Transformational Leadership

1- From the textbook, The leadership challenge (4th ed.), read the following chapters:

4 SET THE EXAMPLE

“The action that made the most difference was setting a personal example.”

Idan Bar-Sade, BridgeWave

“It all starts,” explains Juan Gonzalez, industry solution manager at IBM, “with understanding yourself and identifying the driving forces within in order to have the courage and consistency to engage successfully as a leader.” With this realization Juan started getting involved more personally, and emotionally, in activities that he once would have handled at arm's length. “I started by taking the time to go a little beyond the required level of interaction with others,” he says, “like making that extra phone call and showing interest in others’ day-to-day activities, rather than simply focusing on the job to be done.” The payoff, says Juan, is that “now I find our achievements, big or small, more rewarding than before. This in turn has had an effect on my mood, and I can see how this is also reflected in the ways others perceive me at work. Understanding my values allows me to be more passionate about my work and gives a focus for what everyone on the team should be striving for.”

But sometimes one's values are tested, and that's when leaders have to make sure they demonstrate through personal example what it means to be passionately committed. That's exactly what happened to Juan. While his company was applying a product upgrade to the live system of one of their customers, something went terribly wrong. It was quite a mess, and, wouldn't you know it, the problem became apparent the Saturday morning of a long holiday weekend. This was a critical process for their customer, and there was simply no way they could wait until the next regular workday to work on the problem. Says Juan, “I found that I could drive myself harder by letting my voice—my clarity about my values—remind me of the importance of my actions. This voice was fundamental in my decisions about getting personally involved in taking action and pulling the team together on a weekend.” He started by calling each member of the team, rather than sending an “SOS” to their pagers. He described the situation, and learned that it helped immensely that he had already spent several hours testing the scope of the issue. “I had been working to figure out a solution before calling them,” he explains. “Showing them the way by going in in advance gave enormous credibility to my request, and I got them signed up.”

Time was short, and they scrambled to make the needed fixes. “We would implement each fix and test thoroughly. If it didn't work, we were all available to troubleshoot,” Juan tells us. “If it worked, we moved on to the next problem.” Juan was right in the middle of things with everyone: “There wasn't anything I was asking them to do that I wasn't already doing myself. They knew that I was willing to do whatever it took to get this solved, including running errands or handling grunt work for those working on a particular application, and they picked up the same attitude.”

Juan says that he could have just ordered the team back to the office on Saturday (even on a holiday weekend), because it was an emergency. “It's their job anyway, and they get paid for that,” he explains. And he also notes that there wasn't any company requirement or expectation for him to come in. But he clearly understood that even if the situation had been handled successfully, the wounds to morale and motivation would probably have been deep. More important, Juan points out, “I had to show others by my actions that we were serious about our values and commitments. My credibility would have been shattered if I hadn't pitched in, and I would definitely have had a difficult time getting help from them in future situations.”

No down time was experienced by their customer. Before the team departed, Juan went to each team member, one by one, and thanked them personally for all their hard work. Then he sat down and followed up. “I sent a very detailed e-mail, copying anyone who might listen, describing what a great job the team had done in the relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction (our key value) and how their actions directly impacted our bottom line.” Each team member received a thank-you note from the CEO and compensatory time off—all arranged by Juan. And, Juan notes with amused surprise, “The team members really thanked me for that, even though it was I who disrupted their holiday weekend in the first place! This was indeed very rewarding.”

Juan's story illustrates the central message in this chapter—leaders take every opportunity to show others by their own example that they're deeply committed to the values and aspirations they espouse. No one will believe you're serious until they see you doing what you're asking of others. Leading by example is how leaders make visions and values tangible. It's how they provide the evidence that they're personally committed.

Setting the Example is all about execution. It's about putting your money where your mouth is. It's about practicing what you preach. It's about following through on commitments. It's about keeping promises. It's about walking the talk. It's about doing what you say. And because you're leading a group of people—not just leading yourself—it's also about what those who are following you are doing. How consistent are they in deed and word? How well are they practicing what's preached? As the leader you're held accountable for their actions, too.

There are two essentials necessary to Set the Example, one that's focused on you and one that's focused on your constituents. To Set the Example you need to

• Personify the shared values

• Teach others to model the values

In practicing these essentials leaders become role models for what the whole team (the group, the organization, or the company) stands for, and they also create a culture in which everyone commits to aligning themselves with shared values.

PERSONIFY THE SHARED VALUES

We were talking with Gary McBee, who at the time was executive vice president with a regional telecommunications company. He shared a personal story with us that clearly communicated how powerful modeling is, at home as well as at work.

“When my son was seven years old,” he said, “I thought it was time to bring him to the place where I worked and show him my office. I sat him down in that big chair behind my desk. He peeked up over the top and said, ‘Dad. Call somebody in here and fire him.’”

