Interview: The Leadership Challenge with Jim Kouzes

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Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. Today I'm thrilled and honored to be chatting with Jim Kouzes, who co wrote one of the most popular and impactful books on leadership in the world. I was introduced to Jim's work via John Maxwell. I was reading one of John's great books and he said that this book, the Leadership Challenge that we're going to talk about today, is one of the five best books he's ever read, period. And when I read someone like John Maxwell, who I respect a great deal, say something like that, I pay attention and immediately find my way to Amazon and buy the book. So I'm very glad that I did. This book has really been transformational for me personally. Again, the Leadership Challenge, subtitled How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations. There's no question our world needs leaders now more today than ever before. And Jim, I really appreciate you and your work and taking the time to share your wisdom with us today.

Well, thank you Brian, and the feeling is mutual. I'm a big fan of Optimize. I'm a big fan of Philosopher Notes. I read them every night if I'm up when they come in at midnight or in the morning when I do my reading. So thank you for the work that you do. Really appreciate it.

Well, thank you. I'm honored and touched to hear that and excited to explore all the different things that we have in common and find ways to play together beyond just this conversation.

That would be wonderful.

Well, let's jump in. So the Leadership Challenge, obviously embracing challenge is a big part of your work in this book. Can you tell us why you guys decided to name the book the Leadership Challenge?

Well, Barry and I had met at Santa Clara University in 1981 and this big tall guy, 6 foot 4, arrives in my door frame and knocks on the door and introduces himself. And we began to chat about our mutual interests. And we came to understand that we had mutual interest in personal values and managerial values in particular. And 1981 into 82, we were exploring how we might work together. And it was the year of the Olympics. And so we were wondering, how do we explore this idea of managerial excellence? That's what we called it at the time. We later began to expand that to all leaders. And we said, why don't we ask people, because it's an Olympic year, about their personal best leadership experiences? And the light bulb went off and we both said, why don't we do that? So we began to explore with a few executives, and that expanded to more personal interviews. And what we learned, Brian, is something very interesting. When you ask people to talk about their personal best leadership experiences, they talk about challenges, they talk about adversity, they talk about difficult times, turning around to losing operations, starting something up, doing something nobody had ever done before, taking on a challenge in their lives, perhaps one that was handed to them or one that they personally initiated. But every personal best involved a challenge. And so we decided that the book had to be named the Leadership Challenge because that was, in fact, what every extraordinary accomplishment was about. Overcoming some kind of adversity.

Hmm. I love that. And one of my mantras to myself is from an interview with Steven Kotler, who wrote the Rise of Superman. I asked him at the end, what's your number one piece of wisdom? And he said, no pressure, no diamonds. Being willing to lean into that. That challenge and not run away from it, but realize that's as we're going to talk about, a call to greatness. I love the way you guys define that. But before we get into that, can you just share briefly the five practices of leadership that form the kind of backbone of the book?

Well, in asking people to tell us about their personal best leadership experiences, we uncovered five common themes that cut through all the cases, Whether it's from somebody who works as a principal in a school, to someone who's a CEO of a company, to a volunteer in a not for profit organization. When people tell their personal best leadership experiences, they talk about doing five. We call them practices engaging in five practices. The first of those is modeled away. So you have to be clear about what you believe in. And then you have to practice what you preach. You have to put it into practice. Your actions have to match your words. The second practice we call inspire a shared vision. You need to envision the future. Think long term. Imagine those Possibilities and then enlist other people, communicate it in such a way that people want to join in. The third practice, apropos to challenge is what we call challenge, the process. If you can do something new and different, something no one has ever done before, achieve something extraordinary, you have to innovate, you have to experiment and take risks and you have to, you make mistakes, so you have to learn from those mistakes. The fourth practice is you can't do it alone. You can't lead alone. You need a team, a group, an organization. And so you have to collaborate with other people and then you have to strengthen their capacity to deliver. You have to enable them to act. And then finally, we call it encourage. The heart is the fifth practice, which is, you know, it's difficult when you're trying to do extraordinary things. It's hard, it's hard work. People need to be encouraged, people need to be recognized and they need to celebrate their successes. So those are the five model. Inspire, Challenge, enable and encourage. Hmm.

I'm excited to chat briefly about some of those. And your fifth, which we'll talk about, the best kept secret of leadership was just such a beautiful idea. So we'll wait for that, for the, for the, for the final.

We'll save that for the end.

Yeah, exactly. Because it's so important. It is, it's such a, you know. So we'll have our listeners think, what do you think the best kept secret of leadership is? We'll see if we surprise you at the end of our chat. For now, let's talk about the foundation of leadership. You talk about credibility, can you talk about that?

