Kouzes And Posner Quotes

In the end, leaders don't decide who leads. Followers do.

There's nothing more demoralizing than a leader who can't clearly articulate why we're doing what we're doing.

Interestingly, one of the most important times to listen well is when you disagree with the message, especially as it relates to how we affect others.

Managers can threaten people with the loss of jobs if they don't get with the program, but threats, power, and position do not earn commitment. They earn compliance.

Anyone who’s ever been in a leadership role quickly learns that you’re squeezed between others’ lofty expectations and your own personal limitations. You realize that while others want you to be of impeccable character, you’re not always without fault. You learn that you can’t see around every corner, and even if you know your way forward everyone may not end up at the same destination, let alone be on time. You discover that despite your best efforts to introduce brilliant innovations, most of them don’t succeed. You find that you sometimes get angry and short, and that you don’t always listen carefully to what others have to say. You’re reminded that you don’t always treat everyone with dignity and respect. You recognize that others deserve more credit than they get, and that you’ve failed to say thank you. You know that sometimes you get, and accept, more credit than you deserve. In other words, you realize that you’re human.

Leadership is a dialogue, not a monologue.

… the best leaders are simply the best learners.

You must give people reasons to care, not simply orders to follow.

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.

Listening is seen as one of the most important leadership skills.

Building character and culture is a function of aligning your beliefs and behaviors with principles that are external, objective, and self-evident. They operate regardless of your awareness of them. What principles guide an authentic leader? Authentic leaders are humble. They are unassuming in the way that they share the glory with their team members and are modest about their accomplishments. Their courage ensures that they have the integrity to make the right choices when necessary. Skills

The Kouzes-Posner First Law of Leadership: If you don't believe in the messenger, you won't believe the message. Leaders

People commit to causes, not to plans.

Strategic thinkers see the future. Vision and a sense of the future are inherent parts of strategic thinking. Strategic thinkers are constantly reinventing the future – creating windows on the world of tomorrow. James Kouzes and Barry Posner in their book The Leadership Challenge indicated: “All enterprises or projects, big or small, begin in the mind’s eye; they begin with imagination and with the belief that what is merely an image can one day be made real.

Of all the things that sustain a leader over time, love is the most lasting. It’s hard to imagine leaders getting up day after day, putting in the long hours and hard work it takes to get extraordinary things done, without having their hearts in it. The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations produce, and with those who honor the organization by using its products and services. Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.

And even in this digital age, when face-to-face contact seems to be diminishing—and this change is the source of many of the leadership problems being experienced these days—it is the interaction between leaders and constituents that turns opportunities into successes. The key to unlocking greater leadership potential can be found when you seek to understand the desires and expectations of your constituents and when you act on them in ways that correspond to their image of what an exemplary leader is and does.

Kouzes and Posner emphasize the importance of leaders' engaging people throughout the organization in what they do and why they do it. They ask us to imagine how much more ownership of the values of the organization there would be when leaders actively involve a wide range of people in their development. “Shared values,” they note, “are the result of listening, appreciating, building consensus and practicing conflict resolution. For people to understand the values and come to agree with them, they must participate in the process.

And compliance produces adequacy—not greatness. Only credibility earns commitment.

Only credibility earns commitment.

«Si usted no cree en el mensajero, no creerá en el mensaje». —JAMES M. KOUZES Y BARRY Z. POSNER

Leaders talk about ideals. They express a desire to make dramatic changes in the business‐as‐usual environment. They reach for something grand, something magnificent, something never done before. Ideals reveal higher‐order value preferences. They represent the paramount economic, technological, political, social, and aesthetic priorities. The ideals of world peace, freedom, justice, an exciting life, happiness, and self‐respect, for example, are among the highest strivings of human existence. They're outcomes of the larger purpose that practical actions will enable people to attain over the long term. By focusing on ideals, people gain a sense of meaning and purpose from what they undertake. When you communicate your vision of the future to your constituents, you need to talk about how they're going to make a difference in the world and how they will have a positive impact on people and events. You need to speak to the higher meaning and purpose of work. You need to describe a compelling image of what the future could be like when people join in a common cause.