We all laughed. It was that kind of laughter that appreciates the story's irony but also recognizes its bittersweet truth. We all send signals about what's important to us. Sometimes we may not be completely aware of the signals we're sending, just as Gary wasn't, but we send them nonetheless. We send them through the daily choices we make. We send them in a wide variety of settings and media. We send them verbally and nonverbally. Leaders just happen to be more visible signal senders than others of us, and they know that people are always watching, trying to determine what's important. Leaders recognize that they have to be mindful of and accountable for the choices they make, because they're setting the example of what's appropriate and inappropriate, what's exemplary and what's second-rate.

Mary Godwin became acutely aware of the messages she was sending as vice president of operations of a company that creditors were threatening to put into bankruptcy. At first, Mary was trying to figure out how she was going to keep herself from resigning, never mind keep the operations team together while the company worked its way out of a $70 million debt. Acknowledging that it would have been a lot easier to leave, she explained, “It came to me that if I wanted everyone else to be committed, then I had to be totally, 100 percent, without doubt, committed personally.” Mary realized that before she could ask others to change she had to be willing to make those same changes and sacrifices herself. What's more, she understood that it would be only through her actions that people would come to know the depth of her convictions:

I had to follow through on commitments and show others by my actions how serious we were about our values and standards. My credibility depended upon this, and so I had to set the example for others to follow. For example, if there was “bad news” to be delivered to the company, I would be the one to deliver it. If we needed to work on weekends, then I'd be there. If something didn't work out as planned, I'd never let anyone on the team get “blamed” for it.

In the end, they met the deadline from their creditors and kept the company from going into bankruptcy; most important to Mary, the entire operations team stayed on board through the whole process. Those accomplishments wouldn't have been possible without Mary's leadership by example.

We can't stress enough the power of the leader's personal example. Cornell professor Tony Simons offers telling evidence of this. In his research on behavioral integrity, for instance, he found that organizations “where employees strongly believed [that] their managers followed through on promises and demonstrated the values they preached were substantially more profitable than those whose managers scored average or lower [on follow through].”1 In other words, if you want to get better results, make sure you practice what you preach. What you do speaks more loudly than what you say.

Sometimes the greatest distance we have to travel is the distance from our mouths to our feet.

Leaders are their organizations’ ambassadors of shared values. Their mission is to represent the values and standards to the rest of the world, and it is their solemn duty to serve the values to the best of their abilities. Here are a few signal-sending actions to consider as you work to personally exemplify the shared values in your organization.2

• Spend your time and attention wisely. Spend this precious nonrenewable resource on the most important values.

• Watch your language. Use words and phrases that best express the culture you want to create.

• Ask purposeful questions. Raise questions that intentionally stimulate people to think more purposefully about values.

• Seek feedback. Ask others about the impact of your behavior on their performance.

Each of these signal-sending opportunities offers a chance to make visible and tangible to others your personal commitment to a shared way of being. Each affords the chance to show where you stand on matters of principle. Simple though they may appear, we should all remember that sometimes the greatest distance we have to travel is the distance from our mouths to our feet. Exemplary leaders are very mindful of the signals they send and how they send them.

Spend Your Time and Attention Wisely

How you spend your time is the single clearest indicator, especially to other people, of what's important to you. If you say, for example, that your top priority is your customers (or clients, patients, students, voters, or parishioners), then how much of your daily time do you spend with them? What's the connection between how you schedule your time and what you consider to be priorities and key values? If an independent auditor were to compare your daily calendar to what you say is important to you, what would it say in the audit report?

At one of our client engagements—the annual sales meeting for the company's largest region—we were scheduled to speak right after the company's CEO. Account reps from all over the United States, Latin America, and Canada were in the audience. When the show started, we fully expected to see the CEO walk out onto the stage with all the fanfare that goes with the role. Instead, the lights dimmed and a video began playing. There he was, larger than life all right, but instead of being live-and-in-person he was prerecorded.

Now we don't know how you'd react to something like this, but we were shocked. Here were some of the most important people in the company—the folks who call on customers and prospects every day—getting the cold shoulder from their chief. The employees who had invited us to speak said they felt slighted. They were upset that their leader hadn't made a personal appearance. We're willing to cut the CEO some slack. He, like all his colleagues, is a very busy person, he has lots of demands on his time, and he can't be everywhere, especially when the company has multiple offices in many different countries. But we just can't fathom how this guy could skip out on something as important as the annual gathering of the salesforce, and neither could those who were with us. Leaders make choices about where they spend their time and attention. They send signals by their presence and their absence. In this case, by his absence the message the CEO sent, most likely unintentionally, was “You're not important enough to me.” Sometimes leadership is just showing up.

