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The
Leadership Challenge
Summary
from the book by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
Definition
of Leadership
Leadership is the art of mobilizing other people
so that they want to make an effort and to achieve shared aspirations and
objectives.
The four essential qualities of the leaders:
The leaders should be:
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Honest,
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Look toward the Future,
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Serve as inspiration and
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Be competent.
The five keys
to Leadership
Key # 1: To Challenge
the status quo
The leaders look for opportunities to change the
status quo, they look for innovative forms of improving the organization,
they experience and they assume risks. Assuming risks implies making
mistakes and errors, and suffer failures, the leaders accept the unavoidable
disillusions as learning opportunities.
Key # 2: To Inspire a
shared vision
The leaders believe passionately that they can
contribute important things, they visualize the future creating an ideal and
unique image of what the organization can end up being. With conviction and
persuasion, the leaders invite others to share the dream.
Key # 3: To Encourage
others to act
The leaders promote the collaboration and they
build lively teams. They are involved actively with the others and believe
in confidential atmospheres and dignity. Strengthen others by sharing
information and offering options and this way they get each person to feel
capable and powerful.
Key
# 4: To Become a model
The leaders create standards of excellence
and constitute themselves in examples and models. They establish the
values on how the colleagues or the clients should be treated, how the
goals should be reached, they alleviate the bureaucratic issues that
undermine the real action, they help people when they are unsure of where to go
or how to arrive and create opportunities to reach success.
Key
# 5: Aim to the heart
To
achieve extraordinary tasks in an organization is an arduous work.
To maintain alive the hope and the determination the leaders recognize the
contributions that each person makes and their achievements in such a way that
each person can feel as a true hero.
The
Ten Commitments of the Leadership:
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Key
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Commitment
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To
challenge the" Status Quo"
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1.
To look for opportunities to change, to grow, to innovate, to
improve
2. To experience, to assume risks and to learn from the errors
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To
inspire a Shared Vision
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3.
To visualize an inspiring and noble future.
4. To enlist others in a Common Vision, attracting their best
values, interests, hopes and dreams
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To
encourage others to Act
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5.
To encourage the collaboration promoting cooperative goals and
building trust
6. To strengthen people empowering them, giving them options,
developing their skills
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To
become Model
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7.
To provide example behaving in a consistent way with the shared
values
8. To achieve small successes that promote the consistent progress
and build commitment
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To
aim to the Heart
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9.
To recognize the individual contributions to the success of each
project
10. To regularly celebrate the achievements of the team
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Why
don't we have more leaders?
Our first challenge as leaders is to come off of
traditional teachings and popular myths regarding the leadership.
The traditional teachings
about management:
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They sustain that an ideal organization is
ordered and stable and that the organizational process must work as a clock.
The exemplary leaders want to
change things, "they shake" the organizations and
challenge the processes.
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The managers focus in the short term. The
effective leaders think of the long term. They come
beyond the horizon of the present.
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The management expects leaders to be cold, distant and
analytic. But when we converse with true leaders really find that they speak
of their passions, of the challenges they have to face day by day, of
their kindness and their love for what they do.
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They suggest that the manager's main work is
primarily "control". Control of resources including time,
money, materials, and people. The real leaders, however, know that the
more they try to control others, the less trust they will develop. The
leaders don't command neither control, but rather they serve and
support.
The Popular Myths:
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They
depict the leader like a renegade that it is able to attract a band of
followers by means of valiant acts. But the leaders do not attract
followers by being defiant, but through their deep faith in the human
capacity to adapt, to grow, and to learn.
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They
say that leaders are charismatic and gifted. When we know them we
find that they are energetic and enthusiastic, but their dynamism
doesn't come from special powers but from strong beliefs in a purpose
and their disposition to express that conviction.
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They
sustain that a leader is alone at the top. But the most effective
leaders are involved and in close contact with those they lead.
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They
associate the leadership with a "superior" position. Those who
are in the top are automatically "leaders". But the leadership is not
a place, it is a process.
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They
stress that the leadership is reserved for a few ones. Are the leaders
born or are they made?, we wonder. But the leadership is not transmitted
genetically. The leadership is a set of practical observable actions
that anyone can learn and it is therefore, a task for all
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