Way involves living by the leadership behaviors you hope your team members will emulate years from now. While this may seem difficult to achieve, you can ensure the values you wish to infuse into your team are evident in everything you say, do, or think.
One leader who understood the significance of inspiring a shared vision for success within his company emphasized building trust with his team members by communicating the connection between personal and professional goals, encouraging risk taking, experimenting, and learning from mistakes. He encouraged his employees to seek out challenging opportunities as well as take risks.
He was right. This leader believed that providing his people with a sense of purpose and shared vision for success would lead to their natural fulfillment of business goals – which they did indeed achieve.
Inspire a Shared Vision
Leaders who aim to foster a shared vision enlist people within their organizations to assist in visualizing an exciting future. When people have a clear idea of the goals that the collective is working toward together, it encourages them to invest time and energy towards making those goals come to fruition – this further fuels everyone involved!
People are much more likely to accept challenges and remain motivated when they believe in a vision they support, even during difficult times. Achieve this requires listening carefully to people as they express their dreams and aspirations before using imagery and language that capture them effectively. Furthermore, ensuring the vision is measurable so you can track its progress over time is also key.
Kouzes and Posner’s research found that when people excelled at leading others, they exhibited visions of an attractive future with complete faith in their ability to turn it into reality. By encouraging your team members to have this same positive outlook about the work ahead, you help them overcome fears or insecurities related to doing it themselves.
Challenge the Process
Simply inspiring a team to believe in the vision isn’t enough; they also need the chance to experiment with it through small experiments. For instance, if your goal is improving customer service, try setting up a focus group where participants discuss issues related to certain changes before gathering data from this experiment so you can use that information as the basis of future decisions.
Challenge the Process
Kouzes and Posner’s fifth practice entails encouraging your team to be innovative and take risks. This leadership behavior involves giving them autonomy in making decisions for themselves, which builds trust within the group. Furthermore, this leadership practice celebrates successes as well as recognize individual contributions towards meeting project goals.
Researchers have long found that leaders who demonstrate commitment to The Five Practices tend to be more effective, satisfied with their jobs, perceived as credible by those they lead, have higher job performance levels and greater customer loyalty than their counterparts who engage less strongly with these behaviors.
Nearly two decades ago, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner began researching what people did when they were at their best in leading others. Through their investigation, their research transformed an abstract concept such as leadership into easily learnable practices and behaviors anyone can adopt and use themselves – serving as the basis for both their first leadership workshop as well as the best-selling book The Leadership Challenge and LPI: Leadership Practices Inventory assessment globally used today.
The Leadership Challenge continues to revolutionize how individuals, teams and organizations think about leadership. It turns the concept of leadership into a series of easily graspable practices and competencies that anyone willing to accept the challenge can learn quickly and easily. Furthermore, this serves as the framework for developing a comprehensive strategy to get maximum productivity out of teams, organizations and communities alike. While new theories, studies, approaches or interpretations will always emerge on this topic, these fundamental building blocks provide a solid base upon which anyone can become an exemplary leader.
Enable Others to Act
Today’s fast-paced business environment makes it impossible for any one leader to manage everything by themselves. Teams are essential to success whether working locally or remotely and must demonstrate collaboration, trust, and productivity; leaders who engage their people can assist them in becoming the most productive members of their teams.
One of the five practices of Exemplary Leadership, “Enable Others to Act,” involves giving your people freedom and choice in taking on new challenges and making independent decisions. A good manager should coach his/her people on how they can develop and improve.
Enabling others to act requires acknowledging and celebrating their successes as well as acknowledging all of the hard work they put in, otherwise people may feel undervalued and underappreciated, leading them down the path towards burnout.
When a team member is experiencing difficulty, an effective manager should take the time to listen and offer help. By showing genuine concern and support for them, this builds trust between manager and team member and allows the latter to feel supported in continuing their efforts.
To strengthen the abilities and confidence of your people, enable them to act by providing support and guidance when needed. This will allow them to stay on task with their tasks and goals rather than becoming distracted by outside issues. Leaders who enable their people to act will benefit greatly during times of crisis or stress – this may include providing feedback, giving challenging assignments or encouraging individuals with motivational words – not forgetting knowing each person’s individual strengths and weaknesses and delegating accordingly.
Encourage the Heart
Encourage the Heart is the fifth leadership practice, and is focused on connecting with others’ hearts. Effective leaders in this area can build communities of like-minded people that share values and celebrate victories together, while at the same time acknowledging individual contributions and accomplishments in ways which resonate personally for each recipient.
Recognition that builds confidence, commitment, and progress is the goal here. Encourage team members’ hearts while instilling belief in your organization’s mission and vision through recognition; show that you care by showing it; let team members know you trust them to complete assigned work – take time to understand each person on your team individually before providing the resources required for them to complete their duties effectively.
Kouzes and Posner’s research into exemplary leadership rests on the belief that leaders are made, not born. Their research revealed common behaviors among leaders who achieved great things within organizations, which they organized into five practices to form The Leadership Challenge Model and now considered the gold standard for leadership development. Our suite of solutions, grounded on The Leadership Challenge as well as evidence-based Leadership Practices Inventory assessments will assist your people in developing the necessary leadership abilities to thrive at all levels in any organization. To discover more about incorporating The Leadership Challenge into your organization today or talk with our team members!