Setting an example means arriving early, staying late, and being there to show you care. It's about being the first to do something that everyone should value. Whether the value is family, teamwork, hard work, or fun, the truest measure of what leaders deeply believe is how they spend their time. Constituents look to this metric and use it to judge whether a leader measures up to espoused standards. Visibly spending time on what's important shows that you're putting your time and money where your mouth is. For example, by attending operating meetings in the field, leaders provide visible evidence of their concerns and the direction they want to pursue. That's why Logitech's vice president of worldwide human resources, Roberta Linsky, traveled halfway around the world (from Fremont, California) to attend Lunar New Year celebrations in the company's manufacturing facility in Suzhou, China. Being there in person said more about how much Roberta values her constituents than any e-mail message, telegram, card, or video could ever do.

Watch Your Language

Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has observed that people are “prisoners” of their organizational vocabulary.3 Zuboff's choice of words is deliberate and none too strong. If you disagree, try talking about an organization for even a day without using the words employee, manager, boss, supervisor, subordinate, or hierarchy. You may find this exercise nearly impossible unless you've gotten comfortable with the language some organizations use today, such as associates, crew, cast members, team members, partners, or even constituents. We've all come to accept certain words we use as the reality of organizational life. Those words can trap us into a particular way of thinking about our roles and relationships.

One company that clearly understands how to consciously use a different vocabulary to reflect its unique set of values is DaVita, the largest independent provider of dialysis services in the United States for patients suffering from chronic kidney failure. “All the words and phrases we use,” Joe Mello, chief operating officer, told us, “evolved over time and have ended up being symbolic of the messages we're trying to send and the real environment we're trying to create…. You have to make sure that everybody has a good understanding of what the beliefs are and a good understanding of what the expected behaviors are. Part of that belief system is encompassed in our language, and we have to be more deliberate about our language than we have been in the past.” It begins with the choice of the company name. DaVita is definitely a name that fits the nature of their work. Roughly translated from the Italian, the phrase means “he or she gives life.” Every day in every clinic, DaVitans—that's what they call themselves—work hard to give life to those suffering from renal disease.

At DaVita, memorable catchphrases infuse the daily conversation and reinforce the company's values and management practices. The Three Musketeers maxim “one for all, and all for one,” for example, permeates the culture of the company and reinforces the idea that everyone in DaVita is in it together, looking out for each other. Corporate headquarters is called “Casa DaVita” (house of DaVita). Employees are all “teammates”—be prepared to put a buck in a glass on the meeting table if you should ever use the “E word.” The company is called the “Village,” and DaVita's CEO, Kent Thiry, is its “mayor,” signaling that DaVita is really more like the small town in Wisconsin that Kent grew up in—the kind of place where, as Joe explained, “People don't just go to work and come home. They take people casseroles when they're sick. They take care of each other. They watch out for each other.” Teammates become “citizens” of the Village when they are willing to “cross the bridge” and make a public commitment to the community. Every member of the senior leadership crossed the bridge as part of their symbolic rite of passage into those roles. The company's long-standing emphasis on execution and operational excellence is embodied in the slogan “GSD” (get stuff done); the highest compliment to pay a teammate is to say he or she is “good at GSD.” Another key motto is “We said, we did,” because, as Joe pointed out, “You have to go beyond just doing it, you have to make sure you publicize that you did it.”4

Leaders understand and are attentive to language. They know the power of words. The words people choose to use are metaphors for concepts that define attitudes and behaviors, structures and systems. Words don't just give voice to one's own mind-set and beliefs, they evoke images of what people hope to create with others and how they expect people to behave, as evident in the comparison of the bank manager and the Unilever executive in Chapter Three.

Paying attention to the way you use language isn't one of those ideas-of-the-month that's the trendy thing to do. Researchers have documented the power of language in shaping thoughts and actions. Just a few words from someone can make the difference in the beliefs that people articulate. For example, at an East Coast university where there was a publicized incidence of hate mail sent to an African American student, researchers randomly stopped students walking across campus and asked them what they thought of the occurrence. Before the subject could respond, however, a confederate of the researchers would come up and answer. One response was something like “Well, he must have done something to deserve it.” As you might expect, the subject's response was more often than not just like the confederate's. Then the researchers would stop another student and ask the same question. This time the confederate gave an alternative response that was something like “There's no place for that kind of behavior on our campus.” The subject's response again replicated the confederate's.5

This study dramatically illustrates how potent language is in influencing people's responses to what's going on around them. Language helps to build the frame around people's views of the world, and it's essential for leaders to be mindful of their choice of words. If you want people to act like citizens of a village you have to talk about them that way, not as subordinates in a hierarchy. If you want people to appreciate the rich diversity in their organizations, you have to use language that's inclusive. If you want people to be innovative, you have to use words that spark exploration, discovery, and invention. “Watch your language” has come to take on a whole new meaning from when your teacher scolded you in school for the use of an inappropriate word. It's now about setting an example for others of how they need to think and act.

