The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership include:
- Model the Way
- The ability to inspire a shared vision
- Challenge the process
- Enable others to act
- Encourage the heart
Bosses who complain about missed deadlines they themselves can’t meet may have a difficult time achieving the results they desire. That’s because the old adage of “leading by example” often holds true. It’s what authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner call “Model the Way” in the fifth edition of their book “The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations,” Jossey-Bass, 2012.
“Model the way” is one of “Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership,” say Kouzes and Posner, leadership professors and experts based in the San Francisco Bay area. Through more than 30 years of research, the authors discovered that top-notch company leaders follow similar paths to excellence.
In addition to Model the Way, the Five Practices include:
- The ability to inspire a shared vision
- Challenge the process
- Enable others to act
- Encourage the heart
“Leadership is not about personality; it’s about behavior,” Posner and Kouzes write. “The Five Practices are available to anyone who accepts the leadership challenge – the challenge of taking people and organizations to places they have never been before, of doing something that has never been done before, and of moving beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary.”
Model the Way
Leaders must be willing to serve as models for their employees’ behavior by matching their words with their actions.
“Through their daily actions, they demonstrate their deep commitment to their beliefs and those of the organization,” Posner and Kouzes say.
Leading by example can help top-level managers and executives earn their employees’ trust. It also sends the message that leaders are not asking their employees to do something they wouldn’t do themselves.
Steve Skarke, a plant manager at specialty polymer manufacturer Kaneka Texas, relates in the “The Leadership Challenge” how walked the plant floor and stuffed a bucked full of trash he picked up from the facility. Within a couple of weeks, “trash disappeared from the plant” because workers began picking up trash on their own.
Inspire a Shared Vision
A leader’s vision should be clear to employees and why it should matter to them.
“Unity of purpose is forged when you show your constituents how the dream is a shared dream and how it fulfills the common good,” Posner and Kouzes say.
One way to identify shared values is through consensus-building exercises. One manager of a General Electric Co. (IW 500/5) multinational internal audit team asked team members to complete a questionnaire that asked about several personal topics such as hobbies and favorite foods as well as the type of work each member preferred and their typical roles on teams.
The exercise helped align the team around a common set of values.
