Model the Way | The Leadership Challenge

Making extraordinary things happen in organizations is a difficult, yet rewarding task to achieve. Everyone dreams of working at a place where they feel honoured, respected, and cared for. Unfortunately, that is not something we see in today's workplaces; and there needs to be a system that helps leaders and managers develop a place of not only work, but camaraderie. In this next series of posts, I will explain the framework of exemplary leadership, and how leaders can obtain a sense of trust and excitement from their people. The knowledge of these posts come from the book "The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations 5th Edition" by Barry Posner and James Kouzes.

Clarify Values

To prepare for an upcoming Gala Dinner, Nate, the Event Organizer, faced resentment from his team members because they felt that he was too young and inexperienced to take care of the job. Nate’s first step was to communicate his values to the team. He introduced himself, not as a manager or lead, but as a fellow team member. Then, instead of telling everyone what he wanted out of them, he explained the values and performance he expected from himself every day. Nate ensured that his members understood what he wanted from himself, so that they could act on the same. In a meeting later that week, Nate provided a few examples of cases where he exercised his core values and solved problems. He narrated it like a story, hoping that his members would understand and retain the lesson. One of his colleagues told upper-management that his values clearly communicated the type of person he was and how he wanted the event to be organized.

Leadership is not a title, but your behavior. The fact that you are a CEO, Director, Investor, or the like does not count as leadership, rather it's your characteristics that display honest and integrative leadership. This goes by saying that if exemplary leaders want to achieve high standards from a group, they must model it to set clear expectations.

You must first be clear about your own values and guiding principles, then seek out and listen to the values of others. Anything in common, can be understood by the term shared values. Shared values -- also known as core values -- include common goals, ethics, skills, and passions. They are fundamental beliefs that will help you guide your decision and actions towards the path of success. When shared values are discovered between colleagues, the amount of work input significantly increases because the reason for caring about what they do is introduced.

The very first step you should do to clarify and understand your own behavior is self knowledge: Discover your long-term goals, values, and principles that will lead you towards your envisioned mission. Then, hold informal discussions with your colleagues or constituents on what their goals and values are.

Set The Example

A man named Steve was promoted to plant manager at a manufacturing company. He understood the core value of the company well enough. The company had been discussing the vision of becoming a "World Class Plant'' where there would be a strong culture of safety and good housekeeping. Unfortunately, Steve had not been witnessing that vision come to life. Whenever they had a pending customer visit, Steve would remind everyone to make an extra effort of cleaning up the plant, the roads, and parking lots. He began to feel annoyed every time he had to tell his employees to make a conscious effort. Then he realized the key: he bought a two-gallon plastic bucket and began picking up trash during his lunch time every day. Word went out over the workplace, and his employees started doing it as well. Now, Steve no longer requests for extra effort of cleaning because he set the example of what he wanted his employees to do.

As a leader, individuals are constantly watching and talking about your every move. Exemplary leaders are role models for others and essentially live the shared values. Cornell University professor Tony Simons researched behavioral integrity, and found that organizations where employees strongly believe that their managers followed through on promises and demonstrated the values they preached were more profitable than those managers who scored average or lower.

Final Thoughts

Exemplary leadership is a resemblance of characteristics that lead towards a goal and vision. To achieve success, one must simply act on their values, not command it. Showing not telling is the only approach to get others to understand what you want from them, and most importantly what you want from yourself.

Note: All knowledge and ideas are attained from the book "The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations 5th Edition". This blog summarizes the content from the book, but may unintentionally contain the same wording.