The Student Leadership Challenge

Five Practices for Becoming an Exemplary Leader

James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119422259
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Student Life

Real-world leadership training for real-world students

The Student Leadership Challenge tailors one of the world's most respected leadership models to students' unique needs, and provides a proven pathway to success. Based on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, this book merges solid research with personal stories from real-world student leaders to help students develop the critical skills they need to lead both now and after graduation. Useful from high school to graduate school and beyond, these lessons are reinforced by reflective and critical thinking activities to help students internalize important concepts while honestly assessing their own practices. Updated and expanded, this new third edition includes four extra chapters to allow deeper investigation, while broader, deeper, and more vivid examples from real-life students illustrate what student leadership looks like around the world. New discussion delves into the research behind the model, as well as the usefulness of leadership in the transition to post-graduate life.

What does leadership mean to you? Although it may be difficult to put into words, we all know it when we see it. Effective leaders tend to exhibit a specific set of traits, possess certain skills, and practice particular habits. This book helps you hone your natural talents and shape your path to success as the leader you want to become.

• Learn The Five Practices of Leadership, and how they help you succeed beyond school
• Discover how students around the world are exhibiting the best in modern leadership
• Practice critical leadership techniques and engage in thought-provoking discussion
• Assess your own potential with the Student Leadership Practices Inventory

Great leadership is more important than ever before, and students are in a prime position to develop these critical skills. The Student Leadership Challenge provides a comprehensive framework with real-world application to help students become their very best.

Model the Way

The first step you must take along the path to becoming an exemplary student leader is inward. It's a step toward discovering who you are and what you believe in. Leaders stand up for their beliefs. They practice what they preach. They also ensure that others stand by the values that they agree on. It is consistency between words and actions that builds credibility.

In the next two chapters, we take a look at how you as a student leader must:

1. 
   Clarify Values by finding your voice and affirming shared values.
2. 
   Set the Example by aligning actions with shared values.

Reflections from the Student Leadership Practices Inventory

1. Record your overall score from the Student Leadership Practices Inventory for MODEL THE WAY here: __________
2. Of the six leadership behaviors that are part of Model the Way, write down the statement for the one you indicated engaging in most frequently:
3. Write down the leadership behavior statement that you felt you engaged in least often:
4. On the basis of your self-assessment, complete this statement: When it comes to Model the Way, my areas of leadership competency are:
5. What Model the Way behaviors do you see as opportunities for improving and strengthening your leadership capability? Make note of these below so that you can keep them in mind as you read this chapter and the next.

1
Commitment #1: Clarify Values

Who are you?” This is the first question people want you to answer if they are going to follow you. Your leadership journey begins when you set out to know “this is who I am” and are able and willing to express it. John Banghoff, for example, knew that he wanted to be in his university's marching band since he was nine years old, when he attended his first college football game with his father. Making the band his freshman year felt like a dream come true. “I was on cloud nine,” John said. “It was the coolest experience to hear my name called.”

Shortly after that, the band's student leaders took John and his new bandmates under the bleachers, where they passed around a flask; afterwards, the leaders took new members to a party where they introduced them to a band tradition of hazing freshmen recruits. “This turned out to be the worst night of my life,” John said. “Seeing all of these people that I looked up to drinking and harassing me and the other new band members left me seriously questioning whether I wanted to be part of this organization.”

John's struggle about whether to stay in the band or leave pushed him to think deeply about what mattered to him. Did his personal values align with the band's culture? Being part of a team, having an opportunity to put his passion for music into practice, and expressing his gratitude for being involved in the marching band were important values he discovered in the process of asking himself, “Who am I, and what do I care about?” John told us.

I realized that the marching band was something that I still wanted to be a part of because it gave me the opportunity to play the trumpet and that I should work on my own feelings of gratitude for the experience rather than focusing on parts that weren't what I wanted.

With this clarity, John soon found other band members who shared his beliefs and his concerns. “Once I talked about values, I realized that there were other people who felt the way that I did. Together we could focus on what was right about marching band and figure out what we might do about the negative aspects,” John said. However, before they could do much, the band's tradition of hazing became public news and eventually resulted in the college firing the band director.

It was a time of intense challenge for everyone in the band, as John explained: “It felt like we had no direction and were being punished for the mistakes of a few. We weren't sure who we could trust, and the leaders we'd come to know and respect within the band were just trying to keep the ship afloat.” The band felt directionless and unmoored, not at all like the prestigious group that John had once yearned to join.

In the midst of this crisis, John and a few of his peers were selected as squad leaders for the following season of marching band. Under the leadership of the newly appointed band director, John and the other squad leaders helped design a cultural blueprint for the band, which articulated new values to help guide it: a tradition of excellence, extraordinary respect, and an attitude of gratitude. “These values gave us signposts to move to when we noticed things that didn't align with them,” John said. The group's ability to relate to each other and feel gratitude even through difficult times helped sustain the marching band's excellence and return it to national prominence.

