Jim and Barry developed the widely used and highly acclaimed Leadership Practices Inventory or LPI, which is a 360-questionnaire assessing leadership behavior. The LPI has been administered to over 250,000 individuals and over one million observers have provided feedback using the LPI.
Jim is a highly regarded leadership scholar and experienced executive, and The Wall Street Journal has cited him as one of the 12 best executive educators in the US. His clients have included such companies as Accenture, Applied Materials, AT&T, Bank of America, and Boeing. Jim served as president, then CEO and chairman of the Tom Peters Company from 1988 until 2000. Prior to his tenure there, he directed the Executive Development Center at Santa Clara University.
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KE: Jim, you and Barry have had tremendous success with The Leadership Challenge and the Leadership Practices Inventory. Why take time out to write another book, and why this book in particular?
JK: All our other books prior to A Leader¡¯s Legacy have been descriptive or prescriptive works, meaning they¡¯re either descriptive of the principles and practices of exemplary leadership that we had uncovered in our research, or they have been prescriptions about how to put those findings into practice. Our editor thought it was about time we got down from the podium and wrote a bit more of a reflective piece based on the lessons we had learned over the last 25 years. So we took a step off the platform, we took a deep breath or two, and explored some of those thornier and more personal issues about leadership that had not necessarily lent themselves to the five practices, or to the seven essentials that we had written about before. So it is a refreshing change for us, and something we are likely to do again.
KE: You talk a lot in the book about ¡°legacy.¡± Will you please define that term for us?
JK: Perhaps a little story would help to introduce it. We had the opportunity to interview someone by the name of Gail Mayville, who was at the time at Ben and Jerry¡¯s Ice Cream. This was a few years ago, but I think the story is very relevant to the question. This problem has been resolved; however, at the time of our interview with Gail, the company was growing so rapidly that the factory at Ben and Jerry¡¯s was overloading the local waste treatment facility. Because of that, the local townships told Ben and Jerry¡¯s that if they did not do something about the waste treatment problem, they would shut the factory down. Well, Gail was an administrative assistant at the time, not a quality manager, factory manager, or environmental manager. She heard about this problem, as everyone else did, and she thought she might have a solution. So she approached management and they said they would be glad to hear it.
She said, ¡°Well, it is pigs.¡± She said, ¡°I grew up on a farm in Vermont and on the farm there were some pigs. So, maybe pigs would like to eat this ice cream waste.¡± They thought this was a nuttyidea but nothing else had worked so far, so they implemented it, and put her in charge. She eventually became environmental manager as a result of this. They put the ice cream waste in barrels, they hauled it out to the farms, put ice cream waste in troughs and pigs just waddled on up, ate it and loved it! It was a temporary solution to the problem, they later implemented a permanent solution, but nonetheless, Gail had the initiative to do something to address the issue.
When Gail was asked why she did it, she said the following: ¡°For me personally, I am driven by my concerns for the legacy I am leaving my children, the environmental legacy.¡± Gail¡¯s response is really the best live behavioral example of what legacy really means. Our leadership legacies are those tangible and intangible conditions we pass along to those who follow us. In Gail¡¯s case, she wanted to leave her children a more sustainable and hospitable environment, and that drove her to do something about the waste coming out of the factory. For others, it might be the inspiration to excel, or the desire to pursue a life of service, or a belief in oneself. Whatever it is, we can be sure of one thing: We will be remembered not for what we do for ourselves, but what we do for others.
The legacy perspective reveals that we make a difference. Then, the only question remaining is, ¡°What kind of difference do I want to make? ¡°How do I want to be remembered by those who will inherit my life¡¯s efforts?¡± And, the question that follows that is, ¡°In what ways am I, and am I not, living my life right consistent with this memory?¡±
KE: You state in the book¡¯s opening, ¡°a heartfelt quest to leave a legacy is a journey from success to significance.¡± How so?
JK: Thinking about our legacies requires us to move beyond short term definitions for success, the things that we can make a list of, the sales figures, number of dollars we made, the tall building that we built. All of the accomplishments that we can list are in some respect, a short-term definition of success. Legacies, however, encompass the past, present and future. We¡¯re brought face-to-face with questions of who we are and why we¡¯re here. We have to consider more deeply, the true value of what was, what is, and what will be.
Legacy thinking forces us to ask, so what? So what if I sold the most products? So what if I made a zillion dollars? So what if I built the tallest building on the planet, so what if I drove us to double digit growth? What real difference has all this made in the lives of others? How has this made my family or organization, our people, our community, our nation, or our world a better place?
KE: Your discussion of legacy flies in the face of the current emphasis on leadership creating and producing short-term results. What else is leadership about, if it¡¯s not solely about results?
JK: The key word is ¡®solely.¡¯ Back in 1963, a man by the name of Martin Luther King stood on the Lincoln memorial steps in Washington, DC at the end of that great march on Washington, and we all remember what he said. He said 'I have a dream' and he talked about the dream for his four little children, he talked about the dream for the nation. Forty-four years have passed. Not all of those dreams that he spoke of have been realized, not all of the results that he had hoped for have been realized. For many leaders, it's very true that they do not realize the results during their tenure.
Results are only part of how leaders and leadership should be measured. If we only use results, we reduce leadership to an exercise in counting. If her stack of chips adds up to more than his stack of chips she is therefore the winner! That¡¯s a Survivor TV image of leadership that is not consistent with history, or with reality. It¡¯s as much about the process, how we achieve the results, as it is about the results themselves. You know Enron was praised for its leadership for a while and they certainly achieved results, but now where are they? Some are dead, others are in jail, and a whole bunch of other people¡¯s lives were ruined in the process. Results are just a part of the measure, not the sole measure of success.
KE: What do leaders have to be willing to do to achieve their legacies?
JK: Leaders like Gail Mayville, when they make the kind of suggestion that she made, then find themselves having to make some sacrifices in the short term, like harder work, or more work. In order to achieve those results, they may have to give up the possibility of a particular new role in the organization in order to fulfill some other aspiration. We talk in A Leader¡¯s Legacy about the necessity of leaders making sacrifices. Struggle is a very important part of leadership and one of the things that we don¡¯t talk enough about is just the very question that you raised, what is it that we are going to have to sacrifice? What is it that we are going to have to give up? It may be a promotion. Think of the risk involved in someone doing what Martin Luther King did for example, on a grander scale, or the risk of speaking up at an Enron and saying, ¡°This isn¡¯t right.¡±
True leaders have to take those kinds of risks, have to demonstrate that kind of courage, if they are going to be true to the legacies they want to leave. You know, Gail Mayville¡¯s risk in her particular case was that people might have thought she was nuts. Pigs! What do pigs have to do with waste treatment problems? But, you know she was gutsy enough to make the suggestion, and didn¡¯t worry about whether people thought she was foolish.
