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What it argues
The Leadership Challenge is James Kouzes and Barry Posner's evidence-based framework for what leaders actually do when they're at their best, drawn from decades of survey research and thousands of case studies. First published in 1987 and updated repeatedly, the book distills leadership into five practices and ten commitments that appear consistently across cultures, industries, and organizational levels.
The five practices are: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. Each practice represents a pattern of behavior that emerged from the authors' research into "personal best" leadership experiences — situations where ordinary people produced extraordinary results. The framework is descriptive before it's prescriptive: these are the things people do when they lead most effectively, not aspirational ideals invented by the authors.
What it gets right
- 1.
The five practices of exemplary leadership: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart.
- 2.
Credibility is the foundation of leadership. Followers rate honesty as the most important attribute of admired leaders, above forward-looking vision, inspiration, and competence.
- 3.
Leadership is a set of observable, learnable behaviors — not a personality type or a function of position. The best leaders emerge at every level of organizations.
What it covers
Who wrote it
James M. Kouzes is a Fellow of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University and the Dean's Executive Fellow of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. Barry Z. Posner is the Accolti Professor of Leadership at Santa Clara University, where he served as dean of the business school. Together, they have conducted more than thirty years of leadership research that has resulted in The Leadership Challenge and its companion assessment, the Leadership Practices Inventory, which has been used by more than five million people worldwide.
