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death to achieve the organization’s objectives. Soldiers’ perceptions of their leader’s credibility, the evidence shows, determines the actual extent of influence that leader can exercise.18

The data confirm that credibility is the foundation of leadership. But what is credibility behaviorally? In other words, how do you know it when you see it?

We’ve asked this question of tens of thousands of people around the globe, and the response is essentially the same, regardless of how it may be phrased in one company versus another or one country versus another. Here are some of the common phrases people use to describe credible leaders:

“They practice what they preach.” “They walk the talk.” “Their actions are consistent with their words.” “They put their money where their mouth is.” “They follow through on their promises.” “They do what they say they will do.”

The last is the most frequent response. When it comes to decid- ing whether a leader is believable, people first listen to the words, then they watch the actions. They listen to the talk, then they watch the walk. They listen to the promises of resources to support change initiatives, then they wait to see if the money and materials follow. They hear the pledge to deliver, then they look for evidence that the commitments are met. A judgment of “credible” is handed down when words and deeds are consonant. If people don’t see consistency, they conclude that the leader is, at best, not really serious or, at worst, an outright hypocrite. If leaders espouse one set of values but person- ally practice another, people find them to be duplicitous. If leaders

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G E practice what they preach, people are more willing to entrust them

with their livelihood and even their lives. This realization leads to a straightforward prescription for the

most significant way to establish credibility. We refer to it as The Kouzes-Posner Second Law of Leadership:

You build a credible foundation of leadership foundation when you DWYSYWD—Do What You Say You Will Do.

DWYSYWD has two essential parts: say and do. The practice of Model the Way links directly to these two dimensions of the behavioral definition of credibility. Modeling is about clarifying values and setting an example for others based on those values. The consistent living out of values is the way leaders demonstrate their honesty and trustworthiness. It’s what gives them the moral author- ity to lead. And that’s where we begin our discussion of The Five Practices. In the next two chapters, we examine the principles and behaviors that bring Model the Way to life.

MODEL THE WAY

T he first step a leader must take along the path to becom-ing an exemplary leader is inward. It’s a step toward discovering personal values and beliefs. Leaders must find their

voice. They must discover a set of principles that guide deci-

sions and actions. They must find a way to express a leadership

philosophy in their own words and not in someone else’s.

Yet leaders don’t just speak for themselves. They also

speak for their team and organization. Leadership is a dia-

logue, not a monologue. Therefore, leaders must reach out to

others. They must understand and appreciate the values of

their constituents and find a way to affirm shared values.

Leaders forge unity. They don’t force it. They give people

reasons to care, not simply orders to follow.

Leaders stand up for their beliefs. They practice what they

preach. They show others by their actions that they live by the

values they profess. They also ensure that others adhere to the

values that have been agreed on. It is consistency between

words and actions that builds credibility.

In the next two chapters, we will take a look at how you

must

• Clarify Values by finding your voice and

affirming shared values.

• Set the Example by aligning actions with

shared values.

P R A C T I C E 1 M O D E L T H E W A Y

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WHO ARE YOU? This is the first question your constituents want you to answer. Finding that answer is where every leadership journey begins.

When Alex Anwar was hired as director of a new business unit at Labo America, he faced resentment from many within the company because they felt that he was too young and inexperienced to manage such a diverse group and product portfolio.1 Because many of the units were siloed and polarized, a widespread question was whether he would be the kind of leader who would bring people together toward a common goal. Alex’s first step was to communicate his values to the team. He circulated an email introducing himself, not as a manager, but as a fellow employee of the company charged with a difficult task. Instead of telling everyone what he wanted out of them, he stated clearly what values and performance criteria he demanded of himself every day. In teaching his value set, Alex ensured that people would be better prepared to under­ stand his actions and the reasoning behind certain decisions. They

Clarify Values

C H A P T E R 2

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G E were able to connect the outcome with a value (for example, hard

work). In an all­hands meeting later that week, Alex provided a few

examples of cases in which he exercised his core values of honesty and sincerity, discussing how he handled a particular problem with a customer. He took his constituents through the issue as though narrating a story. He subsequently used this style of storytelling every time he made a case for how certain company situations were to be handled. By making these lessons easy to relate to, values centered, and personal, he helped people both understand and retain the intended lesson. As one of his direct reports explained, “Alex made his values understood through clearly communicating and providing contexts that would aid in their retention. He put all the values into his own words, and thus gave us a clear idea about the kind of person he was.”

