Great Leadership Creates Great Workplaces

By James M. KOUZES and Barry Z. Posner

How can you inspire your employees to the high levels of engagement that drive strong results across the board?

Drawing on over 30 years of research and data from more than two million constituents around the world, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, the bestselling authors of The Leadership Challenge, expand on their work with The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership to create a new metricPositive Workplace Attitudesaddressing how leaders affect employee engagement. Their research shows how positive feelings about being part of the workplace strongly influence people's willingness to apply discretionary effort to their work. People put forth much more effort for their best leaders and very little for their worst leaders. Leaders who more frequently exhibit exemplary practices foster engagement and inspire people to go from acceptable to good and even to great.

Filled with new findings from Kouzes and Posner's original research, Great Leadership Creates Great Workplaces expands the reach of The Leadership Challenge to address pressing, critical issues around employee engagement, and how leaders can improve it to outperform the competition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: May 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118728000

Book preview

GREAT LEADERSHIP CREATES GREAT WORKPLACES

Whether you are an eighty-year-old corporate icon, a high-tech start-up with the ink still wet on the incorporation papers, a government department, or a nonprofit agency, nothing is certain today. Trust in corporations, government, and institutions in general keeps eroding, and there’s no indication that this trend is going to change its direction anytime soon. Besides that, employee commitment and engagement have taken a dip, and those who are still employed are indicating that they’d jump ship when things improve. There’s no doubt about it. We live in challenging times.

As surprising as it may sound, in these challenging and difficult times we’re likely to see some of the most extraordinary leadership we’ve seen in decades. Leaders, it turns out, don’t do their best when they’re maintaining the status quo or when they feel comfortable. They do their best when faced with adversity, crisis, setbacks, and great difficulty. Challenge is the opportunity for greatness.

Great results in the marketplace can only come about from making extraordinary things happen within your organization. The key is great leadership. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that great leadership creates great workplaces; and, in turn, great workplaces create great marketplace results. The late management guru Peter Drucker said, Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership. So if you want better results in your marketplace, ensure that you are working on fostering great leadership within your organization.

In making the case that great leadership is the key to creating great workplaces, we will present evidence that leadership makes a meaningful difference in people’s engagement at work and in the performance of the organization. We’ll do this by exploring what the difference looks like in terms of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership®—the practices that we’ve found in our research lead to extraordinary results. And within this framework, we will provide you with practical ideas and actions you can take to become a better leader and foster a great workplace.

One additional note: developing leadership competency isn’t just an issue for any one function, industry, or nation. It’s a global issue. Studies show that over three-quarters of executives around the world indicate that the most critical people issue related to their organization’s success is leadership development, especially as it relates to developing their future pipeline of leaders.¹ These executives are even more concerned because the baby boomer generation is quickly approaching retirement, a consequence of which is that vast numbers of experienced leaders are expected to retire or to step down from full-time employment by 2020, creating a leadership vacuum. A lack of leadership bench strength is of great concern to organizations worldwide.

Leaders Make a Difference

Consider what people report when we ask them to think about either the worst or the best leader they have ever worked for and the percentage of their talents that each leader utilized. In recent years, we’ve asked this question to a wide variety of people, including U.S. Coast Guard commanders, senior HR executives, graduate students in higher education administration, marketing executives with a global cosmetics firm, palliative medicine physicians, and community organizers. Their

Reviews for Great Leadership Creates Great Workplaces

[newmans2001 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I would agree with much of Iacobus view, especially "Unfortunately there is little about the Colosseum ". I have read about it some and hoped to learn more. This is more a history of Rome and not a good one, and briefly some of the social situations that may have influenced the Colosseum, but the author seems to have forgotten the title of the book..

[schmerguls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

1105 The Colosseum, by Peter Quennell and the Editors of the Newsweek Book Division (read 3 Mar 1971) This is a "made up" book but I was impressed by some of it. Naturally, the authors have to strain some to write a whole book about the Colosseum--but it is a structure unbelievably rich in history. It is hard to picture it as it was before 1933--when the surrounding buildings were cleared away. The most moving of all comments on the Colosseum in the book is Byron's in Childe Harold which ends:"...Heroes have trod this spot--'tis on their dust ye stand." All in all, a good book to own.