The Leadership Challenge is a field guide for becoming the kind of leader that other people want to follow. International bestselling authors and longtime research partners James Kouzes and Barry Posner have compiled thousands of case studies and millions of responses to surveys over the course of decades and used them to distill leadership into five overall principles. Each principle is supported by two guidelines (for 10 guidelines in total) that offer concrete steps for how to achieve outstanding leadership.
The five principles of leadership and their associated guidelines are based on two primary understandings:
To explore these concepts more fully, we’ll start with an overview of what leadership is, and then we’ll discuss each of the five principles in detail.
Consistently, over time and around the globe, people most often name four specific characteristics. People want leaders who are:
In general, people want to feel their leaders are truthful, know what they’re doing, have a positive attitude, and have a sense of direction.
This brings us to the Five Principles of Outstanding Leadership, which will enable you to develop the qualities of leadership that lead to success. The five principles of outstanding leadership are:
The first principle of outstanding leadership is to set an example by establishing strong values and then demonstrating how your values can increase the success of your organization and the overall happiness of your team.
Effective teams are built on shared values, so as a leader, your first job is to establish a set of values that will guide you and your team.
Clear values help guide your behaviors and choices so that you stay on the path toward your goal. Your values are the enduring beliefs underpinning your actions; the principles that will guide your decisions. Take time to think carefully about what you stand for and what priorities will drive your actions, because having a solid understanding of your own core principles will give you and your team confidence when making decisions.
Once you’ve properly communicated your values, you must help your team members align their values with the values of your organization. Strong teams are built on shared values. If team members have differing values and priorities, they often stop coordinating their efforts and instead work separately toward individual goals.
To affirm your values with your team, proactively engage in conversations that talk about these values. There are many ways you can spark conversations. For example, you might:
Once you’ve established and clearly articulated your values, you must model them in your behavior. When you live out your values, others will know that you’re serious about expecting them to live them, too. Further, when you model your values, you educate your constituents; you guide, teach, and coach them on how to align their values with those of your organization. People learn better by seeing an example in action than by merely hearing the words.
You broadcast your values in many ways, some of which are:
When you inspire people, you ignite their passion, which motivates and excites them. People are naturally drawn to leaders who have a vision of a better world because they want to feel like they are a part of something important.
A forward-thinking leader has a positive vision of the future—one that engages people’s imaginations and emotions—and then works to make it happen. You must have a specific, purposeful vision of where you're going in order to move forward: You can’t judge what path to take if you don’t know your destination.
Often, visionary leaders have difficulty pinpointing where their visionary thinking comes from, chalking it up to intuition or a gut feeling. While these sources of inspiration are vague and hard to quantify, fortunately, there are specific steps you can take to prompt visionary thinking:
Once you’ve created a solid, specific, and inspiring vision, engage your teammates to get them equally excited. To do this:
Outstanding leaders don’t merely manage the day-to-day tasks of keeping an organization on track; they chart new tracks for their organizations to follow. They recognize things that can be improved and find ways to make them better. They seek out challenges rather than waiting for challenges to find them.
Envisioning opportunities is a foundational part of leadership: Leaders think about possibilities and then lead other people toward them. Every venture starts with an idea of how life might be different.
Sometimes opportunities arrive at a leader’s feet, but most often, a leader proactively looks for them. Two rules can guide you in this:
As a leader, when you challenge the status quo, you have to convince others to challenge it with you. However, other people may be reluctant to embark on an unproven path.
You can alleviate some of these concerns by demonstrating through small experiments how your vision might work. In doing so, you’ll not only be learning how to improve your strategy through trial and error, but you’ll also be providing proof of concept for your constituents and others in your organization.
When you work on small pieces of your project, you can experiment and test your vision or strategy in ways that reduce the risks of failure. For example, implementing a new procedure within one department can show you what works and what doesn’t before you roll out the program to the wider organization.
Experiments also allow you to learn through failure, which research shows is a very effective teaching tool. To get the most out of failure:
Your job as a leader is to encourage, enable, and empower others to act. To do this, foster a sense of collaboration among your team members, and build their sense of self-determination by strengthening their competence and confidence.
The success of your project and your leadership depends on a sense of shared creation and shared responsibility. To foster collaboration among your team, follow these principles:
When you go beyond leading and show people how to lead themselves, you become more than a leader—you become a coach, helping others to help themselves. To empower your team:
To encourage lasting commitment from your constituents, you must engage their hearts as well as their minds. This means connecting with them on a personal level. Do this by recognizing their contributions and by celebrating your shared values and victories.
When you recognize the contributions of your team members, you help them feel appreciated for both what they do and who they are. Encouragement helps people function at their highest level, and helps people endure when hours are long, work is difficult or problematic, and the challenge seems daunting. At times like this, people need emotional replenishment—encouragement—to fuel their commitment.
The best way to recognize a team member is with personalized recognition that lets them know that you’ve noticed them in particular for a specific accomplishment. This runs counter to many existing incentive systems, which are routine, bureaucratic, and one-size-fits-all. But people consistently report that the most meaningful recognition they’ve received is a personal one, rather than a financial one. To effectively personalize recognition:
You can engage the hearts of your team members by bringing an attitude of celebration to your workplace. In doing so, celebrate not only accomplishments but also the shared values that define your team. To cultivate a celebratory workspace:
Leadership isn’t created by a fancy title, a famous name, or organizational authority. It comes from fostering and maintaining strong relationships. Ordinary people show outstanding leadership every day, and everyone has the potential to be an effective leader.
Further, leadership isn't an innate quality that a few people have and others don’t. Though many people ask, “Are leaders born or made?” the better question is, “How can I become a better leader tomorrow than I am today?”
Good leaders have an outsized influence on their team’s motivation, effort levels, and willingness to take personal initiative. As you continue to develop your leadership skills, keep these things in mind:
The Leadership Challenge is a field guide for becoming the kind of leader that other people want to follow. International bestselling authors and longtime research partners James Kouzes and Barry Posner have compiled thousands of case studies and millions of responses to surveys over decades and used them to distill leadership into five overall principles. Each principle is supported by two guidelines (for 10 guidelines in total) that offer concrete steps for how to achieve outstanding leadership.
The five principles of leadership and their associated guidelines are based on two primary understandings:
1. Leadership is a relationship between those who lead and those who follow. A leader isn't a leader without a team, and even the greatest leaders don’t achieve their goals by themselves, but instead must enlist the help of a team. Therefore, when you work to develop your leadership, focus primarily on developing your relationships with your team members.
A relationship between a leader and a constituent must be a positive, respectful, and mutually beneficial one. You can’t force people to follow you; they must do so willingly. An employee who doesn’t believe in your mission or your leadership might work for you for a while, but if they don’t truly want to, they’ll eventually move on to another organization. Additionally, while they’re working for you, if they don’t truly want to be there, they're unlikely to put in a great effort.
2. Leadership is a skill—one that can be learned, practiced, and mastered by anyone willing to put in the effort. People sometimes mistakenly believe that a person is either born with leadership skills or isn’t. However, leadership is a set of behaviors, beliefs, and processes that can be learned and practiced by anyone.
To explore these concepts in more depth:
(Shortform note: Because we’ve moved through each principle and guideline in order, we’ve eliminated chapter numbers in our summary because they were redundant.)
Since the mid-1980s, the authors of this book have conducted studies asking people in both business and government what qualities they value in a leader, and what would make them willing to follow someone’s leadership. They’ve found that consistently, over time and around the globe, people most often name four specific characteristics. People want leaders who are:
1. Honest: More than any other characteristic, people list honesty as an important quality of a leader. Other words they use to describe honesty include “truthful,” “ethical,” and “authentic.” Honesty is considered a personal quality more than a professional one, and its importance illustrates that people want to follow leaders they can personally respect and identify with (if you follow a leader who’s viewed as dishonest, your own reputation gets associated with dishonesty).
2. Competent: The second-most-often cited quality is competence. People want their leader to be capable, effective, and experienced; no one wants to follow someone who may lead them into failure. Leaders aren’t expected to be experts in everything, but they should have a solid understanding of their business and their organization—its structure, procedures, culture, and people.
3. Inspiring: The emotional energy that a leader puts forward will infect her whole team. A leader must be able to communicate her vision in such a way that other people understand her passion and believe that it will improve lives. If she is positive, excited, and energetic, her team will be too. If she shows little emotion, or displays anxiety, uncertainty, or discouragement, her team won’t feel enthusiastic.
4. Forward-thinking: People want their leaders to have a clear idea of where they’re headed. They want them to envision a better future and work toward it, rather than merely living with the current status quo. Leaders are not expected to be able to predict the future, but rather, should have a meaningful vision and plan for where they want their organization to head.
In general, then, people want to feel their leaders are truthful, know what they’re doing, have a positive attitude, and have a sense of direction.