The Personal­Best Leadership Experience cases we’ve collected are, at their core, the stories of individuals who, like Alex, were clear about their personal values and understood how this clarity gave them the courage to navigate difficult situations and make tough choices. People expect their leaders to speak out on matters of values and conscience. But to speak out, you have to know what to speak about. To stand up for your beliefs, you have to know the beliefs you stand for. To walk the talk, you have to have a talk to walk. To do what you say, you have to know what you want to say. To earn and sustain personal credibility, you must first be able to clearly articulate deeply held beliefs.

Model the Way is the first of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership we discuss in this book, and one of the commit­ ments you have to make in order to effectively Model the Way is to Clarify Values. In beginning your leadership journey, it’s essential that you

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• FIND YOUR VOICE

• AFFIRM SHARED VALUES

To become a credible leader, you first have to comprehend fully the deeply held beliefs—the values, standards, ethics, and ideals— that drive you. You have to freely and honestly choose the principles you will use to guide your decisions and actions. Then you have to genuinely express yourself. You have to authentically communicate your beliefs in ways that uniquely represent who you are.

However, leaders aren’t just speaking for themselves when they talk about the values that should guide decisions and actions. When leaders passionately express a commitment to quality or innovation or service or some other core value, those leaders aren’t just saying, “I believe in this.” They’re also making a commitment for an entire organization. They’re saying, “We all believe in this.” Therefore, leaders must not only be clear about their personal guiding principles but also make sure that there’s agreement on a set of shared values among everyone they lead. And they must hold others accountable to those values and standards.

FIND YOUR VOICE

“What is your leadership philosophy?” What would you say if someone asked you this question? Are you prepared right now to say what it is? If you aren’t, you should be. And if you are, you need to reflect on it daily.

Before you can become a credible leader—one who connects what you say with what you do—you first have to find your voice. If you can’t find your voice, you’ll end up with a vocabulary that belongs to someone else, mouthing words that were written by some

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G E speechwriter or mimicking the language of some other leader who’s

nothing like you at all. If the words you speak are not your words but someone else’s, you will not, in the long term, be able to be consistent in word and deed. You will not have the integrity to lead.

To find your voice, you have to explore your inner self. You have to discover what you care about, what defines you, and what makes you who you are. You can be authentic only when you lead according to the principles that matter most to you. Otherwise you’re just putting on an act. Consider Casey Mork’s experience with an inter­ nal start­up business that never got off the ground:

First, our manager never had a true voice, as he never had the courage to pronounce solutions or suggestions beyond what our three (never agreeing) directors input into each decision. Oftentimes it felt like he acted as a simple conduit for mixed messages from above . . . without his own personal voice defining a clear road for us to travel. This made it very difficult for the group to focus on a defined set of tasks connected to goals.

Second, an outcome of the above was that we had no specific organizational values to live by. Sure we all knew the company mission, and transferred in corporate values from our previous groups (inside the same company), but he never went beyond the ordinary in defining values for our business. Our customers were different, and so how should we treat them differently than the rest of the company? We spent a lot of money pampering our customers; how would this apply to managing our expense accounts? Seemingly simple values went undefined and as a result were exploited by some team members.

As could have been predicted, Casey says, this lack of clarity and consistency in values at the top resulted in little internal cohesion

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and focus, and the company failed to generate a favorable customer experience or positive business results. In contrast, Josh Fradenburg, founder of Mindful Measures says that it was his values that drove the products that he brought to market. “It was really the values that formed the organization, rather than the organization forming the values,” he recounts.