KE: In your book, you reference the role of loving critics, and I am wondering how we might encourage our leaders to more actively seek feedback.
JK: We got that phrase from a conversation with John Gardner. The late John Gardner was Secretary of Health Education and Welfare. In the Johnson administration, he was founder of Common Cause, he served five different Presidents of the United States and one of the things he said at one time, which I just absolutely love is, ¡°pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.¡± You know, all leaders need someone who says to them, ¡°I love you and I care about you, but I need to give you some honest feedback.¡± We don¡¯t like people who simply harp on us and there are those unloving critics who say time and time again, everything we do is awful. We shut them out because they just have nothing good to say.
On the other hand, with people who only have good things to say about us, we eventually ask, ¡°what do you want?¡± We think they become sycophants, and we stop listening to them because we just can't be that good. Feedback is the mechanism that allows any system, human or otherwise, to self-correct, and without it, we keep repeating errors, doing things the same way we have always done them.
Before I answer the question directly about what we can do to encourage leaders to seek feedback, I want to share a piece of data that was quite surprising to us.
In our 30-item Leadership Practices Inventory, that survey you mentioned that we have used for 20 years to measure leadership behavior, there is one item, item #16, which says, I ask for feedback on how my actions affect other people¡¯s performance. That item is the lowest scoring item and has been the lowest scoring item, both from the self and observer perspective for many years. What that tells us from both an observer and a leader self-perspective is, we avoid seeking feedback like a wasp at a picnic, ouch! It might hurt.
While we all recognize the importance of feedback, apparently leaders don¡¯t get it unless some HR person tells them that they should, and even then, they do it reluctantly. We have to begin to encourage leaders to actively seek feedback. The first way we can do that is to model it ourselves and then demonstrate that things can improve when you get it. For example, here¡¯s a very simple thing we can all do. At the end of every meeting, take five minutes at the end to ask, ¡°How did it go today? What should we do more of, less of, the same amount, at our next meeting?¡±
If you are a coach working with a leader, make sure that at the end of every meeting, you take five minutes to ask that question. I have to tell you honestly that there has only been one leader in my own personal experience that has ever done this, but I keep waiting for the next one, encouraging leaders to do this. Whether it¡¯s a speech or meeting, or one-on-one interview, every time we interact with somebody else, we can take the time to discuss how we did. And please, be a loving critic. It often takes courage to offer someone constructive feedback, but experience tells us that leaders will thank you for it.
KE: In my coaching work with leaders, I often find them reluctant to receive feedback because they are anticipating criticism. We seem to assume all feedback will be negative.
JK: Yes, isn¡¯t it so? That reminds me of some research that was done by the researchers on positive psychology, Barbara Frederickson among them, who hooked people up to all those wires that measure brain activity and galvanic skin response, and other things. What they found is that the number of positives to negatives has to be at least three to one; three positives for every negative in order for people to feel fully engaged in their work. In a spousal relationship or significant other relationship, it has to be five to one. I guess at work we are a little bit more willing to take criticism than we are at home.
If the ratio is not at least 3:1 positive to negative, then people will be more likely to leave the organization, feel less engaged, and be less satisfied. And, negative feedback is not just verbal; it can be an eyebrow-raising, smirk on your face, a ¡°harrumph¡± or a roll of the eyes.
KE: You state in your book that the single best predictor of career success for a corporate executive is the relationship they had with their very first supervisor. What do you suggest companies do to help ensure those first experiences are good ones?
JK: It was interesting and shocking to me when I first read that, but it made me recall my very first supervisor who was Johnny Smith. You may have also seen the data that shows that if we think the performance of our first-line supervisor is excellent, the likelihood that we would want to leave the organization is only 11%. However, if we think that person¡¯s performance is poor, we are 40% (almost 4 times) more likely to leave. (Source: Spherion & Lou Harris Associates, 1999)
Instead of focusing so much of our attention on top executives, senior managers, even middle level managers, we need to start thinking about what we do for that new first line supervisor. Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. We have to recognize that fact, and pay more attention to selection and base selection of first line supervisors, not just on technical skills, but on relationship skills as well. The evidence is quite clear that it¡¯s the emotional and social skills that account for success in supervisory roles.
Secondly, we need to start training folks a lot earlier in their careers in leadership. Barry and I are spending much more time now focusing on youth leadership because we know that when these young people go to the workforce they need more and better relationship skills than they currently have. They are very technically savvy but they are really poor at relationships skills. In fact, we have found over the last few years that relationship skills have actually declined among young people, which may have a lot to do with technology. There is some of the normal maturation process and biology working here, but we have got to get back to focusing on basic social skills and relationship skills with young people.
KE: I am thinking about the enormous efforts that a lot of very large firms put toward, for instance, recruiting university graduates. And yet, the piece that they may not be paying much attention to is the supervisors to whom these new hires will report. Is it likely to be a good experience ¨C given that it sets the tone for their future success?
JK: Yes absolutely, and to try to mend that a little bit, at Santa Clara University where my colleague Barry Posner is the dean of the business school, we require now that every freshman enroll in a leadership class. By graduation, four years later, they have to have written some kind of paper on a leadership project that they have led during their four years, or they won't graduate. This is just our little effort to help them learn a bit more about how leaders behave and the skills required. I think we can all begin to pay more attention to it, whether it¡¯s at school or at home.
KE: You also stated in the same portion of your book, that when asked what contributes most to both ethical and unethical behavior, the most frequent response from employees at every level (including management) is the behavior of their boss. Now the obvious moral of the story is that leaders need to walk their talk. Is there anything else it tells us?
JK: Well, the big message is that you are the most important leader in your organization. In life and in leadership, the most influential people are always those who are closest to us. We did a survey with young people. We asked them to choose from a list of people including business leader, political leader, professional athlete, entertainer, community leader, family member, teacher, coach, etc., their most significant leadership role model. They only had one choice, and the category that got the most votes was family member; the second choice was teacher/coach; and the third was community leader. Those top three totaled 77% of leadership role models for 18 to 30 year olds.