Ask Purposeful Questions

The questions you ask can also be quite powerful in focusing attention. When leaders ask questions, they send constituents on mental journeys—“quests”—in search of answers. The questions that a leader asks send messages about the focus of the organization, and they're indicators of what is of most concern to the leader. They're one more measure of how serious we are about our espoused beliefs. Questions direct attention to the values that should be attended to and how much energy should be devoted to them.

You need to be intentional and purposeful about the questions that you ask. You need to make sure that the questions you ask are directly related to the values that you hold dear. Barbara Goretsky, corporate director of leadership development at Northrop Grumman Corporation, points out the importance of asking people questions such as “What evidence exists that we are living by our values and making decisions consistent with these values?” Although this question can take many different forms, what's critical is that leaders ask about the evidence. What questions should you be asking, for example, if you want people to focus on integrity? On trust? On customer or client satisfaction? On quality? On innovation? On growth? On personal responsibility?

Questions frame the issue and set the agenda. In one of our workshops, we suggested that participants who wanted their constituents to stay focused on continuous improvement ask this simple question of every person attending their next group meeting: “What have you done in the past week to improve so that you're better this week than last?” We then recommended that they repeat this question for the next four weeks or more, predicting that it would take at least that many repetitions to sustain the focus.

About a month later, we heard from a participant in the workshop who had done what we recommended. He told us that the first time he asked the question, people looked at each other skeptically, apparently thinking, “Oh, this guy's just been to a seminar.” The second time, some of his team members took him seriously and about 30 percent had a response. The third time, about 70 percent reported what they had done. And the fourth? Something very interesting happened: “They asked me what I had done in the last week to improve myself so I was better than I was last week.” Questions can indeed be very effective tools for change.

Questions can be very effective tools for change.

Questions can also develop people. They help others escape the trap of their own paradigms by broadening their perspectives and taking responsibility for their own viewpoints. Asking good questions, rather than giving answers, forces you to listen attentively to your constituents and what they are saying. This action demonstrates your respect for their ideas and opinions. If you are genuinely interested in what other people have to say then you need to ask their opinion, especially before giving your own. Asking what others think facilitates participation in whatever decision will ultimately be determined and consequently increases support for that decision. Asking good questions reduces the risk that a decision might be undermined by either inadequate consideration or unexpected opposition.

Seek Feedback

Feedback comes from a variety of sources. For example, some of the feedback that Seang Wee Lee received when he was promoted at Cisco Systems was from his own management about the need to change the engagement model that his team used with internal organizations and external vendors. He decided right away that he also needed to have an open dialogue with the team, as he told us, “to understand their perception about what was going on and to obtain feedback on my role as their leader.” Seang Wee explained that he had done this throughout his career:

I have enlisted feedback from those that I work with very closely with the hope of understanding how I can further improve. I utilize this feedback to further improve my leadership skills, identify shortfalls, and open up communications with the team. This promotes trust in my leadership and creates a climate of trust within the team and with me. I almost always learn about some things I can do to help develop each individual as well as the team, and also me.

Another benefit, according to Seang Wee, is that “my seeking feedback and listening in turn encourages my team to maintain open communication with other groups through enlisting their feedback and understanding the impact they can make to make their work more efficient.” Leaders realize that while they may not always like the feedback, it is the only way they can really know how they are doing as someone's leader. Seeking feedback provides a powerful statement about the value of self-improvement and how everyone can be even better than they are today.

As critical as feedback is to assessing and improving our performance as leaders, leaders don't seem to ask for much of it. In our most recent analysis of data from over seventy thousand individuals who completed the Leadership Practices Inventory, our thirty-item behavioral assessment, we've found that the statement that ranks the lowest from the observers’ perspective, and the next to lowest from the leaders’ perspective, is this item:

16. (He or she) asks for feedback on how his/her actions affect other people's performance.

When we related this finding to the director of leadership development for one of the world's largest technology companies, he told us that the same was true for his organization. The lowest-scoring item on its internal leadership assessment was the one on seeking feedback. We hear the same thing from other executive coaches.

Let's think about this for a moment. Credibility, which is at the foundation of leadership, from a behavioral perspective is about doing what you say you will do. But how can you know that you're doing what you say if you never ask for feedback on your behavior and on how your behavior affects how others are doing? How can you really expect to align your words and your actions over the long haul?

There's solid evidence that the best leaders are highly attuned to what's going on inside themselves as they are leading and to what's going on with others.6 They're very self-aware, and they're very socially aware. They can tell in short order whether they've done something that has enabled someone to perform at a higher level or whether they've sent motivation heading south.