When we ask leaders how clear they are about their leadership philosophy, those who fall into the top 10 percent on this leader­ ship behavior have quite different work attitudes than their coun­ terparts in the bottom 10 percent. Their overall attitudes toward the workplace are significantly more positive. When asked to rate their own effectiveness as a leader, the scores of those who are clear about their leadership philosophy are 25 percent higher than those who report being not very clear about their leadership philosophy.

The impact that the leader’s clarity of leadership philosophy has on his or her constituents is even more dramatic, as shown in Figure 2.1. When asked how effective the leader is, the scores from those working with leaders who are seen as being clear about their leader­ ship philosophy are more than 40 percent higher than those scores received from constituents who view leaders as not very clear about their leadership philosophy. There are statistically significant differences between these two groups of constituents on a variety of important dimensions. For example, feeling a sense of team spirit, feeling proud about the organization, feeling committed to the organization’s success, being willing to work extra hard to meet organizational objectives, and levels of trust all differ significantly. Leaders who have a clear leadership philosophy are nearly 30 percent more likely to be trusted by their constituents than those unclear about their leadership philosophy.

The evidence is clear: to be the most effective, every leader must learn to find the voice that represents who he or she is. When you have clarified your values and found your voice, you will also find

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G E FIGURE 2.1 The Impact of Leadership Philosophy Clarity on

Constituent Work Attitudes and Engagement

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the inner confidence necessary to express ideas, chose a direction, make tough decisions, act with determination, and be able to take charge of your life rather than impersonating others.

Let Your Values Guide You

Milton Rokeach, one of the leading scholars in the field of human values, referred to a value as an enduring belief. He noted that values are organized into two sets: means and ends.2 In the context of our work on leadership, we use the term values to refer to here­and­now beliefs about how things should be accomplished—what Milt calls means values. We will use vision in Chapters Four and Five when we refer to the long­term ends values that leaders and constituents aspire to attain. Leadership requires both. When sailing through the tur­

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bulent seas of change and uncertainty, crew members need a vision of the destination that lies beyond the horizon; they also need to understand the principles by which they must navigate their course. If either of these is absent, the journey is likely to end with the crew lost at sea.

Values influence every aspect of your life: your moral judgments, your responses to others, your commitments to personal and orga­ nizational goals. Values set the parameters for the hundreds of deci­ sions you make every day, consciously and subconsciously. Options that run counter to your value system are seldom considered or acted on; and if they are, it’s done with a sense of compliance rather than commitment.

Values constitute your personal “bottom line.” They serve as guides to action. They inform the priorities you set and the decisions you make. They tell you when to say yes and when to say no. They also help you explain the choices you make and why you made them. If you believe, for instance, that diversity enriches innovation and service, then you should know what to do if people with differing views keep getting cut off when they offer fresh ideas. If you value collaboration over individualistic achievement, then you’ll know what to do when your best salesperson skips team meetings and refuses to share information with colleagues. If you value indepen­ dence and initiative over conformity and obedience, you’ll be more likely to challenge something your manager says if you think it’s wrong.

All of the most critical decisions a leader makes involve values. For example, values determine how much emphasis to place on the immediate interests of the customer or the long­term interests of the company, how to apportion time between family and organizational responsibilities, and what behaviors to reward or discourage. In turn, these decisions have critical organizational impact. Indeed, in these

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G E turbulent times, having a set of deeply held values allows leaders to

focus and make choices among a plethora of competing beliefs, paradigms, and interests.

Paul di Bari’s operations section within the engineering services group took on the new responsibility for the physical security of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System’s 2.2­million­square­foot facility. Along with the responsibility of hiring a new technician to manage this system, Paul was also taking on a new contractor relationship. Before starting any more projects, Paul called a meeting with the new technician and contractor to figure out the status of the current access system, any open projects, and any projects on the horizon. Paul used this meeting to vocalize his intentions about how the newly developed team would work, his vision moving forward, and his expectations for all parties. His values on project timelines, preparations, submittals, and execution would require more detailed attention than in the past and would also, he hoped, create a new sense of accountability. Paul explained,

If I was going to pay large sums of money for parts and services, then I had expectations for the quality of the deliver­ able, which were far higher than the previous regime. These higher standards of quality were necessary to fix the system and to make it operate at a high level. I began to personally inspect the work of the contractor as we completed six open projects. During this time, I was also training our new techni­ cian and establishing expectations of project management (for example, statements of work, pricing quotes, communica­ tion, workmanship, and the final product) that he would need to carry forth. It was imperative to the long­term success of this program and this new team that I clearly explained what my values were, my project management style and expectations.