So one of the things we also did, Brian, when we were doing our research is we took these cases as the leader's perspective on what they did. But we wanted to know what their constituents, their followers expected of them. So we asked the question, what do you look for and admire in a leader? Someone whose direction you would willingly follow. The key word in that question is willingly, not because you have to, but because you want to. And we initially asked it as an open ended question. It got about 150 attributes. Well, no one can be 150 different things. So we had to narrow that. Excuse me, we had to narrow that list down to a manageable number. And we came up with 20 keywords each followed by some synonyms. And we asked people in a survey to indicate the ones they most look for. What people said they most look for over 60% for each of these was first of all, honest, secondly, competent, inspiring and forward looking. So the order of Those, with the exception of honest, changes over time. But those four, the only four that over 30 years have received over 60% of the vote. That's an amazing finding when you think about how much things have changed. So the context of leadership has changed a lot, but what people look for and admire in a leader has not changed much at all. And so consequently we. Brian, I gotta do this. I'm sorry.

No problem.

I didn't turn my watch off.

You know, I have a 15 minute timer that goes. We'll just edit this out. Yeah, that goes on my end.

I just silenced my watch. Sorry about that.

No worries at all. Easy to edit.

All right, so let, let me just respond. So what we found was there are four things that. And at the top, honest, forward looking, inspiring and competent. Sometimes the order of those changes, with the exception of honest, Honest is always at the top. But what those add up to in the research literature, three of them, honest, competent and inspiring, are what researchers call source credibility. Bottom line, if you don't believe in the messenger, if you don't think the messenger is credible, then you won't believe the message that that person is delivering. And that's our first law of leadership. If you don't believe in the messenger, you won't believe the message. Credibility is the foundation of leadership.

That's amazing. And you say as well that, that leadership is really self development in many ways, right? That we need to be a worthy, incredible human being in order to inspire others to want to, as you say, willingly follow us. So, you know, taking the time to actually build our character and to build our virtue and to become the types of people we're capable of becoming is in fact the, the most fundamental aspect of leadership, right?

It is the most fundamental and we see that played out all the time. In fact, I was reading the most recent Edelman survey, the Edelman Trust Barometer, which you're probably familiar with, and it comes out once a year this last year. They come out in the report at the beginning of 2017. The reporting on their data gathered in the Latter Part of 2016 finds that globally credibility has declined globally. So leaders are not as believable as they were last year. That creates lots of issues. Because if we don't willingly follow someone unless we believe in them, that means that we can expect engagement to decline, we can expect more turnover, we can expect other kinds of issues in the global marketplace as a result of that. And so it's absolutely fundamental and leaders need to take it to heart. And our research shows that the more the Constituents perceive their leaders to be credible, the more engaged they are in their work.

It reminds me of Cal Newport in his deep Work. He made the point that doing deep work, whereas juxtaposed with shallow work, is simultaneously more rare and more valuable. So I just felt a parallel of credible leadership is simultaneously more rare and more valuable. We need it now more than ever. And unfortunately, we don't have as many people stepping into that room.

Unfortunately, we don't. There is a definite call to action for leaders these days to really pay attention to that issue. And the other thing I have to remind folks of is that's what we want. We don't always get it. And so even more so now than ever, we must, must attend to the issue of character credibility in ourselves as leaders and in those leaders we willingly follow.

So just very practically, what's your kind of top ruck for us building that?

Well, we asked people, what's credibility behaviorally? And out of that response came the answer to that question. Brian. We asked people and they said things like, well, credibility is you do what you say, you practice what you preach, put your money where your mouth is, walk the talk, all those phrases. And so we came up with an acronym, D W Y S Y W dwizzywid for short. And that's the answer to the question, you have to do what you say you will do in order to be credible. And that implies a couple of very important things. First of all, you have to have something to say. You have to have a set of values and beliefs. We know that leaders who score high on an item we have in our Leadership Practices Inventory called How Clear is this person about his. Her philosophy of Leadership? The higher you score on that item from the constituent's standpoint, the more engaged people are at work and the higher their performance. So you have to have a set of values and beliefs and be able to articulate those. But of course, when we ask people, do you believe what people say or what people do? They say what people do. And so you have to actually follow through on your beliefs, on what you say you believe in to be credible.

So good. And this is gonna be my next idea. So you went right there. D W Y S Y W D Do what you say you will do. And for me, that's just. I feel like I've tattooed on that my. On my brain thinking about it so much. Had it up on my whiteboard for a while, and just with the little things, too, of, you know, if I tell my son that we're gonna do something we do it, you know, and what are we telling him? When I tell you I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna do it. And kind of, he's four years old, you know, and that virtue of having integrity, where your word is law and what you say you're gonna do is what you do. And obviously none of us are perfect. But aspiring to get a little better each day in being more in integrity is a personal practice of mine and deeply inspired by that awesome acronym.

