James M. Kouzes - Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership

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ISBN 9781119687016 (Hardcover)

ISBN 9781119686903 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781119686972 (ePub)

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The premise of Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership: How to Make a Difference Regardless of Your Title, Role, or Authority is quite simple: leadership is a learnable set of actions and behaviors that is available to everyone. In the pages that follow, we make the case that leadership is not about rank, position, or authority, and we will provide data to support this claim. We'll also share examples of individuals who, as a result of engaging in practices of exemplary leadership, have guided others in making extraordinary things happen in their organizations and communities.

Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership is about what individuals do to effect change and improvement. It is about the behaviors and actions individuals use to transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, division into unity, and risks into rewards. It's about exercising leadership that contributes to creating an environment in which people can work together to turn perplexing problems and challenging opportunities into remarkable successes.

All too often, when leadership is discussed within workplaces and communities, attention is given primarily to those appointed or elected to positions of authority. While leaders with titles certainly deserve credit for what they do, they are not the only people who matter. In fact, we would argue that there are just as many, probably even more, leaders without titles who contribute to collective achievements and well-being. Workplace and community engagement are not just a function of what formal leaders do; they are also related to how all leaders in organizations behave.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point as it spread across the globe, overwhelming healthcare systems, shutting down a significant number of commerce and educational systems, and totally disrupting the normal way of life for effectively every person on the planet. It has been an unprecedented crisis like no other experienced in our lifetime. While there are—and have to be—global, national, regional, state, and local coordinated efforts to address the pandemic, it is also the many small acts of leadership among doctors, nurses, first responders, teachers, parents, students, volunteers, and other concerned citizens that make a difference. They create novel ways to treat the sick, care for the vulnerable, deal with shortages, produce personal protective equipment, recognize heroes, and even bring a bit of joy to an otherwise tragic and depressing situation.

Another case in point about how tragedy and adversity create opportunities for people to step up and lead, and that leadership arises as much, if not more so, from the bottom up as it does from the top down, is the response to the death of George Floyd while in police custody. His death was the tipping point in long-standing tensions around matters of racial and social justice and police treatment of people of color. Within a day of the event, protests began, first in Minneapolis, where the incident occurred, and then across the United States and in major cities around the world. These were mostly decentralized actions initiated largely by young people of highly diverse backgrounds who had no formal titles or positions. They captured the attention of governments, businesses, and ordinary citizens and supercharged calls for more diversity, equity, and inclusion in every institution.

There continues to be no shortage of challenges facing individuals, organizations, and communities, and no limits to the opportunities and needs for people to lead. We wrote this book to help you prepare to become the best leader you can be and take advantage of the chances you have to make this world a little bit better place than you find it.

This book is for and about people who do not have titles, like supervisor, manager, executive, chief, head, director, captain, boss, and the like, or some formal authority over other people. It's intended for front-line workers, new hires, individual contributors, salespeople, analysts, researchers, consultants, professionals, community activists, volunteers, project leads, scientists, engineers, administrators, artists, athletes, attorneys, programmers, coaches, teachers, parents, and all the others who lead without the benefit of hierarchical position or rank. The book aims to help people—no matter their role—strengthen their capacity to make extraordinary things happen.

We also wrote this book to uplift your spirits. We will show you how you can be effective at leading without any formal authority. Leadership matters from wherever you do it. We have learned from our research—which is discussed in each chapter—that people who aren't managers or executives are far more capable of developing themselves as leaders and exercising leadership than tradition or myth has ever assumed possible.

Managers, executives, and leadership developers will benefit, as well, from reading this book. They will find here example after example of people who have made extraordinary things happen without having the advantage of title or positional power. We hope that it will reinforce the need for them to provide leadership development opportunities to everyone in their organization—and much sooner in people's careers than they typically do. We know that the best leaders are the best learners, and learning leadership is best begun before people join the workforce or take on formal or official organizational responsibilities.

As you will see from the scores of examples in this book, the principles apply regardless of the nature of your organization, and they are not dependent upon any particular demographic characteristic (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, function, nationality, etc.) or personality variable. The focus is on the behaviors and actions of what people do when they are exercising exemplary leadership.

The principles and practices described in Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership are based solidly on quantitative and qualitative research. The book has its origins in a study we began in 1983. We wanted to know what people did when they were at their “personal best” in leading others. People see their individual leadership standards of excellence in these experiences. We started with an assumption that to discover best practices we did not have to interview and survey star performers, select celebrities, or people “at the top.” Instead, we assumed that by asking people at all levels and across a broad array of organizational settings to describe extraordinary experiences, we would be able to find and identify patterns of success. And we did.

The results of our initial investigation—and of the ongoing research we have conducted for nearly four decades—have been striking in their consistency and are a refutation of many leader stereotypes. People frequently assume, for example, that leadership is different from one type of organization or culture to the next. Nothing could be further from the truth. While each setting may look different from the outside, we find that what leaders do when they are at their best is quite similar. This pattern of behavior varies little across locations and circumstances. It's true enough that the context keeps evolving, and the landscape of workplaces, communities, and countries has shifted over time, but leadership remains an understandable and generalizable process. While each leader is a unique individual, there are shared patterns to the practice of leadership. In each chapter of this book, you will find empirical evidence that shows the positive difference leaders without titles make across a wide spectrum of settings.