These characteristics correspond closely with another measure: what makes people feel an information source is credible, whether that’s a newspaper, doctor, business leader, or politician. Researchers have found that people will judge a source to be credible if it has these qualities:
Notice how closely these terms hew to the top three characteristics listed above of good leaders: honesty, competence, and inspiration. In other words, when people see these qualities of leadership, they judge that leader to be credible.
Credibility is crucial to leadership because if people don’t believe in you, they won’t believe in your mission, message, or strategy. Leaders therefore must protect their credibility so that they can inspire loyalty, enthusiasm, and effort from their employees, customers, and investors.
When researchers ask people what exactly it means for a leader to be credible, the responses vary in wording but typically are some version of “Leaders do what they say they’ll do.” Therefore, as a leader, when you promise something, you must follow through on it or risk losing your credibility.
Other qualities of leadership that study respondents listed included being supportive, fair-minded, courageous, cooperative, and imaginative. The differences between what people prioritized in a leader were often dependent on who those people were, and what leadership skills their particular jobs called for. For example:
This brings us to the Five Principles of Outstanding Leadership, which will enable you to develop the qualities of leadership that create success. The five principles of outstanding leadership are:
Leaders who consistently employ these principles are more effective than those who don’t. Studies show that of people working under leaders who use these practices, 96% self-report feeling highly engaged with their work and the organization. In contrast, of those working under leaders who rarely use these practices, less than 5% report feeling highly engaged.
Leaders using these principles find not only that their team members are more engaged and committed, but that they also lead their organizations to greater financial success. Researchers found that over a five-year period, companies led according to these five principles had 18 times the net income growth and three times the stock price increase as companies whose leaders didn’t subscribe to these principles.
We’ll review each of these principles one by one, and their accompanying guidelines.
The first principle of outstanding leadership is to set an example. Do this by ensuring that your team members understand what you stand for and believe, and then by demonstrating how your values can increase the success of your organization and the overall happiness of your team.
These two guidelines will help you effectively set an example:
Effective teams are built on shared values, so as a leader, your first job is to establish a set of values that will guide you and your team. As your team’s leader, it’s important that when you say, “This is what I believe in,” you're really saying, “This is what we believe in.”
Establishing your values is a two-part process:
Your values are the enduring beliefs underpinning your actions—the principles that will guide your decisions. Clear values help guide your behaviors and choices so that you stay on the path toward your goal. Your values:
For example, if you value diversity and believe innovation comes from a collaboration of different views and mindsets, then you’ll know how to react if people with different viewpoints keep getting shut down in meetings. If you value collaboration, you’ll know how to react when your salespeople aren’t sharing information with each other.
Studies show that having a clear leadership philosophy has several benefits:
Before you can effectively communicate your values to others, you must clearly understand them yourself. Take time to think carefully about what you stand for and what priorities will drive your actions, because having a solid understanding of your own core principles will give you and your team confidence when making decisions.
Your values must be a sincere expression of your own heart, and not merely a parroting of someone else’s values, if you want your constituents to feel properly engaged with them.
Once you’ve properly communicated your values, help your team members align their values with the values of your organization. This is important for the long-term health of an organization:
Strong teams are built on shared values. If team members have differing values and priorities, they often stop coordinating their efforts and instead work separately toward individual goals. When a team works disjointedly like this, they can cross wires and duplicate efforts. For this reason, companies with a strong set of shared values far outperform other companies. Research confirms that such companies have faster rates of profit growth, higher stock prices, stronger rates of job creation, and lower levels of turnover.
This does not mean that everyone on your team must hold the exact same values—such a standard would allow for no diversity of opinion or disagreements, both of which are essential in a healthy organization. However, leaders should aim to ensure that their constituents agree on some basic, overall, core values.
To affirm your values with your team, proactively engage in conversations that talk about these values. Explicitly naming and discussing your values:
There are many ways you can spark conversations about values. For example, you might:
If your team has gone off track or stopped working effectively together, you can bring them back together by discussing your values. For example, say you're hired to replace an ineffective department head, and you find that your new team members are combative, competitive, and disrespectful because of the culture the former department head fostered. You might approach the problem not by telling your constituents what you expect of them, but instead, letting them know what you expect of yourself. When you take initiative and establish which values you aspire to, you’ll likely find that others follow suit, sharing their own values and consciously recognizing how their actions do or don’t live up to them.
Be prepared to have more than one conversation. Establishing a shared set of values is a process—it can’t be accomplished after a single heart-to-heart. The process will take time and will evolve. At first, team members may be focused on their own individual goals or reluctant to share their thoughts. However, if you're consistent in your efforts, people typically start to open up, resulting in an increased feeling of shared purpose.
Be sure that your conversations are dialogues in which you ask about your constituents’ values as much as you explain your own. Allow them to talk freely and explain their own beliefs and the reasons behind them—you won’t arrive at a consensus by demanding it or proclaiming that “These are our values.” Everyone must contribute to the conversation or they won’t feel authentic buy-in. You can, however, guide the conversation by emphasizing certain values that you want to start a dialogue about.
Andrew Levine demonstrated how to appeal to shared values in order to increase the effectiveness of his team members. Andrew was the head mentor at Young Storytellers, an organization that works with school children, developing their imaginations through narrative. He oversaw a group of volunteers who were each assigned a specific child to work with. When he noticed that some of his volunteers were having trouble connecting to their assigned kids, and that they were also showing low signs of commitment to the program as a whole (failing to show up for sessions), he decided to reset the program by focusing his volunteers’ minds on their shared values.
He initiated a conversation with them to explore the organization’s purpose and how it intersected with their own:
In having this conversation, Andrew asked his volunteers to affirm their shared values, while allowing them room to lead with their own values. His volunteers were re-energized and excited about the mission he reminded them of.
You don’t have to lay down an ultimatum like he did, asking people to either fully commit or leave. However, you can remind people that they can willingly choose to belong to whichever organization they connect to, and they should make it a priority to find one that resonates, whether it’s yours or not. They often will respond positively and with renewed energy.
Once you’ve established and clearly articulated your values, model them in your behavior. When you live your values, others will know you’re serious, and you expect them to live them, too. It's easy to say you believe in certain values, but harder to follow through and live them, so when others see you doing just that—practicing what you preach—you gain credibility, and people will more enthusiastically follow your lead.
Further, when you model your values, you educate people; you guide, teach, and coach them on how to align their values with those of your organization. People learn better by seeing an example than by merely hearing the words. To model your values:
As a leader, you're the face of your organization to the public, and this means you represent its shared values. Other people associate you with your organization and will judge it by the actions you take.
You're also the face of your organization to your constituents (employees, volunteers, or other members). As such, you set the tone for your organization and how it—and everyone within it—will operate. Research shows that direct reports mimic the behavior of their leader. Leaders who are visible to their direct reports and who demonstrate positive attitudes, work conscientiously toward their goals, and make constructive changes when needed are likely to have direct reports who do the same.
You broadcast your values in many ways, some of which are:
People will judge your sincerity by what you pay attention to, and whether it matches what you say you value. People will respect a leader who lives by the principle of, “don’t ask others to do what you yourself aren’t willing to do.”
Schedule your calendar and structure your agenda to match your stated values. For example:
An example of a leader exemplifying these principles was a senior client engagement manager at Accenture, whose team ran into trouble on a project and needed to spend New Year’s Eve and Day working in order to complete it. The manager canceled his own vacation plans to join them. His presence sent a strong message to both his team members and the client that he was committed to getting the project completed. Consequently, his team’s levels of morale and engagement soared.
Your language reflects your values, showing how you think about roles and relationships. Words provide a framework for how you see the world and what you want others to focus on. Therefore, ensure your language uplifts, motivates, and empowers your team members, rather than makes them feel restricted and disempowered.
When speaking about the roles and positions of you and your team members, avoid words and phrases that focus on hierarchy, and instead use words that focus on relationships. For example:
Additionally, when speaking of goals and strategy, use words that invoke ideals that go beyond mere functionality. While terms like efficiency, differentiation, and superiority are often accurate descriptions of objectives, they don’t rouse the spirit in the same way words like honor, justice, and truth do.
Your language conveys your priorities. When you ask questions, you indicate what you’re concerned about and direct attention to a specific aspect of the issue. Therefore, ask purposeful questions designed to inform, guide, and emphasize your values.
For example, if you ask someone, “What do you need that we can provide so you can finish the project?” you’re emphasizing collaboration and support. In contrast, if you ask, “Why haven’t you finished the project?” you’re emphasizing personal accountability and implying blame. With this question, you’ll likely prompt a feeling of defensiveness, and the other person will probably feel the need to give excuses rather than to reflect constructively on solutions.
