Rising to the Challenge of Leadership: Revisiting Kouzes and Posner Leadership Practices
I recently revisited the work of Kouzes and Posner and I’ve been considering the different meanings the simple title can take on. Is it the challenge (difficulty) of being a leader? Is it the challenge (opportunity) that we accept in becoming a leader? Is it the delicate balance of becoming, being, and evolving as a leader to the changing needs of our team, organization, and industry?
Their leadership practices were a centering reminder of what matters most in being a leader. Through a 360° assessment process, Kouzes and Posner focus their leadership practices as follows:
Model the Way
Inspire a Shared Vision
Challenge the Process
Enable Others to Act
Encourage the Heart
Model the Way encourages leaders to establish and maintain the expectations, guidelines, protocols of a team and when those challenges arise, they remove any necessary barriers.
Inspire a Shared Vision pushes leaders to envision a future and through their communication and collaboration, they enlist others in co-creating the possibilities for the future.
Challenge the Process allows leaders to shine with their technical problem solving and process improvement, however, they must be mindful to bring others along with them and grow from the inevitable setbacks.
Enable Others to Act pushes leaders to trust in the teams and in the process. Mutual respect takes time to develop and collaboration requires the trust to allow people to do their jobs.
Encourage the Heart reminds leaders that when the organization succeeds, it has been the result of individuals. Taking time to recognize the accomplishments not only at the end of the projects, but also along the way, ensures that the teams share in the achievements.
In a recent meeting with other practitioners of these tools, several themes came through as areas of greatest need within organizations: 42 percent of the group agreed that the skills and indicators around Encourage the Heart were most pressing; 25 percent saw the need for Inspire a Shared Vision; 17 percent felt Model the Way was important; and 17 percent to Challenge the Process.
Of the 30 statements in the tool, the following were the specific statements the group felt were elevated:
Model the Way
#16 Ask for feedback on how their actions affect other people’s performance.
#26 Is clear about their philosophy of leadership.
Inspire a Shared Vision
#2 Talks about future trends that will influence how our work gets done.
#7 Describes a compelling image of what our future could be like.
#22 Paints the ‘big picture’ of what we aspire to accomplish.
Challenge the Process
#8 Challenges people to try out new and innovative ways to do the work.
#18 Ask ‘What can we learn?’ when things don’t go as expected.
Enable Others to Act
#19 Involves people in the decisions that directly impact their job performance.
Encourage the Heart
#9 Actively listens to diverse points of view
#10 Makes it a point to let people know about their confidence in their abilities.
#15 Makes sure that people are creatively recognized for their contributions to the success of our projects.
#25 Tells stories of encouragement about the good work of others.
From this listing, I hope you can appreciate some of the same themes that I saw emerging.
It’s unsurprising to me that while organizations are struggling with employee recruitment and retention, one of the primary areas of missing skills are around encouraging and recognizing others for their contributions. It’s also not a leap to see the connections between how employees are yearning to know the larger picture behind strategy and vision at the team or organizational level.
Leaders need to effectively communicate ‘a’ vision while also balancing the fact it may need to be flexible and responsive to future needs. Too often we see organizations clinging to the ‘old way’ and then paying the price in their lack of resources - employees or otherwise.
Whether adapting to change or trusting employees with autonomy, the opportunity that every leader has is evident: we all need feedback. A 360° tool is just one avenue to arrive at feedback on performance. In the meantime, I encourage you to consider this: How do you know you are rising to the challenge of leadership?