Troy Hansen was vice president of AgDirect and Leasing, Farm Credit Services (FCS) of America, a leading financial services provider in Omaha, Nebraska, when he illustrated how his team learned that feedback is essential to both personal and professional development.7 Although Troy knew the importance of regular performance reviews, his team members held some rather negative attitudes about these appraisals. “The performance evaluation had this big negative tone to it,” he said. “It just doesn't sound like a real positive experience in most cases.” Troy wanted to change that. He did something that had never been done before at FCS. To kick off the initial round of performance appraisals, Troy asked his team members to evaluate his performance first.

After a brief orientation, Troy left the group members alone to evaluate his performance in private. This was the first time the team members had given a performance review on a team leader, and quite naturally they were initially reluctant, particularly in front of other team members and without Troy present. The process was very challenging at first, but eventually the team completed their review and then, at Troy's request, delivered it to him face-to-face in the presence of all his team members.

“The feedback that I received was kind of hard to hear,” Troy admitted. But then he added, “And that was really one of the benefits to the group. To take that personal risk; to model for the group that it's okay to place yourself at personal risk and take that honest feedback. What I hoped the team members would come away with was a sense that it's okay to be in that environment, that feedback is necessary for growth, and then to see how you accept that feedback and then what you do with it.”

Because of Troy's ability to model his commitment to the value of personal feedback—and of not asking someone to do something he wouldn't do first—his team gained a newfound respect for the performance review process itself. Preston Kranz, an AgDirect Representative and a member of Troy's team, commented, “After having the opportunity to go through this performance review, the individual review that I received meant more to me. I placed more value on Troy's feedback.” And then Preston added, “He's asking the question, ‘How can I do this better?’ The performance review shows his commitment to do that. He used that feedback and information to make a difference.”

Often leaders fear the exposure and vulnerability that accompanies direct and honest feedback. Those giving the feedback can often feel a bit exposed themselves and may even fear retribution or hurting someone. Troy admits that it's a risk, but also recognizes that the upside of learning and growth are far more beneficial than the downside of being nervous or embarrassed. Learning to be a better leader requires great self-awareness, and it requires making ourselves vulnerable. Modeling that for others makes it easier for them to do the same when it comes their turn.

TEACH OTHERS TO MODEL THE VALUES

People are not watching only you, they're watching everyone else in your organization. They're paying attention to what others say and do, and so should you. It's not just what you do that demonstrates consistency between word and deed. Everyone—every team member, partner, and colleague—is a sender of signals about what's valued, and they also set an example. Part of leadership is making sure that their actions are also aligned with shared values. Here are a few things you can do to teach others what's expected so they can hold themselves accountable for living the values of the organization.

• Confront critical incidents. Respond to those disruptive occurrences in the life of your organization in ways that reinforce core values.

• Tell stories. Publicly give examples of what team members do to live the values, and make sure to mention “the moral at the end of the story.”

• Reinforce the behavior you want repeated. Keep score and measure performance to determine consistency with values. Tangibly and intangibly recognize performance that's consistent with espoused values.

Confront Critical Incidents

Consciously choosing how you spend your time, the language you use, and how you get feedback on your performance are essential for sending the signal that you're serious about an issue. But you can't plan everything about your day. Even the most disciplined leaders can't stop the intrusion of the unexpected. Critical incidents—chance occurrences, particularly at a time of stress and challenge—offer significant moments of learning for leaders and constituents. Critical incidents present opportunities for leaders to teach important lessons about appropriate norms of behavior.

For example, as Jennifer Tran, content manager at PayPal, found out, being part of a team doesn't automatically mean that everyone has the same set of priorities. While working on a project developing a new technology that would have a huge impact on the way consumers would pay for purchases, she discovered a problem with the documentation that would require further work. The team's copyeditor had already edited the documentation several times and was hesitant to step back and review it yet again. Jennifer pushed back, reminding her teammate about the possibility of not creating a “great user experience”—a core shared value among all groups in their company. With that, the copyeditor reconsidered, and Jennifer's team came up with a solution that satisfied everyone. “The fact that I stood up for this common value,” Jennifer told us, “was instrumental in both mitigating potential conflict and encouraging greater team spirit.” Jennifer saw in this situation not simply another problem to be dealt with but an opportune moment to remind her colleagues about the importance of living up to their shared values.

Critical incidents present opportunities for leaders to teach important lessons.

Having shared values may not always be sufficient to ensure that everyone's actions are aligned. There are critical moments when leaders have to take action to put values squarely on the table and in front of others so that they can return to this common ground for working together. In the process, leaders make clear how their actions are compelled by shared values. In this way they set an example for what it means to take actions on the basis of values. By standing up for values, leaders demonstrate that having shared values requires a mutual commitment to aligning words and deeds for everyone.