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Paul had to find his voice as a leader by clearly stating his leader­ ship principles and the accompanying management goals and objec­ tives. At the beginning of the project, Paul met with the contractor and his new technician to communicate these in the context of the security access system. By clearly defining his standards, he was establishing a baseline for future performance and also a measuring block on which to base accountability. “It would have been very easy for me,” Paul said, “to sit back and supervise the program from afar, but in order to earn the trust and respect of both people involved, I had to establish a sense of trust through my work ethic.” Because Paul was clear about his own values, he found it relatively easy to talk about values and subsequently to use them in setting standards and expectations. This tone at the top from Paul provided guidelines for how his constituents would subsequently act and make decisions.

As Paul’s experience illustrates, values are guides. They supply you with a compass by which to navigate the course of your daily life. Clarity of values is essential to knowing which way is north, south, east, and west. The clearer you are about your values, the easier it is for you and for everyone else to stay on the chosen path and commit to it. This kind of guidance is especially needed in dif­ ficult and uncertain times. When there are daily challenges that can throw you off course, it’s crucial that you have some signposts that tell you where you are.

Say It in Your Own Words

People can speak the truth only when speaking in their own true voice. The techniques and tools that fill the pages of management and leadership books—including this one—are not substitutes for who and what you are. Once you have the words you want to say,

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G E you must also give voice to those words. You must be able to express

yourself so that everyone knows that you are the one who’s speaking.

You’ll find a lot of scientific data in this book to support our assertions about each of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. But keep in mind that leadership is also an art. And just as with any other art form, leadership is a means of personal expression. To become a credible leader, you have to learn to express yourself in ways that are uniquely your own. Which is exactly what Andrew Levine did, and in the process helped his colleague Pranav Sharma be able to do the same.

Andrew is a head mentor at the Young Storytellers Foundation (YSF), a nonprofit organization in the United States that provides a creative outlet to fifth­graders whose public schools do not have the budget for creative arts programs. He is passionate about and committed to providing a classroom atmosphere that pushes the imaginations of the kids they mentor, and he cares deeply for all the YSF volunteers. According to one of those volunteers, Pranav Sharma, Andrew’s personal values fit comfortably with the values articulated in YSF’s mission statement. Pranav told us how Andrew influenced him: “He had a unique voice among the mentors. His example led me to exhibit values he shared with the organization. He helped me understand what it meant to the kids to have a unique voice.”

Pranav was paired with a fifth­grader named Rachel, and was tasked to guide her in writing an original story in a ten­page screen­ play format, but he was having trouble getting Rachel to focus on her story. Whereas other mentors were making progress on their kids’ stories, Pranav felt that Rachel was not very motivated. The fact that Pranav was absent a couple of times over the eight­week

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program because of the demands from his workplace didn’t help the situation. Andrew was noticeably frustrated with Pranav and a few other mentors’ seeming lack of interest in the program. He took two steps to remedy the situation. First, he reminded the delinquent mentors why they had joined the program. He talked about why he was loyal to the program. He asked them to leave the program if they were not making YSF a priority, which would be evidenced by future absences. Second, he asked the volunteers to look at the program through the perspective of the fifth­grader. What are the kids looking for from their mentors? He suggested that the volunteers stop wor­ rying about whether they were qualified to mentor or whether the kids would like them. All that was required, Andrew explained, was to be present and to talk to them. Pranav got the point.