Yeah, when people come to our workshop, we actually do give them a little card that they can post up there, like you wrote it on your whiteboard. But keeping that branded in front of you every day is important as a par. As you were describing as a teacher, as a colleague, to maintain your credibility. Doesn't just apply to leaders.

Yep. Yeah. So powerful. And I haven't mentioned. But one of the things I love most about your work and just, just for our audience is this is all empirically based. So there's a lot of wisdom in different genres that's very meaningful and powerful. But I always lean toward the scientifically valid, empirically based on research oriented wisdom, which is one of the reasons why I love this book so much. Can you just tell us briefly, how many people have you surveyed now?

Well, we have approximately 5 million people in our database and that number grows every day. And There are about 700 research papers written that further validate this model, mainly by doctoral students using our research as well as other academics and our own papers. So, yeah, we try to be very practical in what we write and very prescriptive. And how do you put this into practice? And here's a story about how somebody used it in the financial services industry or healthcare. But underlying all this is, as they talk about in healthcare, evidence based medicine. This is evidence based leadership. If you do the things we write about, there's a greater chance that you will get results than if you do not do them. And the other important thing I want to, if I might add, Brian, is we don't ask people about is this person a good or bad leader. We ask person, how frequently does this person engage in this behavior? So it's behavioral based. And what we've learned is that we all are leading, just not frequently enough. In fact, in our data, we found out that the number of people who don't exhibit any leadership behavior whatsoever is 0.00013.

As in 00.

So it's not an issue. You know, people are leading, but just not frequently enough. Those who engage more frequently in These behaviors are the ones who have more engaged and more productive and higher performing workforces. And so it's important that what we take to heart is we can all do this. We just have to do it more frequently.

The question is, can we string together a little more of those moments day in and day out? One of my favorite phrases, as you may know, is incremental optimization aggregated and compounded over time. So take that seed of potential or whatever it's flowered into today and just continue to cultivate it day in and day out. But it's there, and we're all called to be leaders in whatever format and context we find ourselves in our lives, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Super inspiring. So you talk about the importance of hopes, dreams and visions. Can you describe that for us?

Sure. One of the things we found is that leaders, and we call it, inspire a shared vision. They have a vision of the future and then they enlist others in it. And what we learned, Brian, from our research is that this is the behavior that differentiates leaders from other credible people. So you can be a peer, you can be a colleague on a team, and not necessarily from the constituent standpoint, have to have a vision of the future. But if you're a leader, you have to be able to do those two things. You have to look across the horizon of time and share with others what you see down the road, what you envision. One of the analogies we use is the is driving in the fog. Imagine you're driving along, it's a beautiful sunny day. You're on the coast of California, you're driving south from San Francisco, Pacific Ocean on your right, the hills on your left. It's a beautiful day, you got the top down, you're speeding along. All of a sudden you hit a bank of fog, which you can do in California, on the coast. What do you do? Well, naturally, people say they slow down, turn on the lights, they turn down the radio, they get a little tense, they lean in, you know, because that leaning in a few inches is going to help you see a lot farther. And you behave differently when you can't see very far. The sun comes up, clears away the fog, and you can see for miles. What do you do? You speed up, you relax, you are able to multitask. You can turn on that radio, enjoy the scenery. And so the job of leaders is to shine the sun light on the future for people and show them what it could look like if they all work together to achieve that. It's absolutely essential that leaders be able to develop that Skill. Unfortunately, it is the most challenging of all the skills to develop. And so we have to work at practicing it with more intention than some of the other practices.

Well, let's go there. So then, what are some of the practices we can engage in to cultivate that ability to shine the light brightly?

Well, a couple of methods. One is for yourself Personally, imagine that 10 years from now, you're leader of the Year, you win the award, and everybody who's listening is going to win this award. Ten years from now, you win this award. And up at the podium, your friends, your family, your colleagues all come to celebrate this achievement. And they each get up to the podium and they say something about you, about the lessons they learned from you, the ideals you stood for, the feelings they had when they were around you, and the evidence that you had made a difference, that you had made a contribution. What do you hope they will say if that were to happen to you, what do you hope he would say about the lessons, the ideals, the feelings, and the evidence? That acronym, by the way, is life L I F E. And the life you lead is the legacy you leave. So those lessons, how are you going to pass those on to other people? Those ideals, what are they and how are you going to put them into practice? If you want people to feel a certain way about you, that you're inspiring or that you care or that you are a person who teaches them, how are you going to create those feelings? And lastly, what's the more tangible things that you have accomplished in your life that you want to make sure people remember you for? So having that in mind and then looking at, of course, all the things that can get in the way of that, making sure that you plan for those contingencies and then help other people to get clarity about that, those. That's one exercise that people can try. You can apply that to your team. You can ask the same question. Your team wins Team of the Year ten years from now. How would you describe the life lessons that people learn from you? The ideals you stood for as a group, the feelings people had when they were around your group, the evidence that your group made a difference?

