Learning Leadership

The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader

James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119144281
• eBook ISBN: 9781119144304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Uncover the extraordinary leader in you with straightforward exercises and advice from two of the world's foremost leadership experts

From the bestselling authors of The Leadership Challenge and over a dozen award-winning leadership books comes a new book that examines a question of fundamental importance: How do people learn to become leaders?

Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader is a comprehensive guide to unleashing the inner leader in us all and to building a solid foundation for a lifetime of leadership growth and mastery.  The book offers a concrete framework to help individuals of all levels, functions, and backgrounds take charge of their own leadership development and become the best leaders they can be.

Arguing that all individuals are born with the capacity to lead, bestselling authors Kouzes and Posner provide readers with a practical series of actions and specific coaching tips for harnessing that capacity and creating a context in which they can excel. Supported by over 30 years of research, from over seventy countries, and with examples from real-world leaders, Learning Leadership is a clarion call to unleash the leadership potential that is already present in society today.

Learning Leadership provides readers with evidence-based strategies to ignite the habit of continuous improvement and the mindset of becoming the best leaders they can be. Emerging leaders, as well as leadership developers, internal and external coaches and trainers, and other human resource professionals will learn from first-hand stories and practical examples so that they can deeply understand and apply the fundamentals for becoming the best leaders they can be.

Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader is divided into digestible bite-sized chapters that encourage daily actions to becoming a better leader. Key takeaways from the book include:

• Believe in Yourself.  Believing in oneself is the essential first step in developing leadership competencies. The best leaders are learners, and they can't achieve mastery until and unless they truly decide that inside them there is a person who can make and difference and learn to be a better leader than they are right now.
• Aspire to Excel. To become an exemplary leader, people must determine what they care most about and why they want to lead. Leaders with values-based motivations are the most likely to excel. They also must have a clear image of the kind of leader they want to be in the future—and the legacy they want to leave for others. 
• Challenge Yourself. Challenging oneself is critical to learning leadership. Leaders must seek new experiences and test themselves. There will be inevitable setbacks and failures along the way that require curiosity, grit, courage, and resilience to persist in learning and becoming the best.
• Engage Support. One can't lead alone, and one can't learn alone. It is essential to get support and coaching on the path to achieving excellence. Whether it's family, managers at work, or professional coaches, leaders need the advice, feedback, care, and support of others.
• Practice Deliberately. No one gets better at anything without continuous practice. Exemplary leaders spend more time practicing than ordinary leaders. Simply being in the role of a leader is insufficient. To achieve mastery, leaders must set improvement goals, participate in designed learning experiences, ask for feedback, and get coaching. They also put in the time every day and make learning leadership a daily habit.

Kouzes and Posner offer unrivaled insights into what it means to become an exemplary leader in today's world with their original research and over 30 years of experience studying the practices of extraordinary leadership. They show that anyone can become a better leader if they believe in themselves, aspire to excel, challenge themselves to grow, engage the support of others, and practice deliberately.  Learning Leadership challenges readers to do the meaningful and disciplined work necessary to becoming the best they can, using a new mindset and toolkit that can make extraordinary things happen.  It's not the once-in-a-while transformational acts that demonstrate leadership. It's the little things that one does day in and day out that pave the path to greatness.

Part I
Learning Leadership Fundamentals

Leadership potential isn't something that some people have and other people don't. It's much more broadly distributed than traditionally accepted views suggest. You already have the capacity to lead, but some prevailing myths and assumptions about leadership get in the way of your becoming the best leader you can be. To become an exemplary leader, you have to move past the myths and get down to applying the fundamentals that will enable you to learn and grow as a leader.

Leadership is essential because it makes a significant difference in people's levels of engagement, commitment, and performance. Developing your leadership capabilities will help you improve the way people around you feel about their workplace and promote more productive organizations. Learning to be a better leader also enhances your feelings of self-worth and meaningfulness.

Our research shows that a universal set of leadership practices is associated with exemplary leadership, and these practices are within the capacity of everyone to follow. The challenge is to increase the frequency with which you engage in these leadership practices and become more comfortable and confident in their use.

In the next three chapters we take a look at these key themes on becoming an exemplary leader:

• Leaders are born and so are you.
• Leadership makes a difference.
• You are already leading, just not frequently enough.