When you ask purposeful, well-framed questions, you can:
You can also use questions to find ways to improve your business or organizational purpose. Ask your constituents for input, and follow up with additional questions. Never criticize suggestions, but instead, ask for clarification. Use questions to reframe viewpoints and inspire new ideas—for example, get your team members to see your business from your customers’ point of view by asking how the customer might feel using your products.
You broadcast how you feel about others’ opinions with whether or not you're open to feedback.
You can’t truly evaluate your own job performance without knowing what others think about you—and to find out, you have to ask them. So to grow in your leadership role, regularly seek feedback.
It’s hard to receive feedback; no one likes to be criticized. Though everyone wants to improve themselves, they also want to feel accepted just as they are. Feedback speaks to both of these basic human desires, and therefore it comes with an inherent tension. Because of this, many people, leaders included, react to feedback negatively, and don’t often seek it out.
Leaders also resist feedback because they fear it will expose their flaws, convince their constituents they aren’t up to their task of leadership, and thus make them less successful. However, research shows that leaders who are open to feedback are far more likely to be successful.
(Shortform note: For a more in-depth discussion of how to constructively accept feedback, read our guide to Thanks for the Feedback.)
When you model your values, you show others how to live the shared values of your organization. This is crucial because your role as a leader is not only to personally represent the values of your organization, but also to ensure that your constituents represent them as well—your constituents are the face of your organization to the public just as you are, and the public will judge your organization’s values based on how they observe your team members acting.
In addition, your own team members will watch what you expect of their peers—or what you let slide. If they see that you consistently hold other team members up to your stated values, they’ll feel more committed to them. If they see you accepting behavior that you have verbally discouraged, they won't judge your commitment to your values as sincere.
There are many ways you can guide and coach your team to live your shared values. Some specific ways are:
You can effectively demonstrate how your values can be put into action when unplanned emergencies arise. Unplanned problems are an opportunity to focus your team members on what’s critical and to show them how your values can create solutions.
For example, if a colleague has to take a leave of absence during an important phase of a project in which she plays an integral part, you can demonstrate how your stated values of, say, teamwork and flexibility can help the project stick to its timeline if you step in to help manage it.
Another way to demonstrate how your values can be put into action is to tell a story. Stories teach people how the world works—what to do, what to avoid, what’s important, and what’s possible—and the human brain has evolved to pay close attention to them. Your team members will better understand the rules if they hear a story about them—what happened when someone broke them or how someone was rewarded for following them—than they will if they just read a list of rules.
Use stories to support major changes in policy or strategy, as people will understand more clearly the reasons behind the changes and what the changes are aiming for. If possible, include people in your stories that your listeners will recognize: People love to hear stories about themselves or people they know, so if you can illustrate a point with a story filled with familiar elements, you’ll grab your listeners’ attention.
As a leader, ensure that your team can follow your values even when you're not physically present. This will allow your team members to take initiative without needing to follow your lead. To do this, establish clear and practical procedures that stand in for your decision-making when you're not around. These might include:
Steve Skarke of Kaneka Texas Corporation demonstrated how to effectively model his values. When Steve stepped into the role of plant manager at the company, he had a vision for the company, shared by management, of becoming a “World Class Plant.” However, he noticed immediately that the physical condition of the plant grounds didn’t hold up this value; the plant was untidy. In fact, whenever a customer was scheduled to visit, Steve had to assign people to clean up trash around the plant, parking lot, and surrounding roads.
To model the values he wanted his team to adopt, Steve picked up a large plastic bucket, labeled it “World Class Plant,” and walked around picking up trash. He took his trash bucket with him wherever he went around the plant. Soon, other managers and workers started carrying buckets too.
Further, now that everyone’s attention was on the trash problem, they began talking about how to address the issue over the longer term. They added trash cans and came up with ways to organize their workspaces better. The company even expanded the program, delegating responsibility for the maintenance of certain pieces of machinery to the floor operators.
Because of Steve’s decision to personally live up to the values he wanted others to live up to, he created a culture based on those values.
Clear values help guide your behaviors and choices so that you stay on the path toward your goal. Your values must be a sincere expression of your own heart.
Write down what values you hold that set you apart from other leaders. What priorities define who you are? What beliefs drive your decisions?
How are your values reflected in the values of your organization? How do they match? Where do they differ?
How can you let your constituents know your values? What are some ways you can articulate or communicate them?
Once you’ve established and clearly articulated your values, model them in your behavior so that others will know that you’re serious about what you expect of them.
What can you do on an everyday basis that demonstrates your values? (Think small: What are some ways you can interact with other people that show your values? Are there things you can say, actions you can take, or habits you can form?
The second principle of outstanding leadership is to be inspirational. When you inspire people, you ignite their passion, which motivates and excites them. People are naturally drawn to leaders who have a vision of a better world because they want to feel like they are a part of something important.
These two guidelines will help you inspire your team:
As we mentioned earlier, people expect a leader to be forward-thinking. A forward-thinking leader creates a positive vision—one that engages people’s imaginations and emotions—and then works to make it happen.
You must have a specific, purposeful vision of where you're going in order to move forward: You can’t judge what path to take if you don’t know your destination.
Envisioning a positive future starts by seeing the potential of the future. A specific vision of the future gives you a theme for your career or life: a guiding principle on which you can base your decisions.
Often, visionary leaders have difficulty pinpointing where their visionary thinking comes from, chalking it up to intuition or a gut feeling. While these sources of inspiration are vague and hard to quantify, fortunately, there are specific steps you can take to prompt visionary thinking:
To properly see the future, first reflect on your history. When you look to the past, you better understand how you arrived at where you are now, and that in turn can inform your future decisions.
Examining your past also helps you see how your values have shaped your life—either how your actions have been influenced by your values or have run counter to them. This can help you reassess whether you're acting in accordance with those values or whether you need to change your behavior to honor them better.
In order to envision a better future, be fully aware of your present—of trends, patterns, strengths and weaknesses in your organization, and challenges and conditions outside your organization. When you pay attention to your current world, you can better anticipate what’s to come.
Strive to notice things outside of your immediate reach of attention:
It can be difficult to be consciously mindful of your surroundings because it’s easy to get caught up in the details and pressures of daily life. To prevent this, be proactive about becoming mindful: Set aside time every day to pause your activities and take stock of the world around you. This will allow you to spot larger trends and see opportunities you might otherwise have missed.
As a leader, your job is to think about the next project and the one after that (and after that).
In scouting the future, look for opportunities and threats. Being aware of both will allow you to lead your organization more successfully and will encourage people to follow you more enthusiastically.
To envision the future, connect with your deepest passions. Your passion will drive your vision because it will point you in the direction you want to go and influence what vision of the future you're willing to work for, suffer for, and sacrifice for.
No one else can tell you what your passion is—your passion and purpose are unique to you. Therefore, just as you spent time clarifying your values, also take time to clarify your passions. Once you have a clear idea of what will give your life meaning, you can effectively pass along your enthusiasm to others.
Andrew Rzepa was the committee chair of lawyer trainees in Manchester, England, when a close affiliate group, Trainee Solicitors Group, arranged to hold a conference in his city. Even though he was not an official organizer for the event, he decided to make the conference a success and took the initiative to get others on board.
When enrollment for the event plateaued at 75 people, Andrew appealed to his colleagues to help boost attendance. He spoke to them passionately about what it would mean for their local organization to have this event be successful, and how good it would feel if they made that happen. He saw a specific possibility: He set a goal of increasing attendance to 300 and asked the other committee members if they were willing to personally commit to helping realize this goal. In the end, he successfully energized his colleagues and the final event attendance was 316 trainees.
Once you’ve created a solid, specific, and inspiring vision, inspire your teammates to be equally excited. If you engage team members in your vision, not only will they be more excited, but they’ll also feel more secure in you and your organization, especially during times of change.
To do this, follow these steps:
To engage your team in your vision, you need more than your vision: You need to incorporate their visions as well.
By fully listening to others, you can learn what drives them, and what you can incorporate into your shared vision.
To engage your team in your vision, help them to see how their efforts will make a uniquely positive difference in the world. A compelling vision shows people how they can be different from others, which translates into higher levels of commitment and enthusiasm.
People want, more than anything else, to feel a sense of purpose and for their lives to have meaning. This is ultimately more important than making money. Therefore, focus others’ attention on the greater cause behind your vision. People commit more readily and wholeheartedly to causes than to strategies.
Show your team how their actions in your organization matter outside the organization. For example, emphasize how your company or division helps your customers live their best lives, or solves problems for clients that resonate throughout the industry.
People are visual and respond to image-based words more strongly than to abstract concepts. Images evoke feelings, and image-based words inspire. For example, a study found that when researchers described a line of toys with visual descriptions such as, “will make wide-eyed kids laugh,” participants reacted more strongly than to the more abstract “will be enjoyed by all of our customers.”