When I do that same survey with adults, I get exactly the same top three with the addition of business leaders, sometimes coming in third above community leaders, but not in first place, or even in second place. What that data tells us is that the people who are closest to us, with whom we have had the most experience, particularly early in our lives, become our leadership role models. For the most part, if we know someone, we are more likely to trust them, so proximity determines our influence.
So, if you are a manager, what this means is that you are the most important leadership role model in your organization to those who report to you. And, because that¡¯s true, none of us can escape personal responsibility, we have to be the most effective leaders we can be. We have to start accepting responsibility for our own leadership and begin to then develop an extensive repertoire of skills in order to be both more conscious and conscientious about how we use them.
KE: I think that one of the other reasons why legacy is so significant is because it removes that artificial boundary that exists for some between work and life. One of the essays in your book that I enjoyed was called, Leadership is Personal. When I encourage leaders to find ways to reveal personal things about themselves as a way of building trust, I sometimes hear, ¡°Why is that relevant to my role as leader?¡± What are your thoughts?
JK: We have worked with a gentleman by the name of Ron Sugar who was, until recently, CEO of Northrup Grumman Corporation. Ron would come and teach in a leadership course that Barry Posner led. He would come in and walk up to a piano that was in the seminar room. He would sit down and play the piano, and after he finished the piece, he would turn around on the piano bench and look at his executives that were there for leadership development, and ask, ¡°Do you know why I played the piano?¡± They wouldn¡¯t have an answer and he would then say, ¡°l played the piano because I wanted you to know I play the piano.¡±
Ron said that leadership is personal, that the people you lead need to know who you are, what you care about and why they are to be following you. It all comes down to this: People will not believe in the message if they don¡¯t believe in the messenger! If people don¡¯t believe in you, they won¡¯t follow you. It shows up over and over again in our research ¡ªwe call it the Credibility Factor, and it¡¯s the very foundation of leadership. How much more personal can you get? Your constituents have to know what you stand for, believe in, and where you are intending to go. This doesn¡¯t mean that you have to disclose every personal secret, but it does mean that they need to learn to trust you as a person, not as a position.
KE: You also state in your book that leaders should want to be liked. How does that desire impact the ways leaders behave?
JK: This is one of the more controversial topics of discussion. Irwin Federman, who is a founder of US Venture Partners, said, ¡°¡ I contend, however, that all things being equal, we will work harder and more effectively for people we like. And we like them in direct proportion to how they make us feel.¡± This is contrary to that comment that people often say, ¡°I don¡¯t care if people don¡¯t like me, I just want them to respect me.¡± Let¡¯s get real - this statement is utter nonsense! This statement is totally contrary to everything we know. Think about it for a moment. Is this a binary choice, I can either like you or respect you? Can't I have both? Can't we both like and respect a person?
When we talk to people about leaders they admire, the ones that they can recall years later as having made a difference in their lives, the ones they would stay up late for, the ones they would bust their butts for, the ones they would even die for, we never ever, ever, hear anyone tell us, ¡°Well, I hated that woman, but I would follow her to the ends of the earth,¡± or, ¡°He was a real jerk, but I was inspired to do my best for him.¡± The people we want to follow are the ones for whom we have genuine affection. We have to begin to understand that likability is a major factor in being successful in just about any endeavor in life.
I am all about evidence-based leadership and I would not be saying any of this if we did not have the evidence. Our research and practically everyone else¡¯s on the subject, clearly shows that people perform significantly higher when their leaders treat them with dignity and respect, listen to them, support them, recognize them, and make them feel important, build their skills, and show confidence in them. So, we are about evidence-based leadership and being liked translates into higher levels of performance, so therefore, we should want to be liked.
KE: Will a leader who is really invested in being liked have a harder time delivering tough feedback, or removing a low performer?
JK: Absolutely. Those of us who have kids, love our children, and still have to deliver some tough feedback sometimes. I don¡¯t always find it easy to do that, but sometimes, it¡¯s necessary. Leadership is often a struggle. You often have to make sacrifices, often it is not pleasant. But, I would prefer a leader who has struggled with those tough issues any day over someone who found it really easy.
We have to keep this reality in mind, though. No matter how hard you try, not everyone is going to like you. We are suggesting that if you are motivated to be liked, you are more likely to listen to people, treat people with dignity and respect and yes, you will find it difficult to give tough feedback.
KE: You encourage leaders to promote ¡°constructive insubordination.¡± Why don¡¯t you describe what it is, and why it¡¯s important?
JK: There is this old Texas saying: if both of us are always agreeing, one of us is redundant. When everyone agrees, especially just for the sake of getting along, we are unlikely to achieve the best outcome. I was reading the other day how students who come quickly to consensus in a classroom on a topic are less likely to stick around and ask more inquisitive questions and get more engaged during recess periods than students who are made to debate opposing points of view. They actually increase their interest in the subject. So this whole idea of getting people to disagree is actually a good thing, as long as we come to some kind of resolution later.
Again, just to test this notion about everyone agreeing or not agreeing, students were asked in this one research project to solve a murder mystery and they found that the groups of people who had the most diverse social backgrounds and experiences were the most likely to solve the case. Not only were the homogeneous groups more likely to be wrong, they were also more likely to express greater confidence in their wrong answers. So when you get people to come together who all think alike, you may end up with a wrong answer and a high level of commitment to the wrong answer. That can be extraordinarily dangerous. So promoting people to be productive in disagreeing with each other in order to get them more engaged and more interested in a topic, to learn more and then come to some kind of resolution based upon diverse points of view ends up being much much more effective and much less dangerous.
Abraham Lincoln was written about in a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin called Team of Rivals and she makes the following comment, "This then is a story of Lincoln's political genius, revealed through his extraordinary array of personal qualities that enabled him to form friendships with men who had previously opposed him; to repair injured feelings that left unattended might have escalated into permanent hostility; to assume responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease and to learn from mistakes." Wow! We could all learn a lesson from Abraham Lincoln and if he could manage to lead a team of rivals under the extraordinary challenges of the civil war in the United States, we could certainly find it within ourselves to manage the conflicts we face, modest as they are by comparison. So we need to make it possible for people to argue with each other, up, down, in and out, sideways, if we are going to realize the best from today's diverse and talented workforce.