Andrew was right. He was asking us to affirm our shared values and find our voice. What Andrew was doing was asking us to reexamine the reasons we joined YSF. He wanted us to be vested in YSF’s values, which included words like loyalty, commitment, passion, and patience. He wanted us to build a relationship with the kids by talking to them. The only way to make a unique difference in a kid’s life was to find my own voice. I had to find my voice if I was to make an indelible impression on my mentee.

So Pranav gave it a shot. He reflected on the reasons he had originally wanted to join YSF, which involved giving back creatively to the community. He had wanted to join a nonprofit organization that valued loyalty. He said,

Finding my voice was not easy. I talked without pretense, allowing Rachel to guide the conversation. It was difficult at

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G E first, but the enthusiasm in Rachel’s eyes encouraged me to

continue to establish my own voice and my own words. The result was a happy child who was proud of her original story. At the end of the program, she gave me a very creative thank­you card highlighting me as the best mentor she had had. I was proud of her.

The lesson here is that Andrew gave Pranav, and all the other mentors, time to discover how their personal values meshed with those of YSF. By telling them his own story of why he was passionate about becoming a mentor at YSF, he helped them find the words to express their own reasons for caring about YSF, its mission, and especially the children. Andrew didn’t tell them what to believe; he told them about his own beliefs and asked them to find in their own values their reasons for being involved with the organization. Through this reflection, they discovered their own voice and found the words necessary to reach kids like Rachel and help them find their way.

Leaders like Andrew and Pranav understand that you cannot lead through someone else’s values or someone else’s words. You cannot lead out of someone else’s experience. You can lead only out of your own. Unless it’s your style and your words, it’s not you—it’s just an act. People don’t follow your position or your technique. They follow you. If you’re not the genuine article, can you really expect others to want to follow? To be a leader, you’ve got to awaken to the fact that you don’t have to copy someone else, you don’t have to read a script written by someone else, and you don’t have to wear someone else’s style. Instead, you are free to choose what you want to express and the way you want to express it. In fact, you have a responsibility to your constituents to express yourself in an authentic manner, in a way they would immediately recognize as yours.

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Find Commitment Through Clarifying Values

It’s one thing to expect leaders to be clear about their values and beliefs, but it’s another to prove that it really matters that they are. What’s the evidence for this assertion? How much difference does being clear about values really make? We set out to empirically investigate the relationship between personal values clarity, organi­ zational values clarity, and a variety of outcomes, such as commit­ ment and job satisfaction. Surveying a large sample of managers in the early 1980s, and another sample of managers nearly two decades later, revealed few differences in the findings.3 The results of our research clearly indicate that clarity of personal values makes a sig­ nificant difference in behavior at work.

Managers were asked about the extent of their clarity around their personal values as well as the values of their organization. They were also asked about their level of commitment to their organiza­ tion, how proud they were to tell others they worked in their orga­ nization, their level of motivation and productivity, their job satisfaction, and the like. As you can see in Figure 2.2, the highest levels of commitment are found where personal values are the clear­ est. Clarity about personal values was consistently more significant in accounting for positive workplace attitudes and levels of engage­ ment than was clarity around organizational values.4

The people who are clear about their personal beliefs but can’t recite the corporate credo are significantly more likely to stick around and work hard than those people who’ve heard the organizational litany but have never listened to their own inner voice. In other words, personal values drive commitment. Personal values are the route to motivation and productivity.

How can this be? How can people who are very clear about their own values be committed to a place that has never affirmed or

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posted its organizational values? Think about it. Have you ever had the feeling, “This place is not for me?” Have you ever walked into a place, immediately gotten the sense, “I don’t belong here,” and just walked right out? In contrast, have you ever just known that you belong, that you can be yourself, and felt “This is the right place for me”? Of course you have. Everyone has had those experiences.