Translate your vision into tangible, actionable, visual, and specific terms that your team members can readily recognize and visually imagine. Use image-based concepts to paint a clear picture of what your vision will look, feel, and sound like. By seeing it in their mind’s eye, your team members will be able to generate their own enthusiasm for your vision, which will mirror yours.
For example, when the Australian branch of tool manufacturer Hilti Corporation wanted to excite its workforce, its management came up with a slogan that allowed workers to picture their common purpose: “We’re Painting Australia Red.” This was a simple and effective way to envision every worksite and garage in the country equipped with items in Hilti’s signature color, and it increased employees’ enthusiasm.
Additionally, to bring your vision to life, use metaphors, symbols, stories, and quotes that allow your team members to hear, see, and recognize what you’re envisioning. Using a metaphor to frame your vision can help others understand it better.
People use metaphors all the time in their everyday language—sports metaphors, war metaphors, machine metaphors, and so on. You can use a common metaphor like these to emphasize your point. For instance, you might compare your organization to a farmer’s market, offering fresh items that change according to the seasons or demand, if that fits with the purpose of your organization, even if your organization has nothing to do with food.
Be aware also of the connotations of your words, in addition to their official definitions. Certain words evoke images that can associate your organization or concept with specific things, whether or not you mean to.
For example, in one study, researchers had two groups of people play a game. Both played the same game using the same rules, but one group was told the name of the game was “The Community Game,” while the other group was told the name was “The Wall Street Game.” The results were striking: Of those playing the Community Game, 70% played cooperatively. Of those playing the Wall Street Game, only 30% played cooperatively, and even then, only at first—once they saw others weren’t playing cooperatively, they stopped cooperating as well. This illustrates the power specific words can have over people’s interpretations of their world.
If you can get other people to feel emotions about your vision, you’ll have much greater success bringing them on board. Emotions inspire excitement and also help with memory. If people connect emotionally with your vision, they’ll remember it in more detail for a longer period of time.
You can create an emotional connection in several ways:
People won’t follow a leader who’s only mildly enthusiastic about their vision. Leaders need to radiate vast amounts of energy in order to inspire energy in their team.
You can portray energy through the way you talk and move. People who are perceived as charismatic behave more animatedly than others. They:
You’ll be more likely to engage others with a positive attitude. As a leader, you’ll need to bring your constituents through difficult times with optimism—to inspire hope when your team faces obstacles or setbacks. A large part of this will come from making it clear you believe in the abilities of others, so that difficulties can make them feel empowered rather than discouraged.
All projects and organizations will face challenges, and if you help your people approach these challenges with a confident attitude, they’ll meet them better. If you instead, have a negative attitude or convey anger, disappointment, or exasperation when your team has difficulties, people will be less willing to seek you out in times of trouble. The resulting disconnect between you and your team can allow problems to worsen before they start to be addressed.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech is an example of how to successfully appeal to people’s values, emphasize meaningfulness, appeal to emotions, use symbolic words, and paint a positive vision of the future. In doing so, King got people behind his message, moving his vision from “my vision” to “our vision.”
In order to envision a better future, you must be fully aware of your present—of trends, patterns, strengths and weaknesses in your organization, and challenges and conditions outside your organization. Pay attention to your current world so you can anticipate what’s to come.
Look around your workplace and make a conscious note of the things people are doing and the things they’re using. What do your colleagues and team members use to complete their tasks? What processes and procedures do they work under? How do they structure their days?
Notice things they’re using on the periphery of their work projects—things that might not directly relate to their task but that help them be more productive or make their day more pleasant. For example, do they refer to a particular news source or use a common app? Do they use any innovative organizational tools?
Look for opportunities in any of these things you notice. Can any of them be improved? Is there anything your team could benefit from that you see them seeking out? Are there any processes you could streamline to help them work more efficiently?
Now that you’ve explored your values, vision, and purpose, and examined how you can engage your team to pursue these things with you, we’ll shift our discussion to another aspect of leadership: a willingness to challenge the status quo.
Outstanding leaders don’t merely manage the day-to-day tasks of keeping an organization on track; they chart new tracks for their organizations to follow. They recognize things that can be improved and find ways to make them better. They seek out challenges rather than waiting for challenges to find them.
The next two guidelines outline specific ways in which you can proactively drive your organization or team forward:
Envisioning opportunities is a foundational part of leadership: Leaders think about possibilities and then lead other people toward them. Every venture starts with an idea of how life might be different.
Sometimes opportunities arrive at a leader’s feet, but most often, a leader proactively looks for them. Two rules can guide you in this:
The first part of searching for opportunity is taking the initiative.
A leader guides others to a new place, and to do that, you have to disturb the existing order of things.
People in organizations grow used to doing things a certain way and are often reluctant to change their habits, defaulting to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Even if they know a procedure could be better, they’ll often resist changing it simply because it’s easier to carry on as usual.
Consequently, as a leader, you must be the one to critically examine the processes and procedures you’ve grown to rely on, and to take the initiative to change them.
As a leader, your job is to see opportunities when others don’t. To spot opportunities that others miss, get into the habit of asking lots of questions.
People naturally ask questions during times of transition, such as when they’re joining an organization or taking on a new project. During these times, you're looking at processes and procedures with a fresh eye, and you’ll naturally question why things are done this way and whether there are better ways to do them.
Be sure to continue this process even after you’ve settled into a position or a role. Continue to ask questions that test others’ assumptions, so you can stimulate new ways of thinking and find new paths to explore.
When leaders recognize a problem, they don’t wait for permission or a set of instructions—they start devising a solution right away. By implementing a solution, you can demonstrate its effectiveness in a way that’s more convincing than a plan would have been.
When you ask for permission, you might run up against the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality we mentioned earlier, or you may run into endless procedural delays. For this reason, look for opportunities to implement improvements proactively.
Everyone on your team, down to the most junior member, should feel they can innovate and improve your team’s systems. When you allow everyone to contribute ideas, you can end up with unexpectedly positive results—sometimes the most junior members of a team are the ones who can see processes and procedures with fresh eyes.
This practice alone will have an outsized effect on team morale: Research shows that those who are frequently encouraged to take initiative in their jobs are about 90% more likely to work harder and longer hours than people who are rarely encouraged to take initiative.
While you want to be constantly on the lookout for opportunities for improvement, don’t try to improve things where improvement isn’t actually needed. Don’t be someone who’s always critiquing, nitpicking, and pointing out problems. Further, if you look for problems, have alternate solutions to offer instead of just pointing out what people are doing wrong.
Dina Campion, a district manager at Starbucks, provides an example of someone recognizing an opportunity, taking initiative, and acting before others do. She noticed that customers were going to competitors’ stores for blended, frozen drinks. The Starbucks corporate management didn’t think the product was worth pursuing, but Dina disagreed.
Without asking permission, she took the initiative to experiment with a blended frozen drink in one location, to prove the concept. The drink proved so popular that the company expanded it to the rest of the chain, investing in blenders for all locations. The resulting product was the Frappuccino, which became the most successful product launch in Starbucks’s history.
The second part of searching for opportunity is looking outward.
Innovations can come from anywhere. A global study showed that most significant innovations come from outside an organization. Ideas can come from, for example, customers, suppliers, business partners, and rival organizations. To increase your chances of spotting opportunities and outside innovations:
Because ideas come from everywhere, actively engage with “everywhere.” When you engage the outside world, you promote conversations that can yield unexpected opportunities and ideas.
Research shows that when you bombard your brain with new stimuli, you promote creative thinking. When you mix up routines, your brain gets put on alert and starts noticing things and making new connections. Otherwise, your brain gets used to routines and stops noticing details—it’s an evolutionary feature designed to save energy.
The best way to shake up your routines and spark creativity is to engage in direct, personal experiences outside your normal world. If you’re faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, the best way to find a solution is to go out into the world and seek information that’s not accessible to you while sitting behind a desk.
To spot new ideas and opportunities, be open to input from a wide range of sources. Even if one person presents an idea that seems valid and sufficient, seek out other opinions, because people from other backgrounds can come up with differing ideas that can shed additional light on the issue.
Sometimes people, especially leaders, avoid seeking other people’s opinions or advice out of a fear that they’ll appear incompetent or unknowledgeable about something they should know. However, the truth is that people tend to view leaders who ask for advice as more competent than those who don’t. This perception is enhanced when the task is more difficult.
To widen your scope of opinions:
Studies of laboratory research teams find that teams engaging in significantly more communication with people outside their labs have much higher performances. These outside influences don’t even have to be immediately relevant to their lab work: Even contact with unrelated departments like marketing, manufacturing, or outside professional groups still has a high correlation to job performance.
