The Leadership Challenge focuses on how to be a successful leader. The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® presents five practices that individuals can put into action to bring out the best in themselves and those they lead. Jim and Barry have also identified thirty leadership behaviors that correspond to The Five Practices. Research proves that this content, when put into practice, builds more effective leadership skills, resulting in exemplary leaders. In addition, many Fortune 500 companies see a direct correlation between coaching and excellent leadership skills. This book is important because it ties together these two powerful competencies: the thirty LPI®: Leadership Practices Inventory behaviors and coaching.
This book offers you an opportunity to combine two exciting and practical concepts: leadership and coaching. It lays out the basics of Jim and Barry's Five Practices and a failsafe coaching model. When the two are combined, it results in a powerful method to assist leaders to practice leadership skills for reaching excellence.
The purpose of this book is to provide trainers, consultants, and others working with The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® a reliable process to coach leaders.
The book includes eleven chapters divided into two distinct parts. Part I, Coaching to Improve The Five Practices, is written for experienced coaches who have their own coaching process and are looking for ideas (questions, activities, books, or other resources) they can use with clients who have completed the LPI. Chapters 2 through 6 present The Five Practices and introduce dozens of ideas to help a leader improve and increase the frequency of the behaviors that support each.
Part II, Improve Your Coaching Competence, provides an overview of coaching. It is written for someone who is familiar with The Leadership Challenge, but wants to learn more about coaching. Chapter 7 presents an overview of coaching, and Chapter 8 allows coaches, new as well as experienced, to assess and improve their coaching skills. Chapter 9 lays out a coaching process that takes a leader from feedback to success. Chapter 10 addresses what to do when things go wrong, and Chapter 11 helps coaches coach themselves to greater heights, providing ideas to improve their skills as well as knowledge about The Leadership Challenge concepts.
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Leadership and coaching go hand-in-hand. Both are relationship-based. The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership can easily describe the practices of an Exemplary Coach.
As you can see, there are many similarities. When we first envisioned this book, we imagined that there are
A Coach's Guide to Developing Exemplary Leaders was born of these premises. The book addresses these needs.
The Leadership Challenge and all of its subsequent products are based on continuing research that started more than thirty years ago. We asked thousands of people to complete a Personal-Best Leadership Questionnaire, which was developed to learn what people do daily to rally their people and inspire them to work toward a common future.
We conducted our research with an assumption that turns out to be important: We did not have to survey only the best leaders in the best organizations to identify best practices. We assumed that we would find success patterns by asking ordinary people to describe extraordinary experiences. We were right.
After initial research, we developed a personal-best leadership survey of thirty-eight open-ended questions such as:
Over a four-year period, we conducted almost six hundred of these surveys and started to implement a shorter survey. Since then we have expanded the research and collected thousands of additional cases, including community leaders, student leaders, church leaders, government leaders, and hundreds of others in non-managerial positions.
Every person we spoke with had at least one leadership story to tell—stories that were rarely textbook cases, but instead were about ordinary people who engage in what has come to be known as The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership®.
The analysis of the personal-best surveys revealed an interesting phenomenon. Even though the individuals' recollections of their peak leadership experiences were all different, all of them engaged in similar practices. We developed a model of leadership that consists of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® we identified earlier:
The research led us to write our first book, The Leadership Challenge, now in its sixth edition, and to develop a quantitative 360-degree instrument, the LPI: Leadership Practices Inventory, to measure the five leadership practices. The Leadership Challenge has sold over two million copies and has been translated into numerous languages. The LPI is one of the most widely used leadership assessment instruments in the world. More than seven hundred doctoral dissertations and master's theses have been based on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® model.
Let's review The Five Practices.
Model the WayLeaders know that to gain commitment and to win respect they need to become exemplars of the behavior they expect of others. Excellent leaders need to identify and articulate their personal values—what they represent. People follow people, not words on paper, so leaders must demonstrate that they stand behind their values and demonstrate that they mean what they say with action. The principles that leaders establish, espouse, and live become the standards of excellence for others to follow. The leader who sets an example creates a situation making it easier to build consensus on shared values no matter what the climate. The excellent leader is clear about his or her values and principles because he or she asks for feedback about his or her actions.
Inspire a Shared VisionA vision is not about a statement; it is about the shared dream of the future. Leaders envision the preferred future, creating an ideal image of the organization or project. They get others behind the vision by vividly expressing their passion. Leaders are able to bring their vision to everyone's level, breathing life into other individuals' hopes and dreams. This strengthens the individuals, strengthens the team, and strengthens the vision. When leaders believe that they can make a difference, others see that the vision can be for the common good of all involved. Excellent leaders incorporate the higher meaning of their work into the vision. This alignment helps others align with the team, the work, and the organization.