It’s the same in the workplace. There comes a point when you just know whether it is or isn’t a good fit with your values and beliefs, even if there was no lecture on the organization’s values. You won’t stick around a place for very long when you feel in your heart and in your soul that you don’t belong. This is why people’s years of managerial experience and hierarchical level help explain differences in the extent of personal values clarity, whereas such factors as gender, educational level, and functional discipline do not.5 The most talented people, no matter their age or background, gravitate to companies where they can look forward to going to work each day because their values “work” in that organizational setting. Julie

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Sedlock, group vice president for operations at Aéropostale, a global specialty retailer of casual apparel and accessories, echoes this observation: “I love to come to work here. I can’t think of a day in twenty years that I didn’t want to wake up and go to work.” She explains that when you share the company’s values, you “want to come to work, work hard, and achieve the goals that the organization has set.”

Workplace and organizational commitment are based on align­ ment with personal values and who you are and what you are about. People who are clearest about personal values are better prepared to make choices based on principle—including deciding whether the principles of the organization fit with their own!

AFFIRM SHARED VALUES

Leadership is not simply about your own values. It’s also about the values of your constituents. Just as your own values drive your com­ mitment to the organization, their personal values drive their commitment. Your constituents will be significantly more engaged in a place where they believe they can stay true to their beliefs. Although clarifying your own values is essential, understanding the values of others and building alignment around values that everyone can share are equally critical.

Shared values are the foundational pillars for building produc­ tive and genuine working relationships. Credible leaders honor the diversity of their many constituencies, but they also stress their common values. Leaders build on agreement. They don’t try to get everyone to be in accord on everything. This goal is unrealistic, perhaps even impossible. Moreover, to achieve it would negate the very advantages of diversity. But to take the first step and then a

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G E second and then a third, people must have some common core of

understanding. After all, if there’s no agreement about values, then what exactly are the leader and everyone else going to model? If disagreements over fundamental values continue, the result is intense conflict, false expectations, and diminished capacity.6 Leaders ensure that everyone is aligned through the process of affirming shared values––uncovering, reinforcing, and holding one another account­ able to what “we” value.

Hilary Hall told us about how her manager helped people examine their own values and how this built a foundation of shared values that resulted in a spirit of camaraderie and common purpose. At General Electric, Hilary was on a multinational internal audit team, which consisted of a German, two Americans, a Belarusian, and an Indian:

At the beginning of the audit, before we even began work, our manager had us all complete a questionnaire, which included topics such as where we grew up, favorite food, hobbies, and so on. There were also questions that dug a little deeper and asked us about the type of work we liked and did not like, how we liked to work, the role we usually played on teams, and what we respected in managers and teammates. After completing the questionnaires individually, we gathered as a group and shared our responses.

At the time, I thought of the exercise as a team icebreaker, a chance for us to get to know one another and build a sense of camaraderie, especially since we came from different corners of the globe. Why else would I need to know that Matt enjoys eating Mexican food, or likes to kick around ideas before having to make a decision? Reflecting on the experience now, I understand that the exercise was more than just an icebreaker; our manager was aligning the team around a common set of

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values––both personal and professional––and showing the team what was important to him, too. This was especially imperative since internal audit work was often stressful, extremely deadline oriented, and required us to be at the work site for two weeks at a time. It was a demanding work environ­ ment, and I believe our success as individual auditors was contingent on our success as a team, which begins with mutual respect and trust.

Hilary was clear that if the team members had not aligned themselves around common values, their effectiveness as a team, as well as their manager’s credibility, would have suffered. They could have easily lost touch with one another and worked according to their own individual standards, which would have resulted in uneven motivation and commitment toward common work goals. “From this experience,” says Hilary,

I have learned that a good leader takes the time to break the ice and know his or her team on a personal level, but a great leader goes one step further and learns about each person’s values, how they build trust, and what is core to their motivation and drive. They then share the team’s values, as well as their own, and align the team around a strong focal point for working together toward a shared goal (or goals).

Research confirms Hilary’s experience. Organizations with a strong corporate culture based on a foundation of shared values outperform other firms by a huge margin. Their revenue and rate of job creation grow faster, and their profit performance and stock price are significantly higher. Furthermore, studies of public sector organizations support the importance of shared values to organiza­ tional effectiveness. Within successful agencies and departments,