Researchers also find that unless people consciously and actively make a point of seeking out diverse opinions, they tend to become insular and cut off important sources of ideas. Further, the longer a team has been working together, the less they tend to reach out to people beyond their team, cutting off sources of information and ultimately reducing their own performance. Therefore, make a conscious choice to seek out others, so you and your team don’t end up so comfortable with each other that you become complacent.
Your attitude toward your job will define how much you get out of it. If you see your job as merely a job, you’ll simply complete the task and be done. However, if you see your job as an adventure and an opportunity to learn and grow, you can make something exceptional happen. Outstanding leaders choose adventure.
There are many things you can do to turn your job into an adventure. Essentially, each one points to your willingness to step out of the boundaries of your role:
While working for a nonprofit organization providing water purification systems for rural India, Priya Saudagaran modeled how to lead by looking outward, expanding her experience, seeking diverse perspectives, and viewing her job as more than just a job.
Management of her organization decided to shut down one particular treatment system because residents of that area weren’t buying the water, and they couldn’t justify keeping the spot open financially. Priya, distressed that the local villagers would lose access to clean water and convinced that the decision didn’t fit with the organization’s mission, went into the field to investigate why the villagers weren’t purchasing the water.
She also reached out to other nonprofits in similar work who were running into these kinds of problems to see how they dealt with them. As a result of her insights, the organization increased its community involvement, adjusted its business model, and was able to become profitable within 12 months. The model she inspired was copied in other locales.
As a leader, when you challenge the status quo, you have to convince others to challenge it with you. However, they may be reluctant to embark on an unproven path.
You can alleviate some of these concerns by demonstrating through small experiments how your vision might work. You’ll not only be learning how to improve your strategy through trial and error, but you’ll also be providing proof of concept for your team and others in your organization.
When experimenting, follow two overall principles:
While your dreams and goals may be big, you should think small when working toward them. You’ll have more success achieving a goal little by little than trying to accomplish the whole thing at once. Aim to accumulate small wins—measurable accomplishments of moderate importance—as you progress.
When you work on small pieces of your project, you can experiment and test your vision or strategy in ways that reduce the risks of failure. For example, implementing a new procedure within one department can show you what works and what doesn’t before you roll out the program to the wider organization.
Aiming for small wins has several other advantages as well:
Experiments will lead you to success by allowing you to fail, and research shows that failure is an effective teaching tool. Failures are opportunities for learning, and consistently, leaders who approach failures with an attitude of “What can we learn from this?” outperform leaders who approach failure looking to cast blame. Leaders who leave legacies are the ones who’ve tried, failed, and then tried again, ultimately achieving success by learning from their past errors.
Experiments allow you to try out a technique more than once, and when people do something more than once, they more readily master it. An example that illustrates this was a study carried out in a ceramics class. The teacher broke the students into two groups. She told the first group that they would get a higher grade if they made more pots, regardless of the quality of those pots. She told the second group that their grade would be based on the quality of the pots they made, not the number.
The first group immediately started making lots of pots, while the second group moved more slowly and deliberately. At the end of the experiment, the teacher discovered that, counterintuitively, the students who had made the most pots had also made the best pots. The act of practicing the techniques repeatedly produced the better product—the students who were encouraged to fail over and over ended up with a better mastery of the skills.
To get the most out of your learning experiences, follow these practices:
To get the most out of your learning experiences, adopt a growth mindset: a belief that you can improve your skills through hard work and practice. This contrasts with a fixed mindset, which is a belief that your basic qualities are settled and permanent.
Leaders with growth mindsets understand that people can learn to be great leaders, while people with fixed mindsets believe great leaders are born, not made: You either have what it takes or you don’t. In study after study, people with growth mindsets perform better on difficult tasks than people with fixed mindsets. This is because when faced with a challenge, people with growth mindsets focus on how they can improve and overcome that challenge, while those with fixed mindsets tend to give up more quickly, reasoning that if they were having trouble with a task, they simply mustn’t have the skills to accomplish it.
To foster your own growth mindset:
(Shortform note: Read our guide to Mindset by Carol S. Dweck to learn more about how to develop a growth mindset.)
You and your team will learn best from your experiences if you foster a culture of learning within your organization. To do this:
Not only do you need to learn from your experiences, you also need to be resilient enough to move past setbacks or periods of little progress so that you can put what you learn to use in the future. Though setbacks can be discouraging, set a tone of determination and perseverance that your team members can adopt. Consistently, research shows that people in any industry—from school kids to military personnel to artists—who have resilience have more success in their careers.
Fortunately, resilience is a skill that can be learned and practiced. To develop a resilient mindset in yourself and your team:
When Dr. Geeta Ramakrishnan took over the microbiology department in a private New Delhi hospital, she showed how a leader can use experimentation and small wins to improve an organization.
When she stepped into her new position, Ramakrishnan recognized that many existing procedures needed improvement but would be complicated and risky to change. Instead of trying to change everything at once, she broke down the needed tasks into smaller pieces and prioritized them by need. She chose one area to start with—the lab’s existing policy of manual testing—and convincing the laboratory head that investing in automated testing equipment would reduce labor costs and lower error rates.
After implementing that first change and seeing success, the hospital decided to expand her program to their other laboratories.
While your dreams and goals may be big, think small when working toward them. You’ll have more success achieving a goal little by little than trying to accomplish the whole thing at once. Aim to accumulate small wins—measurable accomplishments of moderate importance—as you progress.
Think of a project you're working on or a goal you're working toward. Write down the ultimate outcome you're hoping to achieve.
Think of one small thing you can do in working toward that goal that would generate a small win. For example, if your goal is better customer service, how can you help a customer in a minor but unexpected way that would give you and your team something to celebrate?
Now that we’ve discussed how to challenge the status quo, we’ll move on to how to encourage, enable, and empower others to act as well. There are two overall guidelines to achieve this:
The success of your project and your leadership depends on a sense of shared creation and shared responsibility. Consistently, research shows that leaders who cultivate cooperative relationships in their team are viewed as highly effective and inspire the highest levels of engagement.
To foster collaboration among your team:
Trust is integral to human relationships and to leadership. Trust is needed in every type of relationship within a team:
Studies show that people who are trusting are happier and more psychologically well-adjusted than those who see the world with suspicion. Higher levels of trust strongly predict higher organizational performance across a range of markers, including customer loyalty, market share, ethical behavior, and profit growth—for example, the stock performance of companies considered trustworthy is routinely 1.8 times higher than the S&P 500. Therefore, building a trusting team is a foundational step in your success.
Create a climate of trust by following these practices:
Trust must be reciprocal; your team won’t trust in you if you don’t trust in them, and as the leader, you must be the first to demonstrate trust. Trust is contagious, so once you demonstrate it, others are likely to reciprocate. Distrust is contagious, too, so the reverse is also true: If you show that you don’t trust others, they’re unlikely to trust you.
You can’t force others to trust you, but you can earn their trust by respecting them and their abilities.
Also demonstrate trust by being open and honest about your goals, concerns, and values. When you reveal this kind of internal information about yourself, people usually view your motivations as more sincere, and they’re likely to respond with similar openness. For example, if you're working on a new project, you might let your team know that this is the first time you’re leading something like this, and that you’ll need their efforts and expertise to help you. This kind of honesty will encourage them to trust your motives and leadership.
As jobs become more automated, the real competitive advantage of workers—especially leaders—will be their ability to foster strong relationships. The best leaders will be the ones people see as a partner with whom they want to work, instead of as someone merely issuing orders.
To show empathy for others, treat them respectfully.
One of the best ways to show respect for someone is to actively listen to them. Active listening is more than just hearing—it’s engaging in a conversation centered around their thoughts and concerns that makes them feel valued. When you listen actively, you:
When you share your knowledge and insights with your team, you reassure them of your competence, which increases their trust in you. Conversely, if you keep information to yourself, they’ll feel you’re protecting your “turf” and looking out for your own interests over their interests, which decreases their trust in you.
Encourage your team members to share information with each other, as well, as this will similarly increase their trust in each other.
Because people work together best when they trust each other, encourage and foster healthy, trusting relationships among your team members. To do this, follow these practices:
The first step to encouraging strong bonds is to enlist your team in a common purpose. Shared goals unite people in cooperative efforts, in which everyone feels that their success contributes to everyone else’s success, and that no one can be successful unless everyone works together.
Structure your team’s roles and responsibilities so that their individual objectives contribute to a larger objective, and make sure they see how the two are connected. This can also be effective in reconciling people who don’t particularly like each other: Assigning two people who don’t get along to work together can help them get past their distrust once they’re working toward a common purpose.
Reciprocity is the basis of trusting relationships: the belief that others will treat you as you treat them. People like to think that if they help someone, that person will return the favor at some point in the future. This belief in reciprocity is so fundamental to our expectations of relationships that all moral and ethical codes, religious or otherwise, contain some version of it.
If people don’t reciprocate someone else’s efforts, they end up in an unbalanced relationship where one person feels taken advantage of and the other feels superior. Cooperation is difficult in such relationships. This dynamic has been demonstrated in studies where two parties faced a series of challenges that allowed them to either cooperate or compete with one another. Researchers found that the participants who were most successful were the ones who chose to cooperate because their willingness to do so encouraged others to cooperate in return.
Encourage your team members to be available to each other to help whenever any of them needs it. Additionally, model reciprocity by going out of your way to repay favors for those who have helped you.
Large, ambitious goals can’t be accomplished by one person alone, and cooperative teams produce better results than competitive teams, so when talking about the success of any project your team is working on, emphasize the collective results rather than individual results. This will encourage your team to see that there’s a greater payoff in working together than working alone.
The importance of collaboration was demonstrated in a series of studies that looked at what happened when teams were rewarded either for being the highest-performing team or for having the highest-performing individuals. The teams who were rewarded for their collective effort finished their tasks more slowly but more accurately, while the teams rewarded for having high-performing individuals finished more quickly but made more mistakes because team members withheld information from one another.
Getting to know other people is important in establishing trusting and collaborative relationships. Having in-person face time is an essential part of this process. People don’t feel they truly know each other until they’ve seen each other—without a face to put a name to, they don’t seem real.
Therefore, encourage in-person meetings whenever feasible. You can accomplish this through online webcams if your workforce is dispersed, as happens in global companies. In virtual meetings, encourage participants to turn their cameras on, so others have more than just a name and a voice to go by. This will make people feel more comfortable with each other and more ready to express their ideas.
Face time also encourages collaboration because it makes people feel that their interactions with the other person will be ongoing. When people expect to interact with another person again in the future, they’re more likely to cooperate in the present. When they actually see or meet someone, as opposed to merely communicating electronically, like through email, they regard that relationship as one they’ll encounter again, and they’ll put more effort into the relationship.
The real job of a leader isn't to seek power for themselves but to empower others to lead themselves. When you go beyond leading and show people how to lead themselves, you become more than a leader—you become a coach, helping others to help themselves. Too often, people mistakenly assume that the mark of a leader is wielding power over others, but paradoxically, when you give your power away, you actually become a more powerful leader yourself.
Leaders who empower people end up with a stronger team:
To strengthen your team:
People who feel strong and capable under your leadership will perform well. People who feel empowered feel that:
Conversely, people who feel weak and incompetent will underperform, feel disengaged, and might even be looking for opportunities to leave an organization. When people feel powerless, they feel that:
To empower your team, foster a culture where you expect input. Make every team member feel they’re expected to contribute to projects in a meaningful way by giving ideas and helping with strategy. This will help them see themselves as integral and valued parts of the team and will give them confidence to take initiative.
In addition:
People feel in control of their own lives when they have the power to make choices about how to solve problems. In contrast, they feel trapped when they feel their choices are made for them.
This has a significant effect on how people feel about working for an organization: Studies show that when people feel their leaders frequently give them freedom to decide how to do their own work, 80% report feeling proud to work for that organization. However, at even slightly lower levels of autonomy, that feeling of pride goes away—of those reporting their leaders “fairly often” allowed them freedom to make decisions, only 16% reported pride in the organization.
While there is some risk in allowing people to make important decisions, the benefits typically outweigh the potential drawbacks, because your team will end up consisting of stronger individuals.
One example of a company that empowered employees was the Bay Club Santa Clara, a gym in California. After a reorganization, it allowed its trainers to set their own monthly goals for hours worked, which allowed them to take responsibility for recruiting clients and structuring their own work. As a result, trainers felt they were each running their own businesses within the larger organization, increasing their sense of control. As a result, they put more effort into their positions: Billable hours increased and the trainers reported feeling more committed to the organization.
To increase your team members’ sense of accountability—their feeling of responsibility and their desire to proactively take care of their tasks—foster a sense of ownership. This doesn’t mean physical or legal ownership, but rather, psychological ownership, whereby a person feels invested in a project so that they want to go beyond their defined roles to ensure the project’s success.
Increased accountability has benefits for both you and your team:
You can increase your team members’ accountability and sense of ownership by giving them something concrete to control. For example:
To truly empower your team, go beyond just providing them choices and fostering accountability. Help them to feel competent and confident in their roles. To do this, ensure that everyone has the knowledge, skills, and resources to do their jobs, or instead of feeling competent and confident, they’ll feel overwhelmed and discouraged.
Most people realize that competence is important, but confidence is just as crucial. In fact, studies have shown that self-confidence is an even stronger predictor of performance than skill level or training.
To strengthen the competence and confidence of your team:
People do their best work when their task is slightly more challenging than their skill level. That’s when they feel neither overwhelmed nor bored. It’s also when they report feeling “in the flow,” which is the sense that they’re performing expertly even if the challenge is difficult. When people are performing at this level, they’re gaining competence by stretching their skills and confidence by seeing their progress, and they’re most satisfied with their work.
As a leader, aim to provide the conditions that make flow possible. This means periodically assessing your team members’ skill levels and the difficulties of the challenges they face, to make sure that their skills and challenges don’t become unbalanced.
(Shortform note: For more about what flow is, how it affects happiness, and how to cultivate it, read our guide to Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.)
Your team won’t be able to make decisions without adequate information and training, and they’ll be hesitant to exercise their judgment for fear of making mistakes. Therefore, when guiding your team to become more self-sufficient, increase your investment in training and development.
Employees value skills training highly and are more likely to stick with a company that provides it. In fact, studies show that 40% of employees who report little or no skills training leave their positions within the first year, citing the lack of training as the reason.
Another reason to invest in training and development is that in today’s world, industries and technologies change very quickly, and it benefits you and your organization to have team members who can adapt to changing needs. An adaptable and flexible workforce will lessen the need for you to hire from the outside or lose market opportunities.
An example of a manager who successfully encouraged his team members to learn and share information was Jeff Allison of PW Enterprises. When a reorganization required him to be off-site and away from his team for much of the workweek, he knew he’d have to empower them to solve problems without his oversight. He spent a month walking them through a few dozen recent problems he’d faced, making sure they had the information and skills needed to resolve similar situations. Additionally, he gave each employee a hypothetical problem, challenged them to solve it, and had them each present their process to the rest of the team. This allowed them to not only learn from him but also from each other, which accelerated the learning process.
Make sure your team members understand the fundamentals of how your organization works, so they’re able to make critical decisions about key issues when needed. If your team members don’t understand how your organization works, they won’t have a sense of ownership and can’t step up into leadership roles. Educate them about important elements of your organization, including its:
When a person has a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset, which we discussed under Guideline 6r, they’re more likely to develop confidence and competence. Research shows that people who are told that decision-making is a skill that can improve through practice (a characteristic of growth mindsets) have more confidence and better results than people who are told that decision-making is a reflection of innate intelligence (a characteristic of fixed mindsets).
When people believe in themselves in this way, messages of self-confidence can mold their thinking. Research shows that people are also susceptible to messages regarding whether or not they have the ability to effect change in other people (in addition to change in themselves), and their confidence is shaped by those messages. Studies show that groups who are told they can influence their colleagues’ decisions are more confident—and also perform better—than groups who are told that they’re unlikely to influence their colleagues’ behavior.
Coaching is the process of giving constructive feedback, asking probing questions, and actively teaching important concepts. Coaching is different from training; in fact, job training must be accompanied by coaching for it to improve job performance. In a three-year study, employees who had ongoing coaching conversations with their managers after receiving training were four times as likely to be recognized as “high improvement learners” than were employees who received training but no coaching afterward.
As a coach, your role is to help your team member to achieve her goals not by showing her what to do, but by showing her how to figure it out for herself. When you help another person grow, that person tends to reciprocate by helping you grow—by helping you achieve your organizational goals. This is why consistently, employees who receive coaching report feeling strongly supported by their company and committed to the company in turn.
One of the most effective ways to coach someone is to ask lots of questions, which:
Sara Balducci demonstrated how to successfully empower a team by encouraging joint efforts, cultivating common goals, and fostering self-determination and competence when her division of an international management services provider doubled in headcount. With the larger number of employees, Sara suddenly found herself leading a department full of people who didn’t know each other or how other people’s jobs contributed to the whole picture. Her team members were confused and demoralized.
To foster interconnectedness throughout the division, she split the division’s tasks into segments and assigned team members to different crews, based on their areas of expertise, to address the task segments. For example, some addressed international customers, some worked on shipping concerns, and some managed customer refunds. By dividing the larger team into smaller teams, each of which could focus on a single goal, she created a feeling within each small team of a common goal, and between the teams, of a larger common goal to which each crew could clearly see they contributed.
People do their best work when their task is slightly more challenging than their skill level. That’s when they feel neither overwhelmed nor bored. This is also when they report feeling “in the flow,” which is the sense that they’re performing expertly even if the challenge is difficult.
Think about some tasks for which you're currently the primary (or only) decision-maker. In which of these might you be able to involve other people in the decision-making process?
Are there any upcoming projects in which you can involve team members who wouldn’t normally expect to be included? What responsibilities can you give to those team members that will stretch their skills?
To encourage lasting commitment, engage your team’s hearts as well as their minds. This means connecting with them personally.
To engage your team members hearts in a way that increases their motivation and commitment to your project and your leadership, follow these guidelines:
When you recognize the contributions of your team members, you help them feel appreciated for both what they do and who they are. Encouragement helps people function at their highest level, and helps people endure when hours are long, work is difficult or problematic, and the challenge seems daunting. At times like this, people need emotional replenishment—encouragement—to fuel their commitment.
There are two parts to properly recognizing contributions:
Your expectations of your team affect how they perform: When you expect people to do well, they tend to. Conversely, when you expect people to fail, they probably will. Your expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy; how you see them is how they will see themselves.
You broadcast your opinions of other people whether you intend to or not, through body language, the way you phrase things, or even the type of work you assign. So it's in your best interest to truly believe in the abilities of your team members.
Your expectations provide a framework through which people structure their behavior. One series of studies illustrated this well: Researchers found that when giving feedback, if they prefaced it with a statement like, “I’m giving you this critique because I have high expectations and I’m confident you can do this,” the person receiving the feedback was 40% more likely to accept and act on the feedback.
When leaders make a point of frequently telling people they believe in them and expect great things from them, team members report stronger feelings of trust, team spirit, and commitment.
To show your team that you have high expectations:
Your job as a leader is to draw out the best in your team. When you trust in their skills, they’ll become more confident and approach tasks with a more positive attitude.
People can’t live up to your expectations if they aren’t clear on what those expectations are. Make sure your team members know what you're looking for, and praise them when they deliver.
To set expectations, reiterate your goals. Goals give context to your recognition of others’ work and enhance the importance of that recognition, allowing others to see how their actions contribute to the larger picture.
When a team member doesn’t perform to your standards:
Without feedback, your team won’t know how they’re progressing—or not—toward their goals. Be clear about what markers of success and milestones you're looking for, so that people know what sub-goals to aim for in pursuit of the larger goal.
People crave feedback because they want guidance. Research shows that peoples’ motivation increases only when they have both a challenging goal and feedback on their progress. Feedback helps people self-correct as they work toward a goal so they achieve it sooner and more effectively. When your team makes mistakes, they can learn from them only if you discuss those mistakes, pointing them out and providing clear feedback on how they can do better. Without feedback, mistakes can be overlooked, allowing them to be repeated.
The traditional advice on giving feedback is to give it in a “sandwich” form, where the critical “meats” are sandwiched between two slices of praise. Others, though, have rethought that method and instead recommend a different approach:
The best way to recognize a team member is with personalized recognition that lets them know you’ve noticed them in particular for a specific accomplishment. This runs counter to many incentive systems, which are routine, bureaucratic, and one-size-fits-all.
People consistently report that the most meaningful recognition they’ve received is personal rather than financial. In fact, relying on financial recognition to the exclusion of any personal recognition can be demotivating rather than motivating. For example, one manager at Wells Fargo had a habit of rewarding his team members with bonuses for good work, but never reached out and thanked them personally or gave them any encouraging feedback. Instead, he would simply include a bonus to their paycheck with no explanation. The random and inconsistent nature of the rewards, coupled with the lack of guidance, left his team unable to determine when they were doing well or why. Morale and productivity decreased as a result.
To personalize your recognition:
Conventional wisdom dictates that you shouldn’t become friends with people you work with. However, research disproves this. In surveys, employees who say they have a friendly relationship with their superiors report being two-and-a-half times more satisfied with their jobs.
Get to know your team members on a personal level. Go out of your way to speak to them outside of your respective roles. Walk the halls, visit your factories, and regularly meet in small groups with colleagues, suppliers, and clients.
Further, encourage friendships among team members. When people feel a personal connection to others, they’re motivated to work harder because they don’t want to disappoint people they consider friends.
In a five-year study, researchers observed different groups of people cooperating on motor-skill and decision-making tasks. Some of these groups were made up of friends and some of only acquaintances. The groups of friends completed more than three times as many projects as the groups of acquaintances.
One of the best ways to personalize your recognition of someone’s efforts is to get creative with it. Informal, spontaneous rewards can often be more meaningful than formal ones.
A personalized reward that shows you know the other person is far more meaningful than a generic reward. For example, you might give gas cards to employees who travel or an iTunes card to someone who likes music.
Don’t be afraid to get silly. Adding humor lifts morale; for example, managers have had great results giving out stuffed giraffes, mugs with a team photo, classic car rides, and so on. One team adopted a large plastic fish that would reside at the desk of the employee of the month.
Recognize effort in real time: Recognition is often most effective when it's immediate. Don’t wait until a project is completed to dole out praise—recognizing when people are performing well while they’re in the middle of a project is more encouraging. Even small amounts of praise go a long way when delivered in the moment.
The simple act of saying “thank you” is perhaps the easiest and yet most frequently overlooked way to make your team members feel personally recognized. The phrase can have an outsized effect on employee morale because people want to feel that what they do makes a difference and is noticed.
Personal congratulations consistently rank at the top of the list of most powerful motivators, as reported by employees. Studies show that 81% of people say they’d work harder if they had a more appreciative supervisor.
For example, when the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell noticed their first-year recruits were leaving the firm sooner than expected, they conducted surveys and found that the workers didn’t feel appreciated by their supervisors. The firm enacted a policy requiring all partners to say “Please” and “Thank you” when making a request. This simple change reversed the attrition; one year later, American Lawyer magazine voted the firm the best law firm to work for.
Expressing gratitude has another benefit: It makes the person giving thanks feel good, too. Research shows that people who show gratitude are more optimistic, healthier, energized, and better able to manage stress.
Look for opportunities to recognize, thank, and encourage your team members every day. You might even use a physical prompt to help you remember to do this—for example, you might put three pennies in your left pocket and move one to your right pocket each time you recognize someone, aiming to have all three in your right pocket by the end of every day.
You can engage the hearts of your team members by bringing an attitude of celebration to your workplace. In doing so, celebrate not only accomplishments but also the shared values that define your team.
To cultivate a celebratory workspace:
Creating a spirit of community motivates people to do their best because they’re thinking not only of themselves but of their peers. Their identity becomes linked to the group, making them more invested in the group’s success.
Humans are social creatures, and you should view social gatherings not as a nuisance, but instead as a way to allow your team members to exercise their instinctive drives to form bonds with others. Strong social connections lead to trust, reciprocity, information sharing, and collaboration, all of which lead to success for your organization or project.
Research shows that corporate celebrations, ceremonies, and rituals are effective ways of creating a feeling of community. During good times, celebrations make team members feel proud of their accomplishments. During difficult times, celebrations draw people together and increase morale, helping team members persevere through the challenges. Studies show that employees working for leaders who always find ways to celebrate accomplishments are 25% more committed to their jobs than those working for leaders who seldom do.
The purpose of celebrations is not only to build community spirit but also to explicitly reinforce actions and behaviors that demonstrate your organization’s shared values. As such, celebrations don’t have to be elaborate; they can be small ways to connect the everyday actions of your team to the wider organization. For example, you might regularly highlight exemplary employees at staff meetings, and make those shout-outs resonate by specifically listing their accomplishments.
To successfully implement celebrations into your regular work routines:
Public celebrations build on the technique we discussed earlier, of expressing gratitude for a job well done. Celebrating your gratitude with others as witnesses takes your thanks a step further, using the accomplishments of one to show others what they can aim for. Public celebrations thus turn the person being celebrated into a role model and set standards for the group.
Further, public celebrations encourage a culture of positivity, which translates into happy employees. Research shows that people often adopt the mood of others around them in what’s called “emotional contagion.” Brain scans show neurological circuits are activated when a person sees another act in a certain way, as if they’d acted that way themselves. Therefore, celebrating one person’s success makes their teammates feel happy about themselves, too.
One of the managers at Intuitive Surgical, a maker of surgical instruments, did this well when he implemented a “Red Stapler” award, which was simply a red stapler given out at a weekly staff meeting to an employee who’d recently demonstrated the company’s values. It was presented with a short speech detailing the employee’s achievement. The award proved so popular that the company extended it to other departments.
These celebrations and awards become even more meaningful if they are directed by your team, rather than by management. Create a system where team members can nominate and vote for each other. Recognition coming from peers is typically more powerful than recognition coming from management.
Some leaders are hesitant to recognize certain team members in public, out of concerns it might cause jealousy or resentment. Such fears are usually unfounded; winning teams regularly honor their Most Valuable Players, and these honorees are often selected by their teammates.
Your organization’s community spirit will be greatly enhanced if your team members are friends with each other. As we discussed earlier, teams made up of friends perform better: They communicate better, evaluate ideas more critically, give more appropriate feedback to help others stay on track, and offer more positive encouragement. This turns into stronger feelings of accountability and commitment to the group and organization.
Studies have shown other quantifiable results when people work with friends:
Use celebrations to encourage social connections among your team members, even if it’s something as simple as a group cheer at a staff meeting. These kinds of positive interactions reinforce a feeling of being part of a team working toward a common purpose, which is something people crave.
Your team’s sense of community spirit will increase when your team has fun. Don’t think of fun as a work luxury, but instead think of it as an important way to boost morale—most people assert that if they’re not having fun, they have difficulty maintaining the level of intensity required to do their best at their jobs.
Organizations that have fun are consistently more profitable. In fact, on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For, an average of 81% of employees who respond say they’re working for a “fun” company. Fun has several tangible benefits for an organization:
As a leader, you can set the tone for your organization with a clear message that fun isn't just acceptable, but expected. Aim to build fun into the workday so that people don’t have to use their own personal time to engage in it. For example, you might change the structure of your staff meetings, making them more informal with couches or an unusual setting. You can also encourage group dinners or other off-campus events to mark milestones and progress.
Having fun doesn't necessarily mean having parties. Fun can be built into the work itself. For example, if there’s a difficult task, be positive and encouraging, so that the task feels enjoyable.
To effectively build a culture that celebrates its values and accomplishments, be personally involved in those celebrations. When you're present to cheer your team members, you send a stronger message than you ever could through any formal corporate communication. Being personally involved earns a leader respect, trust, credibility, and loyalty from their team.
Research confirms the impact that being personally involved can have on your team. Employees who report that their leaders almost always get personally involved in celebrating accomplishments rate themselves 40% to 50% higher on measures of motivation, pride, and productivity than do workers who report their leaders are only occasionally personally involved in recognition.
To become personally involved in your organization’s celebrations:
Showing you care means making your team members feel supported and valued, and assuring them that you won’t ask them to do something where they could be hurt. When you show you care, they feel you have their best interests at heart, and they’re more likely to work hard for you. There are many ways you can do this, including:
When you become personally involved in the work routines and operations of your team members, you'll witness activities that exemplify your organization’s values. Remember these examples and be ready to relate them to others in the form of first-person stories (something you saw yourself rather than something someone else told you about).
As we mentioned earlier, stories are powerful ways of communicating ideas and teaching lessons. Stories engage a listener in an emotional, compelling way, making them feel they’ve been in the experience and helping them understand a message in a meaningful way.
You can use storytelling to celebrate someone exemplifying your shared values. This will also encourage team spirit, because when you tell a story celebrating someone’s accomplishment, it encourages others to be proud of the accomplishment, too.
There are many ways you can disseminate company stories, including:
Mark celebratory moments on the company calendar. Include not just birthdays and holidays but also significant milestones of your team and organization. Use celebrations to honor individuals, groups, teams, departments, or organizational accomplishments. This lets your team know that you prioritize these celebrations and allows members to look forward to them.
Aim for at least one large celebration per year that involves your whole team—or your whole organization—and draws attention to your shared, core values.
Some examples of the types of celebrations you can work into your company’s regular calendar include:
Stephanie Sorg, a coach for the developmental team of the San Jose Earthquakes, a Major League Soccer club, found that leading with heart brought out the best in her team members. After she noticed that her coaching style was not motivating the team effectively, she decided to focus more on the personal needs of her players and less on the strict game fundamentals. She started commenting on their efforts rather than their mistakes and getting to know their interests. After some time, her changed style made a concrete difference: The players paid more attention to her feedback and became more dedicated to their performance.
One of the best ways to personalize your recognition of someone’s efforts is to get creative with it. Informal, spontaneous rewards can often be more meaningful than formal ones.
Think of one or two people on your team who have done a good job and who you’d like to reward. List some characteristics that make them unique: not just work habits, but personal preferences, hobbies, interests, or personality quirks.
What are some unique or unexpected ways you could reward these people based on their personal interests? What silly, creative, or humorous perks might let them know that you appreciate them not only for their contributions but also for who they are as people?
Leadership isn’t created by a fancy title, a famous name, or organizational authority. It comes from fostering and maintaining strong relationships. Ordinary people show outstanding leadership every day, and everyone has the potential to be an effective leader.
Further, leadership isn’t an innate quality that a few people have and others don’t. Though many people ask, “Are leaders born or made?” the better question is, “How can I become a better leader tomorrow than I am today?”
Leadership has an outsized influence on people’s motivation, effort levels, and willingness to take personal initiative. Employees who work for effective leaders often say those leaders prompted them to achieve more than they thought they were capable of achieving. Studies show that great leaders bring out more than three times the talent and motivation from their teams as do lesser leaders.
Good leaders who use the principles we’ve explored have been shown to:
Further, exit interviews conducted when employees leave a job reveal that often, people leave a company because they’re unhappy with their relationship with their manager. In fact, around 50% of workers report that they’ve left a job at some point in their careers specifically to get away from a manager.
When people are asked to name the person who represents true leadership to them, they most often name someone close to them—a family member, a teacher, a religious leader, or a manager. They name a celebrity or well-known corporate star far less often.
Leadership role models are local—and this means you. As a manager, parent, teacher, or coach, you're setting an example for others, and others are paying attention.
Further, in a professional organization, you are the leader who matters most to your own team, not the leaders further up the chain. You have the power to shape their thinking, behavior, and careers.
Good leadership is a pattern of behaviors. It’s a specific set of skills that can be learned and strengthened through practice. The biggest obstacle to becoming a better leader is an unwillingness to learn these skills—not everyone is open to the need for growth and change that becoming a better leader entails. But as with any skill, mastering it requires training and effort, and more than anything, learning to be a good leader means going above and beyond what’s required of you.
People often attribute lesser achievement to a lack of inborn talents; more often, mediocrity is due to a lack of effort. Raw talent and high intelligence are poor predictors of success. Typically, high performers have average intelligence—what sets them apart is their willingness to learn and put in the deliberate, purposeful work over many years.
Make learning leadership a habit, incorporated into your daily routine instead of tacked on at the end. Think of it as something you should always be mindful of, not just at occasional retreats or during certain projects.
As you pursue your goal of becoming a better leader, keep in mind that there are some things that being an excellent leader won’t protect you against.
First, being an outstanding leader won't protect you entirely from the vagaries of economic cycles. It’s possible that despite your good leadership, you’ll encounter setbacks, such as losing your job or facing fundamental changes in your industry that your organization can’t adapt to.
Effective leadership will make such setbacks less likely, and it will help you navigate them better so that you emerge from them. But there’s no guarantee that your strong leadership will ensure smooth sailing forever.
Second, if you pursue the Five Principles too vigorously, you can create new problems for yourself:
Third, becoming a successful leader can lead you into hubris, where you become accustomed to having influence and end up with an exaggerated sense of your importance.
You can avoid excessive pride by adopting an attitude of humility. Accept that you're human and need other people’s help. This will allow you to stay interested in other people’s ideas and encourage you to seek information and assistance with new projects. It takes courage to admit to yourself that you aren’t always right, that you can’t predict or prepare for every variable, and that you make mistakes—but this type of humility is the hallmark of great leaders because it allows them to continue to grow.
(Shortform note: For a deeper discussion on the traps of leadership and how to avoid them, read our guide to Ego is the Enemy.)
Before you can effectively lead others, you must have a clear understanding of yourself. Leadership growth is essentially a process of self-development.
To be a strong leader, you need a strong internal guidance system. When you have a clear idea of your own values and priorities, you can better evaluate the numerous messages you receive daily, with various (and often conflicting) advice on how to spend your time, what to focus on, and what to choose to do.
Your internal guidance system comes from the lessons you’ve learned from past experiences, challenges, and observations. Examine these lessons closely to ensure that they align with your goals and the values you want to hold. Research shows that reflecting on your experiences every day, even for just a few minutes, can significantly improve your performance. Some questions you can ask yourself include:
Of course, leadership is more than learning about yourself—leading is what happens when you put the lessons you take away from your self-reflection into practice.
Nor is leadership about big, grand gestures. Every day you'll be faced with small, low-level interactions through which you can demonstrate leadership. These might include a conversation with a team member whom you can coach, a time you can listen effectively to a colleague, or a situation where you can show positivity or gratitude. Each of these moments is an opportunity to practice and demonstrate leadership.
In the end, the only way to stay motivated in your pursuit of great leadership over the long run is to keep a passion for it alive—to stay “in love” with leading, with people, and with your organization and its purpose. Leadership is far more about the heart than it is about the head.