Book Review: The Leadership Challenge:
How To Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, sixth edition – James Kouzes and Barry Posner
We live in a world surrounded by data and from baseball to leadership, analytics has become a faith-based approach to seeking truth and gaining an edge in the complexity of our modern age. One could argue that this forsakes a more human touch where one’s gut helps make decisions or falling back on past experiences gives one the edge or that the use of one’s instinct still renders clarity in some circumstances and they would be partly right. The current evidence/data based research approach is mostly a numbers game sprinkled with personal stories to illustrate data findings. Kouzes and Posner are not the only culprits here; Collins and others have also stoked this fire for quite some time. Yet, despite this approach, I have to admit that “The Leadership Challenge” offers a cogent and comprehensive view of leadership based on one simple question: “What did you do when you were at your personal best as a leader?”
After thirty years and six editions, Kouzes and Posner’s work still has value for anyone leading any organization, especially a school. Here is a summation from their introduction:
The domain of leadership is the future. The work of leaders is change.
The most significant contribution leaders make is not today’s bottom
line; it is to the long-term development of people and institutions so
they can adapt, change, prosper, and grow.
I think all of us who have led or have leadership aspirations would agree with this statement. For me, the most important words are “future” and “change” which are also I believe the most difficult challenge for any head of school.
The books is structured around five leadership practices: Model the Way, Inspire a Great Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart.
As an AISH member, these should sound familiar to you as these are the same qualities found in AISH’s Threads of Leadership in the our Leadership Resource Book. I cannot imagine a more solid basis for leadership practice and learning than these five springboards to excellence.
Each chapter focuses on one of these key practices, discusses key findings, interjects examples (primarily from the business world), and gives a nice summary page at the end of each chapter. And although the research comes directly from interviews and questionnaires (thousands of them!), each chapter, for me, clarifies a single practice or idea and then describes actions to achieve or to implement that specific practice. I can tell you that it took me two yellow highlighters to complete my reading. It is dense with statements that both echo and emphasize with many of my own beliefs and past efforts. And it gives any reader or leader lots and lots of things to reflect upon. My primary criticism is that certain actions and results are made to appear too easy to achieve; in my experience they are much more complex and difficult to achieve.
Let me share just a few pearls with you. “Leadership is something that can be learned.” “Leadership is not about personalities; it is about behaviors.” And here is one of my favorite lines: “Leadership is the challenge of moving beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary.” Wow! Think about the power of those words. What kind of school could we create if we enabled a climate where all our teachers, parents, students, and administrators wanted their school to be extraordinary.
Every chapter builds upon itself, and the tapestry of leadership becomes more tightly knotted with each chapter, with each action. And despite the data pyramid on which this and all recent research is build on, in the end, Kouzes and Posner have made it perfectly clear that leadership is about people; it is a human endeavor that depends on relationships, common values, and clarity of vision. The book concludes with this simple proclaimation: “Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.”
Amen brother!