KE: Many organizations seem to be struggling with how to encourage ¡°healthy debate.¡±
JK: We need to learn the skills to manage conflict and to promote it, to promote constructive insubordination. I want people to disagree with me and I can then model my behavior when people do disagree, by saying, ¡°That is an interesting perspective, tell me more about that, I want to hear more about that,¡± and encouraging people, rather than saying, ¡°I am the decider and this is the way it's going to be.¡± Dangerous, dangerous position to take.
KE: You have studied and thought about leadership for many years now. I am curious to know how your ideas have evolved over the years.
JK: Leadership is everyone¡¯s business.I think the most important evolution for us has been moving away from a focus on managers as the leaders to an emphasis on leadership as a set of skills and abilities that are useful and important for everyone in an organization. We have also evolved into spending more time and attention on youth leadership, as I mentioned earlier. Also, I think along with a growing understanding of this notion of leadership is everyone¡¯s business has been an appreciation that the content of leadership has remained mostly the same for decades. There is not a lot new that we are finding. But the context has changed dramatically, and just one example would be the global context of leadership. So we need to pay much more attention to the context of leadership and how it is changing.
KE: What do you see as some of the most effective ways for developing leaders?
JK: There are three ways that our research and others¡¯ research demonstrates we learn to lead; first is experience, secondly observation of others, and third is training, and it tends to be about 70% experience, 20% observation, and 10% training and development.
One of the other things that I have been learning more recently has been about this whole notion of practice and talent in becoming an expert. In a recent (5/07/06) New York Times Magazine article by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt at the Office Of Economics, they were reporting on some research done by others on expertise. They made this provocative comment that, "The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put in another way, expert performers¡are nearly always made, not born. And, yes, practice does make perfect."
If you look at people who become experts in their fields, it turns out that what differentiates experts from those who are good but not as great, is hours of practice. It turns out that those masters of their fields practice about twice as much as those who are good, but not at the expert level. I think the same principal we will see more and more applied to leadership, that indeed it is practice that makes perfect. I think we have to do four things to make sure that we develop leaders better. We need to set some specific goals, we need to engage them in designed learning activities, we need to make sure they get immediate feedback, and we need to concentrate, and this perhaps is a new perspective, as much on technique as on outcome.
KE: In what areas are leaders typically the weakest?
JK: Forward-looking in one hyphenated word. The quality that is #2 on the list of most admired leader qualities, and the one that differentiates leaders from other credible people, is being forward-looking. That is having a vision of the future and being able to communicate it to others. That¡¯s the good news.
The bad news is that the practice in which the majority of leaders score the lowest is Inspire A Shared Vision. We basically stink at it! It¡¯s where there¡¯s the largest gap between expectation and performance. Despite all that we¡¯ve written, spoken and trained on this, leaders still have a very long way to go.
KE: What are some ways that we can help our leaders develop the skill of forward-looking?
JK: It's really a matter of time and attention. Leaders spend very little time, on average thinking about the changing context of their world ¨C both inside and external. We estimate about 3% of their time looking 10-15 years out. We have to just fundamentally spend more time on it. The other thing that we found very interesting is that reading more outside of your field makes you more forward-looking than reading just inside your field, so you have to broaden what you read about. If you are in technology, you also need to be reading about things other than technology, if you are in HR, you also have to study areas outside HR.
KE: What final thoughts would you like to leave with our audience?
JK: Sergey Nikiforov, the founder of a company called Stack 3 Inc., said to us, ¡°Where do I start becoming a better leader? Where do I start?¡± I reflected on this and I found that everyday I had an opportunity to make a small difference, and he went on to say, ¡°I could have coached someone better, I could have listened better, I could have been more positive towards people, I could have said thank you more often.¡± I could have, I could have, I could have¡¡± and the list went on. Sergey pointed out to us that leadership is not just about grand visions and grand strategies, but it really is about what we do everyday, day in and day out. We have the opportunity to listen, to be more positive, to say thank you, to coach. The legacy you leave is the life you lead.
Audience Question: Does practice really make perfect or does it perhaps make permanent?
JK: There are two aspects to this. First of all imperfect practice can make permanent imperfect performance. That is why we need to focus on technique in our practice. Not just keeping on doing something over and over again that is incorrect. We have to make sure we are coaching someone in proper technique and method, whether it is running a meeting, giving a speech, doing a performance appraisal, we have to make sure they get the technique right. But then yes, it is absolutely a function of practice, practice and practice. My son is a college level tennis player. His coach tells him to practice two hours a day just to maintain his current level. If you want to get better, you have to practice more hours.
So it¡¯s a ¡°both/and,¡± not an ¡°either/or,¡± make sure you design a learning activity where people can learn the technique well, then practice that over and over again until you, as they say in tennis, groove it, until it¡¯s natural, until it feels easy to you and then move on to the next one.
KE: Jim you said you¡¯d like to close by telling us the secret of success in life. How can we pass that up?
JK: We have interviewed a lot of people, one of whom was Major General John Stanford. We asked him how to develop leaders for the future. We ask all the people we interview this final question, hoping to glean some bit of advice and John gave us the most memorable response. John, who has had a very distinguished public service career, said, ¡°When anyone ever asks me that question, I tell them I have the secret to success in life. The secret to success is to stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to really ignite other people, to see inside other people, to have a greater desire to get things done in other people.¡± A person who is not in love doesn¡¯t really feel the kind of excitement that helps them to get ahead and to lead others and to achieve. I don¡¯t know any other fire, any other thing in life that is more positive and exhilarating a feeling than love is.¡± So, with that, my last bit of advice is to love ¡®em and lead ¡®em.
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Jim Kouzes is co-author with Barry Posner of the award-winning and best-selling book, The Leadership Challenge, with over one million copies sold. He is also an Executive Fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Leavy School of Business at Santa Clara University. The Leadership Challenge, available in 11 languages, has been a selection of the Macmillan Executive Book Club and The Fortune Book Club. It is the winner of 1989 James A Hamilton Hospital Administrator¡¯s Book, the 1995 and 1996 Critic's Choice Award and was a Business Week best seller in 2001 and 2002. Jim and Barry have also co-authored Creditability, How Leaders Gain and Lose It? Why people demand it? This book was chosen by Industry Week as one of the 10 best management books of 1993. Their other books include Encouraging the Heart, the Leadership Challenge Workbook, and the Leadership Challenge Journal. Based on solid research involving over 70,000 surveys, 1,000 written case studies, and 100 in-depth interviews, these books describe the leadership principles and processes that generate high performance in individuals and organizations.