Critical incidents aren't planned. They are those events in the lives of leaders (and organizations) that offer the chance to improvise while still staying true to the script. Although they can't be explicitly planned, it's useful to keep in mind, as Jennifer did, that the way you handle these incidents—how you link actions and decisions to shared values—speaks volumes about what's really important.

Tell Stories

Critical incidents create important teachable moments. They offer leaders the occasion in real time to demonstrate what's valued and what's not. Stories are another way that leaders pass on lessons about shared values and get others working together.

Steve Denning knows firsthand how stories can change the course of an organization. When Steve was program director of knowledge management for the World Bank, one day he was sitting with a colleague over lunch and swapping work stories. Steve's colleague, who had been working on a project in Zambia with the goal of improving health services to families, talked about a health worker in Kasama, six hundred kilometers from the capital city of Lusaka, who had logged on to the Web site for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and found the answer to a question on how to treat malaria. His colleague thought this was a neat illustration of how knowledge sharing on the Web was working, even in one of the poorest countries on earth. Steve didn't realize it at the time, but this very simple story was ultimately going to change his whole approach to persuading others about the vital role knowledge management could play within the World Bank.8

Steve had been having little success up to this point in convincing others in the World Bank that they had a role other than just a financial one, so he decided to incorporate the Zambia anecdote into his presentations. In the weeks that followed, Steve saw the Zambia story starting to have unexpectedly positive results. He noticed that when he began his presentations with the Zambia story, something was “beginning to click” with his audiences. When he didn't use the Zambia story, Steve found that the conversation ended up “in a tangle of debates about various aspects of the feasibility of the change idea.”

Over the ensuing years Steve learned how truly vital stories were to communicating essential messages within the World Bank, and within all organizations. Why storytelling? He says, “Nothing else worked. Charts left listeners bemused. Prose remained unread. Dialogue was just too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group of managers or frontline staff in a large organization to get enthusiastic about a major change, I found that storytelling was the only thing that worked.”9

Steve's experience with storytelling, in fact, is not remarkable, though the method is seriously underused. Why tell stories? For one simple reason: they are powerful tools for teaching people about what's important and what's not, what works and what doesn't, what is and what could be.10

David Armstrong, president and chief executive officer at Armstrong International, is so convinced of the critical impact of storytelling that he has written several books that include hundreds of stories direct from the factory and office of the company. On the basis of his personal experience with storytelling, David offers a dozen reasons why telling stories is such an effective leadership practice. Among them are these: stories are simple, timeless, and can appeal to everybody regardless of age, gender, or race. They're fun, a useful form of training, and a good method for empowering people. They're also great as a recognition device, a recruiting and hiring tool, a sales technique, and an excellent way to pass along corporate traditions.11

David says that you become a different kind of leader when you tell stories. “For one thing, you create an environment where people are receptive to change and new ideas,” he writes. “Just think about what happens when you yell at people or order them about. They pull back. They get upset. They withdraw. But telling stories is friendly and enjoyable. People want to hear what you have to say.”12

David's and Steve's reports about the impact of stories on attitude and behavior are well supported by the data. Research on stories shows that when leaders want to communicate standards, stories are a much more effective means of communication than are corporate policy statements, data about performance, and even a story plus the data.13 Information is more quickly and accurately remembered when it is first presented in the form of an example or story.14

As Jack Little explains, “Storytelling is more compelling than just giving rules, guidelines, and policies. It gives you an actual example that people can remember a lot better. Storytelling can be tied to people and names and events that are much more relevant.” And this comes from the CEO of The Math Works, a Massachusetts-based developer of engineering software. Despite the company's high-tech focus, leaders at all levels of the organization use stories to communicate organizational values and practices.

Telling stories has another lasting benefit. It forces leaders to pay close attention to what their constituents are doing. Peers—“people like me”—generally make better role models for what to do at work than famous people or ones several levels up in the hierarchy. When others hear or read a story about someone with whom they can identify, they are much more likely to see themselves doing the same thing. People seldom tire of hearing stories about themselves and the people they know. These stories get repeated, and the lessons of the stories get spread far and wide.

Reinforce the Behavior You Want Repeated

Leaders need feedback to help keep them on track. So do their constituents. Feedback is a way of telling them how successful they are at doing what they say they'll do. It's a way of reinforcing what they're doing right, and helping them correct what they're doing wrong. Research indicates clearly that measurement and feedback are absolutely essential to increasing efforts to improve performance.15 Score-keeping systems are essential to knowing how people are doing.

But you don't need a lot of research to understand how behavior changes when you measure performance. We all know about keeping score from the games and sports we've played. Imagine what it'd be like if you didn't have a way of keeping track of your performance in soccer, tennis, golf, basketball, or football. Imagine what it'd be like if you never got information on how well you did at bridge, poker, Scrabble, or Monopoly. And it's not just the numbers themselves that are important. It's what you get points for. For instance, the game of hockey was altered forever when the league changed the rules so that players got points for assists and not just for goals. All of a sudden team members started passing the puck to each other rather than trying to be the one that put it through the net.

Brian Coleman knows firsthand about the impact of scorekeeping. When he was tool-and-die manager with Ford Motor Company in the United Kingdom, he led a turnaround effort at one of their plants.16 One of the tools that he and his team of union employees, based in Dagenham, England, developed was a simple device to measure car quality: “The workers would mark a tick on the outline of a car indicating the location of every defect that came down the line.”

When they put the device to use, reports Brian, “I was shocked by the result. After only five hours there were more than fourteen hundred ticks on our drawing! I asked the team where we should begin, and they pointed to the area with the densest mass of ticks. Why? ‘Because that's where we'll have the greatest impact,’ they said.”

What you choose to reinforce is what people will choose to value.

For Brian and his team, that simple measuring device was a major factor in reducing the number of defects by over 70 percent and nearly doubling productivity in three months. In Brian's case, the value of quality, the specific goal of reducing defects, and the scoring mechanism all converged to produce results.

Leaders can easily influence outcome by providing the tools for measuring progress. For example, if the organization's performance-appraisal system fails to measure how well people perform against the standards of excellence set by corporate values, leaders can add clear performance measures that evaluate how well people are doing on quality, customer service, innovation, respect for others, contribution to profitability, fun, or whatever else is of critical value to the organization.

Rewards and recognition are other tangible means of reinforcing values (and we'll discuss recognition more thoroughly in Chapter Eleven). The important message to keep in mind is that what you choose to reinforce is what people will choose to value. You have to reinforce the key values important to building and sustaining the kind of culture you want.

The leader who places a premium on innovation and risk taking, for example, must be willing to “promote” in a variety of ways those who innovate. Leaders must be attentive to how people are made to feel when they take risks and fail. Are people rewarded or punished when they fail? Are positive or negative stories told about failure? Is the leader's energy funneled into searching for the culprit or assessing what has been learned from the experience? The leader's actions set the tone for innovation and risk taking.

Who is rewarded, who is promoted—as well as who is given a “time out”—and why are among the clearest ways in which leaders demonstrate their seriousness to a specific set of principles. Leaders literally can “put their money where their mouths are” with financial rewards and put their hearts where their good intentions are with more personalized recognition. The same goes for all other support systems—incentive, recruitment, training, information, and the like. They all send signals about what you value and what you don't, and they must be aligned with the shared values and standards that you're trying to instill.

REFLECTION AND ACTION: SETTING THE EXAMPLE

Leaders demonstrate their intense commitment to the values they espouse by setting an example. It's how they earn and sustain credibility over time. Setting the Example is all about execution and action. It's all about doing what you say. Leaders who are seen as practicing what they preach are more effective than those leaders who don't.

Leaders send signals in a variety of ways and in all kinds of settings, and constituents read those signals as indicators of what's okay and what's not okay to do. How leaders spend their time is the single best indicator of what's important. Time is a precious asset, because once passed it can never be recovered. But if invested wisely, it can earn returns for years. The language leaders use and the questions they ask are other powerful ways that shape perceptions of what they value. Leaders also need feedback in order to know if they're doing what they say. They need others to let them know if they're on or off track.

But it's not just what leaders do that matters. Leaders are also measured by how consistent their constituents’ actions are with the shared values, so leaders must teach others how to set an example. Critical incidents—those chance occurrences in the lives of all organizations—offer marvelous teachable moments. They offer leaders the opportunity to pass along lessons in real time, not just in the classroom. Sometimes critical incidents become stories, and stories are among the most influential tools leaders have to teach values. And leaders also have to remember that what gets reinforced gets done. Leaders have to keep score in order for people to know how they're doing and to improve how they're doing it. They also have to reward the appropriate behavior if they expect it to get repeated.

One of the toughest parts about being a leader is that you're always onstage. People are always watching you, always talking about you. They're always testing your credibility. That's why setting the right example is so important, and why it's essential to make use of all the tools you have available to you to set the example.

Here's a series of action steps that you can use to improve and apply your capacity to Set the Example.

Do a Personal Audit

To set the example, you need to really know what example you're setting. To see how you're modeling the way, have an audit of your actions completed by someone other than yourself.

Audit your daily routines. Are you spending sufficient time on matters consistent with your shared values? Use your shared values as the basis for planning your weekly schedule. Let values be your guide, not old habits or the in-basket.

Audit your daily calendar. How much time are you spending modeling shared values? How do your appointments contribute to communicating and reinforcing shared values?

Audit the agendas for your meetings. What topics are discussed? What issue is first on the agenda? What signal does that issue send about what people should consider to be important? Audit your questions. What questions do you typically ask in meetings, one-on-ones, telephone calls, and interviews? How do these questions help to clarify and gain commitment to shared values? Make a list of searching questions that correspond to each of the shared values.