Leaders peek behind the curtain to see what is hiding there. Look around your workplace and community. What do you see people doing now that they weren't doing a few years ago? How are people interacting when they are working virtually and not all in the same place at the same time? How do they feel about hybrid work, and what are the implications for change in your organization? What are the hot topics of conversation? What do people say is getting in the way of them doing their best? Listen as well to the weak signals. For example, what are people no longer talking about or paying attention to? Listen for things you've never heard before. What does all this tell you about where things are going? What's it telling you about what lies just around the corner? To envision the future, you have to spot the trends and patterns and appreciate both the whole and the parts. You have to be able to see the forest and the trees. Imagine the future as a jigsaw puzzle. You see the pieces, and you begin to figure out how they fit together, one by one, into a whole. Similarly, with your vision, you need to rummage through the bits and bytes of data that accumulate daily and notice how they fit together into a picture of what's ahead. Envisioning the future is not about gazing into a fortune teller's crystal ball; it's about paying attention to the little things that are going on all around you and being able to recognize patterns that point to the future.

Your personal history is your traveling partner on every journey you take. It provides valuable guidance and informs the choices you must make. As historians John Seaman and George David Smith, partners at a history and archival services consulting firm, say, “The job of leaders, most would agree, is to inspire collective efforts and devise smart strategies for the future. History can be profitably employed on both fronts.” To lead with a sense of history, they maintain, is not being a slave to the past but recognizing that there are invaluable lessons to be learned by asking, “How did we get to the point we are today?” Michael Watkins, noted scholar on accelerating transitions, says that without a historical perspective, “you risk tearing down fences without knowing why they were put up. Armed with insight into the history, you may indeed find the fence is not needed and must go. Or you may find there is a good reason to leave it where it is.

How you behave as a leader matters, and it matters a lot. You have the potential to make a meaningful and significant difference in the lives of those you lead.

It's now up to you to determine the kind of difference you want to make and strengthen your capacity to have a positive impact on those you lead.

Before you can lead others, however, you have to believe that you have a positive impact on others. You have to believe that your values are worthy and that what you do matters. You have to believe that your words can inspire and your actions can move others.

Leadership is an observable pattern of practices and behaviours and a definable set of skills and abilities. Any skills can be learned, strengthened, honed and enhanced, given the motivation and desire, along with practice, feedback, role models, and coaching.

Challenge is the crucible for leadership and the opportunity for greatness.

Challenge inspires us, shapes up, and requires us to open doors and chart new paths

Leadership is not a fad that goes out of fashion next season. And neither do challenges.

Before you can lead others, however, you have to believe that you have a positive impact on others. You have to believe that your values are worthy and that what you do matters. You have to believe that your words can inspire and your actions can more others.

It is the work of leaders to inspire people to do things differently, to struggle against uncertain odds and to preserve toward a misty image of a better future.

Without leadership there would not be the extraordinary efforts necessary to solve existing problems and realize unimagined opportunities.

As a leader you are expected to have a positive impact on results.

Building your and other capacity to be an active learner requires a growth mindset, which is the belief that people's basic qualities can be improved and strengthened through their efforts, in contrast to a fixed mindset that presumes one's qualities are inherent and carved in stone.

The more you seek to learn, the better you will become at leadership (or anything for that matter).

Building your and other's capacity to be an active learner requires a growth mindset, which is the belief that people's basic qualities can be improved and strengthened through their efforts, in contrast to a fixed mindset that presumes one's qualities are inherent and carved in stone

Mindsets, and not just skillsets, make the critical difference in dealing to take on challenging situations.

Challenge reminds us that the quest for exemplary leadership is first an inner quest to discover who you are, and it's through self-examination that you find the awareness to lead.

Challenges - whether they're the ones faced in the past, are confronting us now, or may be encountered in the future - force us to examine our fundamental values and beliefs.

The secret to success is to stay in love. A person who is not in love doesn't really feel the kind of excitement that helps them to get ahead and to lead others and to achieve.

Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.

Being true to yourself and leading with your best self means that you need to be clear and comfortable with the kind of leader you want to become.

Exemplary leadership is really hard work. You must have the courage to be human and the courage to be humble.