Challenge the ProcessLeaders look for ways to improve processes, for better, faster, less-expensive ways to get the work done, and they encourage the strength of the team to do it. Leaders make certain that the improvement process has a strong chance of success by helping to develop a logical plan of actions and milestones that incorporates dates, goals, and accountability. Leaders challenge themselves to ensure that they grow and learn. They invariably must experiment and take risks on their way to innovative improvement ideas. This means, of course, that leaders learn from their mistakes and blunders as well as from their successes and triumphs, making it possible for the rest of their team to do the same.
Enable Others to ActLeaders foster collaboration through the use of excellent interpersonal skills. Developing cooperative relationships, treating others with dignity and respect, and trusting people to do what they say they will builds individuals' self-confidence and capacity to accomplish the team's work. Leaders show respect for others when they consider diverse viewpoints. Leaders involve others in making decisions about how to do their work and they support the ultimate actions. These actions build cooperation across the team. When leaders empower individuals in this way, they ensure that people grow in their jobs, ultimately empowering the entire team.
Encourage the HeartLeaders bring hope and satisfaction; they bring encouragement and support; and most of all they bring praise and appreciation. People will accomplish extraordinary things when they know someone cares and appreciates their dedication. Leaders recognize the contributions that individuals make; they celebrate the accomplishments that teams make. Leaders begin by showing confidence in individuals' actions. They then continue by praising individuals for both a completed job as well as for achieving small increments along the way. They celebrate creatively, celebrate sincerely, and celebrate often.
Driving The Five Practices are The Ten Commitments of Leadership. It isn't enough—not by a long shot—to list five principles that a leader will follow. The leader must also identify behaviors that support and demonstrate the principles on a daily basis.
Let's briefly review each of these commitments and how leaders are able to demonstrate each.
Leaders must ask themselves, “What do I stand for? What are the principles that guide me in my day-to-day work and keep me here in this job, doing this work, and supporting these people? ” Once affirmed, leaders must act out their values, demonstrating what they mean. One of their favorite actions is to engage people in a dialogue about shared values.
Leaders continue to demonstrate their ideas by aligning their actions in everything they do or say. Then they take actions to ensure that their team members understand what is expected of them and how to implement this commitment. When this is achieved, the team's unity leads to shared values. A leader can encourage this by reinforcing behaviors that are consistent with his or her espoused values.
Developing the capacity to envision the preferred future is a skill that must be both modeled and taught to team members. The leader can reflect on the past, attend to the present, and consider the future, but the leader must also identify the burning passion that will carry the team into the future. Leaders must ask their team members what is motivating them to work toward the vision and to identify their aspirations.
Leaders listen deeply for how to help team members find a spot for themselves in the future vision. They show team members how they have a role in achieving the exciting shared vision. Leaders create a vision that people can see when they use passionate, visual words that create a clear picture. Leaders must describe their vision and inquire about team members' clarity and desire to take part.
Leaders keep their eyes and ears open to predict what's on the horizon. This entails looking outside the department and outside the organization. It requires that leaders establish relationships and connect with many sources of information. It also means that leaders must bring their people along by helping them to identify the opportunities that may strengthen the team and the organization. Leaders challenge their team members to find new approaches to old problems.
Experimenting and taking risks is the only path to making innovative improvement. This means that there may be false starts or errors along the way. Even so, leaders cannot give up the opportunities that come with innovation. Leaders can do two things to temper this dilemma. First, they can look to small wins as stepping stones to the ultimate goals. Second, they can celebrate the errors by identifying what the team learned.
Leaders create a climate of trust and build relationships by making the first move. Leaders must trust their team if they want the team to trust; they must take steps to build personal interactions if they want the team to do the same. This means that the leader must get out and walk around, talking to team members, finding out about them, and genuinely being interested in them as people, not just as employees. Leaders need to find creative ways to get people to interact on both a personal and professional basis.
Leaders develop self-confidence and competence. The two traits are self-perpetuating. The more competent team members are, the higher their self-confidence will be. The higher the team members' self-confidence, the greater the likelihood that they will take a chance at increasing their skill sets. This is a win for everyone involved: individuals become better at what they do, the team becomes stronger, and the leader can increasingly rely on the team to achieve success.
Leaders have a winner's attitude, that is, they believe that people are interested in doing their best in all they do. Thanking people for a job well done, sending a note of appreciation, recognizing someone for living the values—are all easy to do. However, building employees' belief that they can achieve more tomorrow than they are achieving today is the big win for leaders and team members. Leaders find opportunities to show sincere appreciation for team members' accomplishments.