From India, Pune
101Jim is a highly regarded leadership scholar and experienced executive, and The Wall Street Journal has cited him as one of the 12 best executive educators in the US. His clients have included such companies as Accenture, Applied Materials, AT&T, Bank of America, and Boeing. Jim served as president, then CEO and chairman of the Tom Peters Company from 1988 until 2000. Prior to his tenure there, he directed the Executive Development Center at Santa Clara University.
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KE: Jim, you and Barry have had tremendous success with The Leadership Challenge and the Leadership Practices Inventory. Why take time out to write another book, and why this book in particular?
JK: All our other books prior to A Leader¡¯s Legacy have been descriptive or prescriptive works, meaning they¡¯re either descriptive of the principles and practices of exemplary leadership that we had uncovered in our research, or they have been prescriptions about how to put those findings into practice. Our editor thought it was about time we got down from the podium and wrote a bit more of a reflective piece based on the lessons we had learned over the last 25 years. So we took a step off the platform, we took a deep breath or two, and explored some of those thornier and more personal issues about leadership that had not necessarily lent themselves to the five practices, or to the seven essentials that we had written about before. So it is a refreshing change for us, and something we are likely to do again.
KE: You talk a lot in the book about ¡°legacy.¡± Will you please define that term for us?
JK: Perhaps a little story would help to introduce it. We had the opportunity to interview someone by the name of Gail Mayville, who was at the time at Ben and Jerry¡¯s Ice Cream. This was a few years ago, but I think the story is very relevant to the question. This problem has been resolved; however, at the time of our interview with Gail, the company was growing so rapidly that the factory at Ben and Jerry¡¯s was overloading the local waste treatment facility. Because of that, the local townships told Ben and Jerry¡¯s that if they did not do something about the waste treatment problem, they would shut the factory down. Well, Gail was an administrative assistant at the time, not a quality manager, factory manager, or environmental manager. She heard about this problem, as everyone else did, and she thought she might have a solution. So she approached management and they said they would be glad to hear it.
She said, ¡°Well, it is pigs.¡± She said, ¡°I grew up on a farm in Vermont and on the farm there were some pigs. So, maybe pigs would like to eat this ice cream waste.¡± They thought this was a nuttyidea but nothing else had worked so far, so they implemented it, and put her in charge. She eventually became environmental manager as a result of this. They put the ice cream waste in barrels, they hauled it out to the farms, put ice cream waste in troughs and pigs just waddled on up, ate it and loved it! It was a temporary solution to the problem, they later implemented a permanent solution, but nonetheless, Gail had the initiative to do something to address the issue.
When Gail was asked why she did it, she said the following: ¡°For me personally, I am driven by my concerns for the legacy I am leaving my children, the environmental legacy.¡± Gail¡¯s response is really the best live behavioral example of what legacy really means. Our leadership legacies are those tangible and intangible conditions we pass along to those who follow us. In Gail¡¯s case, she wanted to leave her children a more sustainable and hospitable environment, and that drove her to do something about the waste coming out of the factory. For others, it might be the inspiration to excel, or the desire to pursue a life of service, or a belief in oneself. Whatever it is, we can be sure of one thing: We will be remembered not for what we do for ourselves, but what we do for others.
The legacy perspective reveals that we make a difference. Then, the only question remaining is, ¡°What kind of difference do I want to make? ¡°How do I want to be remembered by those who will inherit my life¡¯s efforts?¡± And, the question that follows that is, ¡°In what ways am I, and am I not, living my life right consistent with this memory?¡±
KE: You state in the book¡¯s opening, ¡°a heartfelt quest to leave a legacy is a journey from success to significance.¡± How so?
JK: Thinking about our legacies requires us to move beyond short term definitions for success, the things that we can make a list of, the sales figures, number of dollars we made, the tall building that we built. All of the accomplishments that we can list are in some respect, a short-term definition of success. Legacies, however, encompass the past, present and future. We¡¯re brought face-to-face with questions of who we are and why we¡¯re here. We have to consider more deeply, the true value of what was, what is, and what will be.
Legacy thinking forces us to ask, so what? So what if I sold the most products? So what if I made a zillion dollars? So what if I built the tallest building on the planet, so what if I drove us to double digit growth? What real difference has all this made in the lives of others? How has this made my family or organization, our people, our community, our nation, or our world a better place?
KE: Your discussion of legacy flies in the face of the current emphasis on leadership creating and producing short-term results. What else is leadership about, if it¡¯s not solely about results?
JK: The key word is ¡®solely.¡¯ Back in 1963, a man by the name of Martin Luther King stood on the Lincoln memorial steps in Washington, DC at the end of that great march on Washington, and we all remember what he said. He said 'I have a dream' and he talked about the dream for his four little children, he talked about the dream for the nation. Forty-four years have passed. Not all of those dreams that he spoke of have been realized, not all of the results that he had hoped for have been realized. For many leaders, it's very true that they do not realize the results during their tenure.
Results are only part of how leaders and leadership should be measured. If we only use results, we reduce leadership to an exercise in counting. If her stack of chips adds up to more than his stack of chips she is therefore the winner! That¡¯s a Survivor TV image of leadership that is not consistent with history, or with reality. It¡¯s as much about the process, how we achieve the results, as it is about the results themselves. You know Enron was praised for its leadership for a while and they certainly achieved results, but now where are they? Some are dead, others are in jail, and a whole bunch of other people¡¯s lives were ruined in the process. Results are just a part of the measure, not the sole measure of success.
KE: What do leaders have to be willing to do to achieve their legacies?
JK: Leaders like Gail Mayville, when they make the kind of suggestion that she made, then find themselves having to make some sacrifices in the short term, like harder work, or more work. In order to achieve those results, they may have to give up the possibility of a particular new role in the organization in order to fulfill some other aspiration. We talk in A Leader¡¯s Legacy about the necessity of leaders making sacrifices. Struggle is a very important part of leadership and one of the things that we don¡¯t talk enough about is just the very question that you raised, what is it that we are going to have to sacrifice? What is it that we are going to have to give up? It may be a promotion. Think of the risk involved in someone doing what Martin Luther King did for example, on a grander scale, or the risk of speaking up at an Enron and saying, ¡°This isn¡¯t right.¡±
True leaders have to take those kinds of risks, have to demonstrate that kind of courage, if they are going to be true to the legacies they want to leave. You know, Gail Mayville¡¯s risk in her particular case was that people might have thought she was nuts. Pigs! What do pigs have to do with waste treatment problems? But, you know she was gutsy enough to make the suggestion, and didn¡¯t worry about whether people thought she was foolish.
KE: In your book, you reference the role of loving critics, and I am wondering how we might encourage our leaders to more actively seek feedback.
JK: We got that phrase from a conversation with John Gardner. The late John Gardner was Secretary of Health Education and Welfare. In the Johnson administration, he was founder of Common Cause, he served five different Presidents of the United States and one of the things he said at one time, which I just absolutely love is, ¡°pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.¡± You know, all leaders need someone who says to them, ¡°I love you and I care about you, but I need to give you some honest feedback.¡± We don¡¯t like people who simply harp on us and there are those unloving critics who say time and time again, everything we do is awful. We shut them out because they just have nothing good to say.
On the other hand, with people who only have good things to say about us, we eventually ask, ¡°what do you want?¡± We think they become sycophants, and we stop listening to them because we just can't be that good. Feedback is the mechanism that allows any system, human or otherwise, to self-correct, and without it, we keep repeating errors, doing things the same way we have always done them.
Before I answer the question directly about what we can do to encourage leaders to seek feedback, I want to share a piece of data that was quite surprising to us.
In our 30-item Leadership Practices Inventory, that survey you mentioned that we have used for 20 years to measure leadership behavior, there is one item, item #16, which says, I ask for feedback on how my actions affect other people¡¯s performance. That item is the lowest scoring item and has been the lowest scoring item, both from the self and observer perspective for many years. What that tells us from both an observer and a leader self-perspective is, we avoid seeking feedback like a wasp at a picnic, ouch! It might hurt.
While we all recognize the importance of feedback, apparently leaders don¡¯t get it unless some HR person tells them that they should, and even then, they do it reluctantly. We have to begin to encourage leaders to actively seek feedback. The first way we can do that is to model it ourselves and then demonstrate that things can improve when you get it. For example, here¡¯s a very simple thing we can all do. At the end of every meeting, take five minutes at the end to ask, ¡°How did it go today? What should we do more of, less of, the same amount, at our next meeting?¡±
If you are a coach working with a leader, make sure that at the end of every meeting, you take five minutes to ask that question. I have to tell you honestly that there has only been one leader in my own personal experience that has ever done this, but I keep waiting for the next one, encouraging leaders to do this. Whether it¡¯s a speech or meeting, or one-on-one interview, every time we interact with somebody else, we can take the time to discuss how we did. And please, be a loving critic. It often takes courage to offer someone constructive feedback, but experience tells us that leaders will thank you for it.
KE: In my coaching work with leaders, I often find them reluctant to receive feedback because they are anticipating criticism. We seem to assume all feedback will be negative.
JK: Yes, isn¡¯t it so? That reminds me of some research that was done by the researchers on positive psychology, Barbara Frederickson among them, who hooked people up to all those wires that measure brain activity and galvanic skin response, and other things. What they found is that the number of positives to negatives has to be at least three to one; three positives for every negative in order for people to feel fully engaged in their work. In a spousal relationship or significant other relationship, it has to be five to one. I guess at work we are a little bit more willing to take criticism than we are at home.
If the ratio is not at least 3:1 positive to negative, then people will be more likely to leave the organization, feel less engaged, and be less satisfied. And, negative feedback is not just verbal; it can be an eyebrow-raising, smirk on your face, a ¡°harrumph¡± or a roll of the eyes.
KE: You state in your book that the single best predictor of career success for a corporate executive is the relationship they had with their very first supervisor. What do you suggest companies do to help ensure those first experiences are good ones?
JK: It was interesting and shocking to me when I first read that, but it made me recall my very first supervisor who was Johnny Smith. You may have also seen the data that shows that if we think the performance of our first-line supervisor is excellent, the likelihood that we would want to leave the organization is only 11%. However, if we think that person¡¯s performance is poor, we are 40% (almost 4 times) more likely to leave. (Source: Spherion & Lou Harris Associates, 1999)
Instead of focusing so much of our attention on top executives, senior managers, even middle level managers, we need to start thinking about what we do for that new first line supervisor. Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. We have to recognize that fact, and pay more attention to selection and base selection of first line supervisors, not just on technical skills, but on relationship skills as well. The evidence is quite clear that it¡¯s the emotional and social skills that account for success in supervisory roles.
Secondly, we need to start training folks a lot earlier in their careers in leadership. Barry and I are spending much more time now focusing on youth leadership because we know that when these young people go to the workforce they need more and better relationship skills than they currently have. They are very technically savvy but they are really poor at relationships skills. In fact, we have found over the last few years that relationship skills have actually declined among young people, which may have a lot to do with technology. There is some of the normal maturation process and biology working here, but we have got to get back to focusing on basic social skills and relationship skills with young people.
KE: I am thinking about the enormous efforts that a lot of very large firms put toward, for instance, recruiting university graduates. And yet, the piece that they may not be paying much attention to is the supervisors to whom these new hires will report. Is it likely to be a good experience ¨C given that it sets the tone for their future success?
JK: Yes absolutely, and to try to mend that a little bit, at Santa Clara University where my colleague Barry Posner is the dean of the business school, we require now that every freshman enroll in a leadership class. By graduation, four years later, they have to have written some kind of paper on a leadership project that they have led during their four years, or they won't graduate. This is just our little effort to help them learn a bit more about how leaders behave and the skills required. I think we can all begin to pay more attention to it, whether it¡¯s at school or at home.
KE: You also stated in the same portion of your book, that when asked what contributes most to both ethical and unethical behavior, the most frequent response from employees at every level (including management) is the behavior of their boss. Now the obvious moral of the story is that leaders need to walk their talk. Is there anything else it tells us?
JK: Well, the big message is that you are the most important leader in your organization. In life and in leadership, the most influential people are always those who are closest to us. We did a survey with young people. We asked them to choose from a list of people including business leader, political leader, professional athlete, entertainer, community leader, family member, teacher, coach, etc., their most significant leadership role model. They only had one choice, and the category that got the most votes was family member; the second choice was teacher/coach; and the third was community leader. Those top three totaled 77% of leadership role models for 18 to 30 year olds.
When I do that same survey with adults, I get exactly the same top three with the addition of business leaders, sometimes coming in third above community leaders, but not in first place, or even in second place. What that data tells us is that the people who are closest to us, with whom we have had the most experience, particularly early in our lives, become our leadership role models. For the most part, if we know someone, we are more likely to trust them, so proximity determines our influence.
So, if you are a manager, what this means is that you are the most important leadership role model in your organization to those who report to you. And, because that¡¯s true, none of us can escape personal responsibility, we have to be the most effective leaders we can be. We have to start accepting responsibility for our own leadership and begin to then develop an extensive repertoire of skills in order to be both more conscious and conscientious about how we use them.
KE: I think that one of the other reasons why legacy is so significant is because it removes that artificial boundary that exists for some between work and life. One of the essays in your book that I enjoyed was called, Leadership is Personal. When I encourage leaders to find ways to reveal personal things about themselves as a way of building trust, I sometimes hear, ¡°Why is that relevant to my role as leader?¡± What are your thoughts?
JK: We have worked with a gentleman by the name of Ron Sugar who was, until recently, CEO of Northrup Grumman Corporation. Ron would come and teach in a leadership course that Barry Posner led. He would come in and walk up to a piano that was in the seminar room. He would sit down and play the piano, and after he finished the piece, he would turn around on the piano bench and look at his executives that were there for leadership development, and ask, ¡°Do you know why I played the piano?¡± They wouldn¡¯t have an answer and he would then say, ¡°l played the piano because I wanted you to know I play the piano.¡±
Ron said that leadership is personal, that the people you lead need to know who you are, what you care about and why they are to be following you. It all comes down to this: People will not believe in the message if they don¡¯t believe in the messenger! If people don¡¯t believe in you, they won¡¯t follow you. It shows up over and over again in our research ¡ªwe call it the Credibility Factor, and it¡¯s the very foundation of leadership. How much more personal can you get? Your constituents have to know what you stand for, believe in, and where you are intending to go. This doesn¡¯t mean that you have to disclose every personal secret, but it does mean that they need to learn to trust you as a person, not as a position.
KE: You also state in your book that leaders should want to be liked. How does that desire impact the ways leaders behave?
JK: This is one of the more controversial topics of discussion. Irwin Federman, who is a founder of US Venture Partners, said, ¡°¡ I contend, however, that all things being equal, we will work harder and more effectively for people we like. And we like them in direct proportion to how they make us feel.¡± This is contrary to that comment that people often say, ¡°I don¡¯t care if people don¡¯t like me, I just want them to respect me.¡± Let¡¯s get real - this statement is utter nonsense! This statement is totally contrary to everything we know. Think about it for a moment. Is this a binary choice, I can either like you or respect you? Can't I have both? Can't we both like and respect a person?
When we talk to people about leaders they admire, the ones that they can recall years later as having made a difference in their lives, the ones they would stay up late for, the ones they would bust their butts for, the ones they would even die for, we never ever, ever, hear anyone tell us, ¡°Well, I hated that woman, but I would follow her to the ends of the earth,¡± or, ¡°He was a real jerk, but I was inspired to do my best for him.¡± The people we want to follow are the ones for whom we have genuine affection. We have to begin to understand that likability is a major factor in being successful in just about any endeavor in life.
I am all about evidence-based leadership and I would not be saying any of this if we did not have the evidence. Our research and practically everyone else¡¯s on the subject, clearly shows that people perform significantly higher when their leaders treat them with dignity and respect, listen to them, support them, recognize them, and make them feel important, build their skills, and show confidence in them. So, we are about evidence-based leadership and being liked translates into higher levels of performance, so therefore, we should want to be liked.
KE: Will a leader who is really invested in being liked have a harder time delivering tough feedback, or removing a low performer?
JK: Absolutely. Those of us who have kids, love our children, and still have to deliver some tough feedback sometimes. I don¡¯t always find it easy to do that, but sometimes, it¡¯s necessary. Leadership is often a struggle. You often have to make sacrifices, often it is not pleasant. But, I would prefer a leader who has struggled with those tough issues any day over someone who found it really easy.
We have to keep this reality in mind, though. No matter how hard you try, not everyone is going to like you. We are suggesting that if you are motivated to be liked, you are more likely to listen to people, treat people with dignity and respect and yes, you will find it difficult to give tough feedback.
KE: You encourage leaders to promote ¡°constructive insubordination.¡± Why don¡¯t you describe what it is, and why it¡¯s important?
JK: There is this old Texas saying: if both of us are always agreeing, one of us is redundant. When everyone agrees, especially just for the sake of getting along, we are unlikely to achieve the best outcome. I was reading the other day how students who come quickly to consensus in a classroom on a topic are less likely to stick around and ask more inquisitive questions and get more engaged during recess periods than students who are made to debate opposing points of view. They actually increase their interest in the subject. So this whole idea of getting people to disagree is actually a good thing, as long as we come to some kind of resolution later.
Again, just to test this notion about everyone agreeing or not agreeing, students were asked in this one research project to solve a murder mystery and they found that the groups of people who had the most diverse social backgrounds and experiences were the most likely to solve the case. Not only were the homogeneous groups more likely to be wrong, they were also more likely to express greater confidence in their wrong answers. So when you get people to come together who all think alike, you may end up with a wrong answer and a high level of commitment to the wrong answer. That can be extraordinarily dangerous. So promoting people to be productive in disagreeing with each other in order to get them more engaged and more interested in a topic, to learn more and then come to some kind of resolution based upon diverse points of view ends up being much much more effective and much less dangerous.
Abraham Lincoln was written about in a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin called Team of Rivals and she makes the following comment, "This then is a story of Lincoln's political genius, revealed through his extraordinary array of personal qualities that enabled him to form friendships with men who had previously opposed him; to repair injured feelings that left unattended might have escalated into permanent hostility; to assume responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease and to learn from mistakes." Wow! We could all learn a lesson from Abraham Lincoln and if he could manage to lead a team of rivals under the extraordinary challenges of the civil war in the United States, we could certainly find it within ourselves to manage the conflicts we face, modest as they are by comparison. So we need to make it possible for people to argue with each other, up, down, in and out, sideways, if we are going to realize the best from today's diverse and talented workforce.