Chapter 1
Leaders Are Born and So Are You

We've been writing and speaking about exemplary leadership for more than 30 years, and throughout that time there's one question people ask us more often than any other. That most frequently asked question is some variation of “Are leaders born or made?” Maybe you're wondering the same thing.

Our answer to that question has always been the same: We have never met a leader who was not born. We've also never met an accountant, artist, athlete, engineer, lawyer, physician, scientist, teacher, writer, or zoologist who was not born.

You might be thinking, “Well that's not fair. That's a trick question. Everyone is born.” That's precisely our point. Every one of us is born, and every one of us has the necessary material to become a leader—including you. The question you should be asking yourself is not “Will I make a difference?” In becoming a better leader, the more demanding and significant question you should be asking is “How will I make the difference I want?”

And just for the record, no one has ever asked us, “Are managers born or made?”

Let's get something straight right from the start. Leadership is not some mystical quality that only a few people have and everyone else doesn't. Leadership is not preordained. Neither is it the private reserve of a special class of charismatic men and women. Leadership is not a gene. It is not a trait. There is just no hard evidence to suggest that leadership is imprinted in the DNA of some people and not others.

We've collected assessment data from millions of people around the world. We can tell you without a doubt that there are leaders in every profession, every type of organization, every religion, and every country, from young to old, male and female. It's a myth that leadership can't be learned—that you either have it, or you don't. There is leadership potential everywhere we look.

Asking, “Are leaders born or made?” is not a very productive question. It's the old nature versus nurture argument, and it doesn't get at a more important question that must be asked and answered. The more useful question is “Can you, and those you work with, become better leaders than you are today?” The answer to that question is a resounding yes.

There are people who maintain that not everyone has the potential to lead and not everyone has the capacity to learn to lead. That's because myths, misconceptions, and false assumptions about leadership create barriers to developing leaders at all levels. One of the first challenges on the path to exemplary leadership is to overcome these folk legends and false assumptions. They foster a model of leadership that is antithetical to the way real-life leaders operate. They also create unnecessary barriers to the revitalization of our organizations and communities.

Before we can examine evidence and examples of the mindsets that enable people just like you to become the best leaders they can be, we need to address some of the fables that keep people from thinking that they can provide leadership and be leaders. Five myths inhibit learning to lead and contribute most to the misunderstandings about what leadership is and isn't.

The Talent Myth

The talent myth has captivated the training and development world for years, and some have come to accept it as the new gospel. If only you search far and wide, and long and hard, you'll be able to identify the best and the brightest people and then place them in all the existing leadership roles. Problem solved. No training required; just find the right person. Well, good luck with that.

Talent is overrated.¹ Florida State University professor and noted authority on expertise K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues have found, over the 30 years of their research, that raw talent is not all there is to becoming a top performer. It doesn't matter whether it's in sports, music, medicine, computer programming, mathematics, or other fields; talent is not the key that unlocks excellence.² In studying what it takes to succeed and how people reach their goals, Professor Heidi Grant Halvorson at Columbia Business School reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that the emphasis on talent, smarts, and innate ability has done more harm than good.³ As she points out, there's a vast difference between “being good” and “getting better.”

Leadership is not a talent that you have or you don't. In fact, it is not a talent but an observable, learnable set of skills and abilities. Leadership is distributed in the population like any other set of skills.

For more than three decades we have been fortunate to study the stories of thousands of ordinary people who have led others to make extraordinary things happen.⁴ There are millions more stories and examples. The belief that leadership is available only to a talented few is a far more powerful deterrent to development than anything else is. It prevents too many people from even trying, let alone excelling.

To become a better leader than you are right now, the first fundamental thing you have to do is to believe you can be a better leader and that you can learn to improve your leadership skills and abilities. Without that belief, there's no training or coaching that's going to do much good.

The Position Myth

This myth associates leadership with a hierarchal position. It assumes that when you have a position at the top, you're automatically a leader. It assumes that leadership is a title and that if you don't have a title of authority, you aren't a leader. It assumes that leadership starts with a capital L.

Every day, the mass media and social media perpetuate thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Learning Leadership
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction: The World Needs Exemplary Leaders
• Part I: Learning Leadership Fundamentals
• Part II: Fundamental One: Believe You Can
• Part III: Fundamental Two: Aspire to Excel
• Part IV: Fundamental Three: Challenge Yourself
• Part V: Fundamental Four: Engage Support
• Part VI: Fundamental Five: Practice Deliberately
• Part VII: Commit to Becoming the Best
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement