Esteemed author and scholar Dr. Barry Posner joins Dr. Gary White from the School or Business at NCU to discuss how any of us can make difference no matter what position, title, or authority we hold. Their discussion is centered around the newest book by Drs. Kouzes and Posner: Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership: How to Make a Difference Regardless of Your Title, Role, or Authority. Listen to hear insightful perspectives on application of timeless leadership principles!
Esteemed author and scholar Dr. Barry Posner joins Dr. Gary White from the School or Business at NCU to discuss how any of us can make difference no matter what position, title, or authority we hold. Their discussion is centered around the newest book by Drs. Kouzes and Posner: Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership: How to Make a Difference Regardless of Your Title, Role, or Authority. Listen to hear insightful perspectives on application of timeless leadership principles!
Welcome to the Center for the advancement of virtual organizations podcast, everyday people, extraordinary leadership. I'm Dr. Gary White from the North Central University School of Business. And today we're joined by Dr. Barry Posner, author of over a dozen award winning leadership books over the past 40 years. Welcome. And thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us about how everyday people can make a difference. Dr. Posner.
00:33
My pleasure, nice to be here, Gary, and look forward to the conversation.
00:37
Thank you. In our prior episodes, we've been talking about adaptive leadership, leading diverse teams across cultures, and establishing leadership presence, especially in the light of today's virtual environment. So this is really a timely discussion. And I'm so glad that you're here with us today. To have this discussion, a few questions that we would like to ask of you, Dr. Posner. In your latest book, everyday people extraordinary leadership, your discussion is organized around the five practices of exemplary leadership that's modeling the way inspiring, shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act and of course, encouraging the heart.
We were first introduced to these practices in your 1987. Book, the leadership challenge, one of my personal favorites, how have these practices changed in the 34 years since they were first introduced?
01:43
Well, Gary, it's a fair question. As you know, the leadership challenge at its core, is about how we mobilize others to what we say want to struggle for shared aspirations. And it's really about the leadership behaviors that people use to transform values into actions, visions, into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity and risks into rewards. And my colleague, Jim Kouzes, and I've spent nearly four decades together researching, consulting, teaching and writing about what leaders do when they're at their best, and how everyone can learn to become better leaders.
And we've continued to ask these days, the same basic question we started with in the early 1980s, when we began researching into trying to understand what was exempt what what constituted exemplary leadership. We asked the question then, and we asked the question today, to people to ask them, we asked them. So tell us about a time you were at your personal best as a leader, what were the key actions, behaviors that made a difference. And over the years, we've talked to men and women, young people and old people, people representing just about every type of organization there is at all levels, all functions from all over the world. And the personal bests were experiences in which our respondents in their own perceptions set their individual leadership standards of excellence.
And Gemini started with the assumption that we didn't have to interview and survey star performers in excellent companies to discover best practices. Indeed, we assumed that by asking ordinary people to describe extraordinary leadership experiences, we would find patterns of success. And we did. And and while it's true that each leader is a unique individual, there are certainly shared patterns to the practice of leadership. Specifically, to your question, as part of our research, we typically ask people kind of the same question that you asked, we asked them what kind of what's new, and what's different? Is leadership changed from yours in the past to today to look into the future.
And we find almost to a person, the response has been the same. Each of them told us that the fundamentals of leadership are the same today, today 2020, as they were in the 1980s, and the 1990s, and the 2000s, and the 2000s, and 10s. And they probably been the same for for centuries. And in that sense, even though we've been through six editions of the leadership challenge. leadership's not a fad. There's really nothing new. It's not here today and gone tomorrow. It's here today in here forever.
And in fact, there have been no shortage in any in any time. And certainly these are challenging times for people to make a difference. And that's fundamentally what leaders do. So sure, the context of leadership has changed dramatically. And we could enumerate to half a dozen things going on in the world today that that exemplify that but The content of leadership, the content of leadership, the process of leadership has been consistent over time.
05:06
Excellent, excellent. Now, the central theme of everyday people extraordinary leadership, is that leadership is everyone's business. You state that leadership is not about title or a status. It's not about position or authority or power. We don't need to, as you say, look up for leadership, but we only need to look inward, a very poignant. Can you give us an actual example from your experience?
05:41
Yeah. Well, you know, when we say inward, we mean that leadership, like any other behavior, it's a, it's a choice that people make. Leadership begins within an individual, essentially, by figuring out what you care about what you care enough about that you'd be willing to do, to do something that you're not now doing, to take some action, or to stop doing something. And in our definition of leadership, we indicate that leadership is a struggle, what I said a moment ago, because it requires you to do something out of the ordinary, something that's difficult, something that's novel, something that's probably at least initially perceived as risky, and something that will take, take away time and energy from whatever it is you're currently doing or enjoying. And so let me give you an example.
Take Aaron McIlroy, who works in business development and brand engagement in a manufacture Midwest manufacturing firm, regularly volunteers with civic and local nonprofits in her rural suburban County. And last March, like the rest of us, Aaron was ordered to shelter in place due to the covid 19 pandemic. And like many of us, she found it hard to sit still. So, you know, in her community, Aaron wondered how local businesses would adapt to the pandemic. And she also worried about the health of frontline workers who are caring for others, on and unable to shelter in place, and wanting to do something to help she reflected on the values.
This is the inward, the values that mattered the most to us, to most to her. And when she told us or what she told us was that when she returned to her core values, and took an internal audit of her heart and mind, that service to others was one of the things most important to her long with warmth and graciousness, gratitude, connection, kindness and being the difference. So she thought, so how can I put these values into practice during a pandemic? So she began talking with a few like minded colleagues in her community that she'd worked previously with. They came up with a GoFundMe campaign that they call project frontline. And they reached out to their local community through local media asking, you know, do you have a love of local restaurants, cafes, and bakeries, and you want to lift up the front lines that are going to be out there fighting the pandemic.
So they raised funds to connect food service organizations to prepare meals for those on the front line. And from their small community, they raised over $50,000 from 542 local residents. They provided funds to 40 local establishments to prepare and deliver meals to over 8100 frontline workers. And here's how she explained this to us. He said, If you want to have an impact, it starts within yourself your core values, you need to align your thoughts your words, your actions from from a clear purpose.
And the results will be unprecedented. Who you speak with you collaborate with and and what you will achieve will stem from these principles. Everything you will produce will resonate with those intentions. That's what it means to to lead from within. So if you if you want to be like Garen, you have to comprehend fully the values, beliefs and assumptions that drive you. And no matter where you are in the organization or what you're doing, you have to freely and honestly choose the principles that you will use to guide your actions. Essentially, you've got to find your voice and authentically communicate your beliefs in actions. You have to mean what you say. If your actions are to be consistent with your words, your words and your deeds go together.
09:33
That's an excellent example. Anyone can make a difference. That's excellent. Now, you've stated that one of my favorite quotes bringing meaning to life in the present by focusing on making life better in the future is essential to making extraordinary things happen. So people expect leaders to be forward looking, articulating desired outcomes and what the future could look like. Not Just the current state. So, therefore, an effective leader needs to be able to imagine a positive future and make the current task full of meaning and purpose. As you stated up, can you share an example of this from your experience?
Sure, happy to do so you know, it's been, it's interesting, because it's been said that the human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. Daniel Gilbert, who's a professor of psychology at Harvard, known for his research on effective forecasting, put it this way, here's what he said. He said, The greatest achievement of the human brain is its is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real. And it is disability that allows us to think about the future. He says the human brain is an anticipation machine. And making future is the most important thing that it does.
And we found in our research that leaders in this vein are possibility thinkers thinking about the future and what might be possible? Because the truth is that all all ventures big and small, begin with the belief that what is today might be merely a yearning, will one day become a reality. It's this belief that sustains leaders and the people they work with through difficult and challenging times. When we ask people to tell us where their visions come from, their sense of the future. Well, the truth is, Gary, they often have great difficulty describing this process. When they do provide an answer, typically, it's more about a feeling sense or a gut instinct. And there's often no particular specific logic to it, they just kind of feel strongly about something.
And it's that intuitive sense that they feel must be fully explored. In other words, we just put it like this, it's kind of like what grabs hold of you, and won't let go. So visions are projections of, of our fundamental beliefs and assumptions about human nature, technology, science, politics, art ethics, the world vision of the future is, you think about like literary or musical theme. It's the Paramount, persistent and pervasive message that you want to convey, frequently recurring melody that you want to remember. And whenever repeated, like a mantra, or reminds the audience of the entire work, that's, it's, you know, this is the monitor, this is why we're here. This is our purpose, this is our meaning. And every leader needs such a theme, an orienting principle, around which he or she can organize an entire cause your movement.