KE: Many organizations seem to be struggling with how to encourage ¡°healthy debate.¡±
JK: We need to learn the skills to manage conflict and to promote it, to promote constructive insubordination. I want people to disagree with me and I can then model my behavior when people do disagree, by saying, ¡°That is an interesting perspective, tell me more about that, I want to hear more about that,¡± and encouraging people, rather than saying, ¡°I am the decider and this is the way it's going to be.¡± Dangerous, dangerous position to take.
KE: You have studied and thought about leadership for many years now. I am curious to know how your ideas have evolved over the years.
JK: Leadership is everyone¡¯s business.I think the most important evolution for us has been moving away from a focus on managers as the leaders to an emphasis on leadership as a set of skills and abilities that are useful and important for everyone in an organization. We have also evolved into spending more time and attention on youth leadership, as I mentioned earlier. Also, I think along with a growing understanding of this notion of leadership is everyone¡¯s business has been an appreciation that the content of leadership has remained mostly the same for decades. There is not a lot new that we are finding. But the context has changed dramatically, and just one example would be the global context of leadership. So we need to pay much more attention to the context of leadership and how it is changing.
KE: What do you see as some of the most effective ways for developing leaders?
JK: There are three ways that our research and others¡¯ research demonstrates we learn to lead; first is experience, secondly observation of others, and third is training, and it tends to be about 70% experience, 20% observation, and 10% training and development.
One of the other things that I have been learning more recently has been about this whole notion of practice and talent in becoming an expert. In a recent (5/07/06) New York Times Magazine article by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt at the Office Of Economics, they were reporting on some research done by others on expertise. They made this provocative comment that, "The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put in another way, expert performers¡are nearly always made, not born. And, yes, practice does make perfect."
If you look at people who become experts in their fields, it turns out that what differentiates experts from those who are good but not as great, is hours of practice. It turns out that those masters of their fields practice about twice as much as those who are good, but not at the expert level. I think the same principal we will see more and more applied to leadership, that indeed it is practice that makes perfect. I think we have to do four things to make sure that we develop leaders better. We need to set some specific goals, we need to engage them in designed learning activities, we need to make sure they get immediate feedback, and we need to concentrate, and this perhaps is a new perspective, as much on technique as on outcome.
KE: In what areas are leaders typically the weakest?
JK: Forward-looking in one hyphenated word. The quality that is #2 on the list of most admired leader qualities, and the one that differentiates leaders from other credible people, is being forward-looking. That is having a vision of the future and being able to communicate it to others. That¡¯s the good news.
The bad news is that the practice in which the majority of leaders score the lowest is Inspire A Shared Vision. We basically stink at it! It¡¯s where there¡¯s the largest gap between expectation and performance. Despite all that we¡¯ve written, spoken and trained on this, leaders still have a very long way to go.
KE: What are some ways that we can help our leaders develop the skill of forward-looking?
JK: It's really a matter of time and attention. Leaders spend very little time, on average thinking about the changing context of their world ¨C both inside and external. We estimate about 3% of their time looking 10-15 years out. We have to just fundamentally spend more time on it. The other thing that we found very interesting is that reading more outside of your field makes you more forward-looking than reading just inside your field, so you have to broaden what you read about. If you are in technology, you also need to be reading about things other than technology, if you are in HR, you also have to study areas outside HR.
KE: What final thoughts would you like to leave with our audience?
JK: Sergey Nikiforov, the founder of a company called Stack 3 Inc., said to us, ¡°Where do I start becoming a better leader? Where do I start?¡± I reflected on this and I found that everyday I had an opportunity to make a small difference, and he went on to say, ¡°I could have coached someone better, I could have listened better, I could have been more positive towards people, I could have said thank you more often.¡± I could have, I could have, I could have¡¡± and the list went on. Sergey pointed out to us that leadership is not just about grand visions and grand strategies, but it really is about what we do everyday, day in and day out. We have the opportunity to listen, to be more positive, to say thank you, to coach. The legacy you leave is the life you lead.
Audience Question: Does practice really make perfect or does it perhaps make permanent?
JK: There are two aspects to this. First of all imperfect practice can make permanent imperfect performance. That is why we need to focus on technique in our practice. Not just keeping on doing something over and over again that is incorrect. We have to make sure we are coaching someone in proper technique and method, whether it is running a meeting, giving a speech, doing a performance appraisal, we have to make sure they get the technique right. But then yes, it is absolutely a function of practice, practice and practice. My son is a college level tennis player. His coach tells him to practice two hours a day just to maintain his current level. If you want to get better, you have to practice more hours.
So it¡¯s a ¡°both/and,¡± not an ¡°either/or,¡± make sure you design a learning activity where people can learn the technique well, then practice that over and over again until you, as they say in tennis, groove it, until it¡¯s natural, until it feels easy to you and then move on to the next one.
KE: Jim you said you¡¯d like to close by telling us the secret of success in life. How can we pass that up?
JK: We have interviewed a lot of people, one of whom was Major General John Stanford. We asked him how to develop leaders for the future. We ask all the people we interview this final question, hoping to glean some bit of advice and John gave us the most memorable response. John, who has had a very distinguished public service career, said, ¡°When anyone ever asks me that question, I tell them I have the secret to success in life. The secret to success is to stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to really ignite other people, to see inside other people, to have a greater desire to get things done in other people.¡± A person who is not in love doesn¡¯t really feel the kind of excitement that helps them to get ahead and to lead others and to achieve. I don¡¯t know any other fire, any other thing in life that is more positive and exhilarating a feeling than love is.¡± So, with that, my last bit of advice is to love ¡®em and lead ¡®em.
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Jim Kouzes is co-author with Barry Posner of the award-winning and best-selling book, The Leadership Challenge, with over one million copies sold. He is also an Executive Fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Leavy School of Business at Santa Clara University. The Leadership Challenge, available in 11 languages, has been a selection of the Macmillan Executive Book Club and The Fortune Book Club. It is the winner of 1989 James A Hamilton Hospital Administrator¡¯s Book, the 1995 and 1996 Critic's Choice Award and was a Business Week best seller in 2001 and 2002. Jim and Barry have also co-authored Creditability, How Leaders Gain and Lose It? Why people demand it? This book was chosen by Industry Week as one of the 10 best management books of 1993. Their other books include Encouraging the Heart, the Leadership Challenge Workbook, and the Leadership Challenge Journal. Based on solid research involving over 70,000 surveys, 1,000 written case studies, and 100 in-depth interviews, these books describe the leadership principles and processes that generate high performance in individuals and organizations.
From India, Pune
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