Audit how you deal with critical incidents. How did you respond to the most recent incident? To what extent did your actions teach lessons about the most important shared values? Audit your rewards and recognitions. Who's being recognized? Do these people exemplify the values you want reinforced? When someone gets recognized have you made clear the value (or standard) on which the reward is based?

Make the audit results public. Explain what's right and working. Disclose what is not working. Set in motion changes that will realign your actions and behaviors to be more consistent with shared values. Your personal audit will help you discover the example that you're really setting. Be sure it's what you intend.

Develop a Routine for Questioning

In our daily lives at work we ask a lot of questions, often for more information, clarification, and greater understanding. Leaders should ask their constituents questions not just for these reasons, but also because every question is a potential teaching opportunity. The key to good questions from a leader's perspective is to think about the “quest” in your question: Where do you want to take this person (or group, unit, organization) with your question? What value or values are you trying to reinforce with your questions? Rather than “what do I want to know?” leaders ask questions to get others to know and become more aware of certain critical factors, perspectives, and beliefs. You need to come up with a routine set of questions that will get people to reflect on the core values and what they have done each day to act on those values. And they ought to be questions that they will expect you to ask, and not be surprised by. Why? Because you want them to be thinking about them well before you ask them. You want people to routinely ask themselves these questions, knowing that you will be expecting an answer to them the next time you see them. In one way or another, the questions you ask are all a variation on a single theme: What have you done to live out our values?

What would you ask if the value were innovation? How about, What's the most creative idea you heard today? Or, What's the best suggestion you got from our customers today about how we can improve our products and services? Or, If our competitors were going to put us out of business, what weakness of ours would they exploit? The possibilities are many, and the list can be quite fun.

What would you like each of your constituents to think about each day? What would you like each of your constituents to pay attention to each day? Developing a questioning routine forces you to understand what you are trying to teach and achieve. Consider carefully the key (two or three) questions you want to ask about each and every action and decision that takes place. The point is not to ask rhetorical questions (ones which have obvious answers or responses) but to get others to think about how their own actions are consistent with shared values. Your questions help to keep others focused and paying attention to what really matters in your workplace.

Put Storytelling on Your Meeting Agendas

Think of yourself as the CSO—Chief Story Officer—for your team. Be on the lookout for good stories! Capture as many examples of exemplary behavior in your organization as you can. The practice of observing and recording is important to building your skills in storytelling.

Then put it on the weekly meeting agenda. Start each meeting with a story about something someone on your team did to demonstrate a cherished value. If possible, figure out a way to reenact the incident. If you're a virtual team and can't do it in a meeting, then use voicemail and e-mail as media for telling stories. In these formats shorter stories are generally more useful than longer ones, but they're still helpful ways to disseminate good news.

Also keep in mind that the “memorability” of stories is in direct proportion to their “vividness.”17 To be vivid, a story should be about a real person, have a strong sense of time and place, and be told in colorful and animated language.18 It helps immensely if you can talk from a first-person perspective. Allow your emotions to surface as you speak; this brings excitement to your voice and increases your natural tendency to use gestures and to smile. If you are feeling truly excited about a particular activity or goal, show it. If you are deeply concerned about competitive threats, show it. Start your story by relating an “above-and-beyond-the-call” deed. Think of a clever title for the story that will capture people's attention and help them to remember (catalogue) it. Give your story a theme. Be willing to repeat this theme. Keep the story short. Use people's names. Verify all facts. Be sure to end your message or story with a conclusion that demonstrates concretely the intended message or lesson to be learned. The old storytellers had good reasons for calling the ending “the moral of the story.”

Finally, in setting the example through storytelling, provide opportunities for others to share a story or two—not necessarily about themselves but about a colleague who took an action that exemplified the organization's values.

Don't be worried about either telling too many stories or repeating the same theme (moral, lesson, or value) too often. People simply like good stories—and they are a great way to learn!

COMMITMENT NUMBER 2

Set the Example

Essentials of Setting the Example

• Personify the shared values

• Teach others to model the values

Taking Action

•Do a personal audit

•Develop a routine for questioning

•Put storytelling on your meeting agendas

(Kouzes 73)

· Kouzes, James M., Barry Z. Posner. The Leadership Challenge, 4th Edition. Jossey-Bass, 07/2007. <vbk:9780470633397#outline(4)>.

2- From the internet read

· Epitropaki, O. (n.d.). What is transformational leadership? Retrieved from http://esrccoi.group.shef.ac.uk/pdf/whatis/transformational.pdf

· Hay, I. (n.d.). Transformational leadership: Characteristics and criticisms. Retrieved fromhttp://www.leadingtoday.org/weleadinlearning/transformationalleadership.htm