Absolutely, thank you for sharing that. Your research has determined that the top four personal values, traits and various characteristics that people look for in their leaders, and these weren't there were many but the top four, were honesty, forward looking competency and inspirational ability. Can you share with us a present day leader that most of us would know who you consider to be this kind of leader? And how does that lead or exhibit those traits that your research uncovered?
13:22
Well, let me let me back up a moment from answering that question, to keep in mind that, that essentially, leadership is personal. And it's a it's a personal relationship between those who would lead and those who would follow. And that's true, regardless of whether the relationship is one to one or, or one to many. You're going to be a leader whose guidance others want to follow. There must be a human connection, something that binds you and others together. And I say that because I can't really describe a public leader, someone that everyone listening Gary to our podcast would know, because we don't all know the same people. And in with leadership, thinking of it as a relationship, we can we can clearly think that we're not, we're unlikely to follow someone whom we don't know.
And, and even more likely to follow someone who doesn't first of all know who he or she is. So, you know, back to the first question you asked me in this podcast, the point is that leadership begins with examining the inner territory, the very first person who has to follow you any one of us is in fact, us, is you. The first person who has to listen to me is me and the first person who has to believe in me, is me. Now, in some recent research we just completed involving a global sample of over 35,000 respondents around the world. We ask people to identify a role model from from which from home they they learned to lead with More than 95% of us can identify a role model, a leader, someone who, who helped teach us about what it meant to be a leader. And each of those individuals embody those four characteristics. Now, for me, not this is not going to be a public figure that that everybody knows.
But for me, when I think about the leader, who, who exemplify these characteristics, for me, it was my supervisor. In my first job after college graduation, he was always honest, oftentimes providing me with feedback, feedback, which was not always positive, from my point of view. But it was always constructive. And it was truthful, he was forward looking, he kept me focused, not so much on what was but more on what could be, especially as we faced challenges or had problems to solve. I found him more than competent, he could, he was very experienced and could teach me a lot.
But he was competent, not just what he already knew. But he also seemed to be at least one step ahead of me in terms of his learning about what was around the corner ahead of us. And he forced me to be similarly forward looking thinking about what might be happening just around the horizon. And he was certainly inspiring not just about how he went, you know about his own business, but about how we believed in what in what we were trying to accomplish for the common good, and what I and my colleagues could accomplish, and that was always more than what we thought was possible ourselves. And in that way, he was on as competent, forward looking and inspiring.
16:43
Yes, that's fascinating. And that's exactly the characteristics that your research has, has determined. Your research also tells us that people who are most frequently engaged in learning, likewise, exercise effective leadership most frequently. And we know from your latest book that people learn to lead through experience learning by doing, they learn, through example, learning by observing others, obviously. And also, people learn through education, formal and informal education, training and coursework. Your research revealed that learning by doing was the most frequently cited way to learn yet at the same time challenge, as you mentioned, in your book is critical to learning and career enhancement. So what are some of the practical ways that we as leaders, those of us listening to this podcast, can stretch our followers, in particular in a virtual organization?
Sure. Well, let me let me give you maybe a little bit longer answer to this question set, set it up, and then give you some practical strategies. First of all, when we talk with people about their personal best leadership experience, they talked about challenging the process. And you might get the impression that you have to start big in order to be a leader. And what we found was, that's not necessarily true. In fact, change conceived of too broadly can be so overwhelming that you can't even figure out where or how to get started. Just thinking about gigantic problems can defeat people's capacity to even imagine what might be done, let alone strengthen their determination to solve them.
So framing a challenge a problem or an opportunity is to immense dampens people's motivations to do anything. More often, leadership begins with starting small and gaining momentum. When you start small, typically breaking big problems into small doable steps, you find it easier to get people involved to say yes, numerous times. In fact, small visible steps are much more likely to lead to early victories than Big Bang efforts. And they also gain early supporters people want to get on the bandwagon. research finds that progress in technology, for example, is more likely to be the result of a focus on incremental improvements in tools and processes, rather than on to tonic shifts of minds. And that's also the case when you think about individual change.
Because researchers have shown that the place to start, you know in creating a long term change in your own behavior is by taking small actions, often ones that take less than 3030 seconds. The small and unobtrusive nudge in the right direction can lead people to eating better, saving more money for retirement conserving energy. Therefore, if you Want to get people to want to change the way they're currently headed? They need to nurture an experimental attitude and begin with a one step at a time approach.