Implementing the new values and practices began during John's fifth year. During that time, he helped facilitate workshops on the new cultural blueprint, including exercises to show how the band's values could be lived in real life. John recalls, “Although the process of redefining the band's culture was not an easy one, it was extremely rewarding to see everyone rally around the new set of cultural values.” At the end of the season, at the annual concert where the band plays for the community and presents awards to its members, John received the Most Inspirational Bandperson Award for his work in helping to bring the band back together after its crisis. “That night, as I drove home, I was in tears,” John said. “I was in tears the first night of my band experience and my last night, but in two very different circumstances and for very different reasons. It was the journey between point A and point B that made me the leader I am.”

The personal-best leadership cases we've collected are, at their core, the stories of people like John who were clear about their personal values and used this clarity as a bedrock to give them the courage to make tough choices and navigate difficult terrain. Leaders are expected to be able to speak out on matters of values and conscience, and to be clear about what matters to them. But to speak out you have to know what to speak about. To stand up for your beliefs, you have to know the beliefs you stand for. To walk the talk, you have to have a talk to walk. To do what you say, you have to know what you want to say. To earn and sustain personal credibility, you must first be able to clearly articulate deeply held beliefs.

Model the Way is the first of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership we discuss in this book, and one of the commitments you must make to effectively Model the Way is to Clarify Values. In beginning your leadership journey, it's essential that you:

• Find your voice
• Affirm shared values

Becoming an exemplary student leader requires you to fully comprehend the deeply held values—the beliefs, standards, ethics, and ideals—that drive you. You must freely and honestly choose the principles you will use to guide your decisions and actions. Then you must express your authentic self, genuinely communicating your beliefs in ways that clearly represent who you are.

What's more, you must realize that leaders aren't just speaking for themselves when they talk about the values that should guide their decisions and actions. When leaders passionately express a commitment to learning or innovation or service or some other value, those leaders aren't just saying, “I believe in this.” They're also making a commitment on behalf of an entire group. They're saying, “We all believe in this.” Therefore, leaders must not only be clear about their personal guiding principles but also make sure that there's agreement on a set of shared values among everyone they lead. Furthermore, they must hold others accountable to those values and standards.

Find Your Voice

What would you say if someone were to ask you, “What is your leadership philosophy?” Are you prepared right now to say what it is? If you aren't, you should be. If you are, you need to reaffirm it on a daily basis.

Before you can become a credible leader—one who connects “what you say” with “what you do”—you first need to find your authentic voice, the most genuine expression of who you are. If you don't find your voice, you'll end up with a vocabulary that belongs to someone else, sounding as though you are mouthing words written by some speechwriter or mimicking the language of some other leader who is nothing like you at all. If the words you speak are not your words but someone else's, you will not, in the long term, be able to be consistent in word and deed. You will not have the integrity to lead.

To find your voice, you need to discover what you care about, what defines you, and what makes you who you are. You need to explore your inner self. You can only be authentic when you lead according to the principles that matter most to you. Otherwise, you're just putting on an act. Consider Christian Ghorbani's experience.

Christian returned from a three-week trip to India, where he worked on a construction site building a new village school, spent time playing with and interacting with children and families who live in extreme poverty, and learned about the social issues that people in rural India face. This experience fueled his passion for philanthropy, and when he returned to school he founded an organization called Pledge to Humanity. Christian attributed this action to “the inner reflection where I clarified my values, took action based on these values, and expressed my vision to those I came in contact with. The more I talked, the more I began to see my voice strengthening and my passion deepening.”

Leading others begins with leading yourself, and you can't do that until you're able to answer that fundamental question about who you are. When you have clarified your values and found your voice, you will also find the inner confidence necessary to take charge of your life. Take it from Tommy Baldacci.

Throughout college, Tommy had many leadership experiences, and as a result felt that people who don't take the time to engage in personal reflection will lack an understanding of personal values and philosophy. “To know how to lead, you need to know where you are going,” he told us.

To know where you are going, you have to know who you are. Knowing yourself truly means that you have to be honest with yourself. By understanding myself, I was able to figure out professionally where my passions were aimed. Without knowing myself, I would have had no baseline to refer to.

Our research backs up Tommy's observations. There was a dramatic relationship between how leaders assessed their leadership skills relative to their peers and how frequently they reported “talking about their values and the principles that guided their actions.” The increase in leadership skills between those leaders who indicated that at most they “sometimes” talked about values and principles and those who often did so was nearly 35 percent. There was still another 40 percent increase in people's assessment of their leadership skills between those who indicated they often talked about values and principles and those who maintained they very frequently did so.

Let Your Values Guide You

Values constitute your personal “bottom line.” They influence every aspect of your life—for example, your moral judgments, commitments, and personal and group goals—and the way you respond to others. They serve as guides to action and set the parameters for the decisions you make, consciously and subconsciously. They tell you when to say yes and when to say no. They also help you explain the choices you make and why you make them. You seldom consider or act on options th...