Leaders bring people together to celebrate big and little wins. Celebrations perpetuate a corporate spirit of belonging to something greater than one's own being. Leaders find opportunities for celebratory events. Celebrations that link rewards with performance are a powerful way to reinforce achieving the vision. Leaders are successful at this commitment when they find ways to have fun together as a team and make celebrations a part of the team's atmosphere.
These Ten Commitments are more than an action list for aspiring leaders. They are a reminder of the commitment and the responsibility everyone has in the challenging position we call leadership. Leaders need to be aware of how well they are doing with their own leadership commitment. The Leadership Practices Inventory can provide that feedback.
The LPI: Leadership Practices Inventory is one of the best-selling and most trusted 360-degree leadership assessments available on the market. The instrument approaches leadership as a measurable, learnable, and teachable set of behaviors. This leadership assessment helps individuals and organizations measure their leadership competencies by providing a structured means of collecting and processing data based on The Five Practices.
Research shows that gathering 360-degree feedback is the first important step to improving performance and making behavior changes over time. The ratings are collected anonymously, with the exception of supervisor ratings, since most people have only one boss. The assessment of strengths and development needs is more reliable and valid because the individual receives input from multiple raters: him- or herself, supervisors, peers, direct reports, and others. Personal biases are significantly decreased by collecting feedback from individuals who have different relationships with the individual. Based on the collected data, the LPI delivers in-depth results with a detailed feedback report for each participant.
It is essential that the feedback report and scoring results be shared with the individual in a one-to-one or group setting that is led by a facilitator. The facilitator can assist individuals to:
The LPI Online has the ability to save data for future use so that leaders can compare their scores over multiple administrations. Taking this action is highly encouraged.
Once individuals receive their feedback, they are ready for tools, techniques, and knowledge to begin to make changes and increase the frequency of behaviors identified on the LPI. The LPI helps individuals to discover their leadership potential by providing them with the skills to master The Five Practices. Individuals can improve their skills by working on their own, attending additional LPI training sessions, or working with a coach.
If participants are working on their own, they may wish to use two particular tools included with their LPI 360. One of the tools is a set of user-friendly LPI Participant Handouts that takes participants to the heart and soul of their feedback results. A second tool is the Leadership Development Planner that was created to use over several months of coaching sessions. There are also numerous books, such as The Leadership Challenge, Encouraging the Heart, A Leader's Legacy, The Leadership Challenge Workbook, and Credibility, that will enhance knowledge.
If you are a facilitator or a coach, there is a product for you to help leaders too, The Leadership Challenge® Facilitation Set which includes guidance for more than forty hours of workshops and more than one hundred experiential learning activities.
In addition to the suggestions above, coaches using the LPI can turn to the rest of the chapters in this book for support. The book is divided into two distinct parts. Part I, Coaching to Improve The Five Practices, is written for experienced coaches who have their own coaching processes and are looking for ideas (questions, activities, books, or other resources) they can use with clients who have completed the LPI. Chapters 2 through 6 supply dozens of ideas to help your leader improve and increase the frequency of the behaviors that support The Five Practices.
Each chapter represents one of The Five Practices. It begins with a brief review of the practice, its two commitments, and its four essentials. Each of the six items in the LPI that relate to the chapter's practice are listed (items are numbered and listed in the order as they appear in the LPI to make it easy to locate). You, the coach, will determine which items to address based on your client's Feedback Report.
After each LPI item, you will find suggestions for:
At the end of each chapter we provide:
Remember, the value of these activities and discussion questions is not in the doing, but in the follow-on discussion with you, the coach. Be sure to allow time to discuss the “so what ” and the “now what ” that occur as a result of any discussion or activity.
Part II, Improve Your Coaching Competence, provides an overview of coaching. It is written for someone who is familiar with The Leadership Challenge® Model, but wants to learn more about coaching. Chapter 7 presents an overview of coaching, and Chapter 8 allows coaches, new as well as experienced, to assess their coaching skills and to add knowledge and ideas for how to improve their skills. Chapter 9 lays out a coaching process that will show you how to take your leader from feedback to success. Chapter 10 addresses what to do when things go wrong, and Chapter 11 helps you coach yourself to greater heights by providing ideas to improve your skills as a coach as well as knowledge about The Leadership Challenge® Model.
Coaching leaders is a noble task. The only thing this world needs more than excellent leaders is excellent coaches to rally, inspire, and accompany them on their journeys.