There's an old African proverb that wisely advises, never test the depth of the water with both feet. Now, Gary, of course, the truth is, when you experiment, not everything's going to work out as you intended. So one of the things that you have to do is create an environment where it's safe for people to take risks. And while it might seem like a paradox, the truth is that unless people feel sufficiently safe, they will be unwilling and even unable to experiment and take risks. Psychologically safe environment is one where people feel a sense of mutual trust and respect. That's one that nurtures honesty and a sense of obligation to communicate when there's disagreements as well as opportunities.
And in such an environment, people believe that if they make a mistake, or ask for help, their colleagues will not think less of them, pick them apart, ridicule, embarrass, or punish them. So here's a couple strategies for creating kind of that sense of safety. One is to ask questions and invite participation. And another is to take initiative to address what might be people's reluctance, silence and possible defensiveness. For example, instead of asking, what mistakes did people notice when we did X, Y, and Z? Maybe we could reframe this more along the lines of say, what do you think? Did we do everything as well as we could have? When we did X, Y, or Z? Another strategy would be to foster what's been called a humble mindset. And that means we're focusing more on what can be learned rather than simply what didn't work or who might, who might we blame? It means a willingness to acknowledge our own shortcomings. It assumes a modest level of goodwill in an organization and researchers find that most of the time, your colleagues will respond well to genuine expressions of vulnerability and interest.
And it's particularly true here in the pandemic, you know, this notion that we're all struggling, we're all tired, we're all bored, we're all. Not you know, we're not our motivation is lacking. The other thing is to realize that that few few of our mistakes are fed, here's our failed. Good news, good news there. And success comes through, typically rapidly fixing our mistakes, rather than getting things right the first time. I mean, consider this situation where you say, save yourself. I don't know how to do this, but I'd like to be able to. So when you when you frame it that way, there's no other choice but to learn, telling yourself to get it right, the first sign time, or hearing somebody in the organization say, you know, I want you to I want you to do things you haven't done before, but I don't want you to make any mistakes.
These are simply ridiculous standards to set because you won't get it right. But the first time, the real issue is, is how fast can you learn? How quickly can you learn from your mistakes and your failures before get it right? And in our own studies, people told us how how mistakes and failures were crucial to their success, both personally and professionally. In fact, without making mistakes without pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zones, we wouldn't know what we could, or perhaps could not do, at least in the moment. So what's what's required oftentimes for us is a growth mindset.
A learning mindset, a growth mindset, a belief that, that we can learn our qualities can be improved and strengthened. And that's in contrast to a fixed mindset. That presumes that one's qualities or characteristics are inherent in cartoon stones. When when we have a growth mindset, we believe that we I and other people can learn to be better leaders. And if you hold a fixed mindset, it means that you, you can't learn no amount of training or experience is going to make you or anybody better than they are today. We did some research recently in which we took a look at the five practices of exemplary leadership, and how often they were used by people who had a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. We found that those who had a growth mindset when it comes to leadership, we're more likely to embrace challenges persist when facing obstacles and sustained efforts, even when confronted with with resistance.
They showed a greater propensity to support experimentation by others. In contrast those with with a fixed mindset, avoided challenging situations, and were unlikely to open themselves up to feedback of any sort, because they just simply didn't want to hear that they weren't successful. So, I think you can nourish you can develop this and nourish it and others by believing that you that you can continuously learn and if you believe so you can, the truth is that only those who believe that they can get better trying to do so. And when you encounter setbacks, they're inevitable. So you simply have to persist.
You don't give up easily on yourself or on others. when things don't work out, as you expected, well, that's just another kind of bump bump in the road. So kind of the summary, you know, for leadership here is kind of the mantra of what can be learned from this experience, rather than who can be blamed. The more frequently than individuals reported by their peers, we talked about in this new book, to more frequently of individuals were reported by their peers is asking what can we learn when things don't go as expected to more their colleagues assess them as effective leaders. In fact, peers gave the highest evaluation as leaders, to those individuals who most often focused on learning and not simply the outcome. So those are a few thoughts about strategies for for challenging and learning and growing and making a difference in organizations.
26:44
Absolutely. And how refreshing. Dr. Posner, thank you so much for joining us today in support of the Center for the advancement of virtual organizations here at North Central University. We truly appreciate your insight. And we know that our listeners around the world will benefit from your experience. So thank you so much, sir.
27:08
My pleasure hearing thank you for the opportunity.