Yeah, that's amazing. As I was just taking a moment to feel into that right now, there's just such power in it. And one of the exercises I do often is that, you know, the eulogy of let's go to the end of your life and what are your eulogy virtues that we need to embody more and more moment to moment to moment. Then of course, there's the best selves exercise of you in five years of what does that look like? Which we know empirically is so powerful. But this 10 year you as a leader, winning leader of the year award. Who are you? How have you inspired those around you? What have you materially created?

Right.

In terms of tangible outcomes in the world, what have people learned from you? How have you inspired them to reach their potential? I mean that's an amazing exercise. And then refresh that, that's not a January 1st. Here it is vision. That's a X time in the morning when you do your check in with your highest self. Reflect on that and live that and then connect it to today. My practice is basically exactly that of what am I going to do today? After I spend five to 10 minutes, I write the same thing every day. Optimize Enterprises Public Benefit Corporation. We want to create one of the coolest, most loved, most virtues based, most impactful, most profitable companies on the planet that changes the world. I mean so I go through our purpose, our mission and our strategy and then it's what are we going to do today to live in integrity with that vision? Obviously we can talk about that for quite a while, but what a beautiful exercise. And congratulations to everyone listening on winning that award 10 years. Here's a high five from from today to tomorrow, right?

Absolutely.

Let's go back to challenges. And you have the phrase that challenges are simply calls to greatness. Can you tell us more about that?

Well, back back to our finding that every extraordinary accomplishment involves some kind of challenge. Then the question we have to ask ourselves on a regular basis as a leader, daily basis, if you can, is what have I changed lately? What am I challenging? Whether it's a process, whether it's a policy, whether it's myself, whether it's our team, what am I doing to stretch myself and others to achieve that greatness that they have within them? Because we know that what we're doing right now, we draw a boundary around our current capabilities and our current actions. That's what we're doing right now. But to get extraordinary things done, we have to move beyond that boundary. We have to move outside of it, into that uncomfortable place. And person after person told us that when they looked at their own personal best, what stood out for them Is that how they had to overcome uncertainty and fear in order to achieve their very best. I remember one of the people that we had the opportunity to talk to years ago, John McDonnell, former CEO of McDonnell Douglas, said, Adversity introduces us to ourselves. And when you, when you Encounter adversity. Who are you meeting? An important. Another personal growth exploration is who is that person? We are. We are meeting. You know, I remember walking on Mendocino coast in California when I moved out here over 40 years ago and was walking on the coast, down to the coast and there was a sign on the path that said, never turn your back on the ocean. And being a kid from the east coast originally, I didn't quite understand that question. So I asked somebody, a local restaurateur, what did that sign mean? And she kind of laughed and she said, well, we have people like you who are new to the area come here, tourists who come here and they want to walk out onto the rock right off the shoreline and they want to have a picture taken. So they turn their back on the ocean and a rogue wave comes along and washes them out to sea. Never turn your back on the ocean. Never. We have to always be mindful that outside in our environment, there are things that are happening in the world that if we aren't attending to them, might wash us out to sea. So all leaders have to have outside, have to look outward and think about what are the opportunities, what are the challenges, what are the trends that are going to impact us? And how can I, as a leader challenge myself and others to respond to what's coming, not just what's happened. We have to do what we say we will do right now, but we also have to anticipate what's coming and prepare ourselves. So we have to live in that space as leaders and always be asking ourselves what will call other people to greatness beyond what we're currently doing. Let's search for those opportunities and experiment and take risks.

And then when we push our edges and the inevitable challenges and setbacks and failures and quotes and all the mistakes that inevitably come, we don't use that as evidence that something's wrong. We use it as evidence that something's right, that we're challenging ourselves and meeting in that adversity and meeting that higher version of ourselves with power and strength rather than, you know, diminishing and not meeting it head on. Right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, beautiful. That leads us to our best kept secret of leadership, which is.

Well, may I tell the story that led us to that discovery? One of the people we interviewed, and again, this was very early on, but this, this is the only story that has survived five editions. Now, the sixth edition of the Leadership Challenge coming out in 2017, and that gentleman's name was Major General John Stanford. And John was head of Military Traffic Management Command at the time we met him. And then he went on once he left the military to become county administrator for Fulton county. That's where Atlanta is located. And then he went on to become superintendent of schools, Seattle Unified School District. And when we asked him the question, John, so what advice would you give to other leaders based on your own experiences, your personal best leadership experience, and other experiences you've had as a leader, what advice would you give them? And he said, whenever anyone asks me that question, how do you develop leaders for the future? I tell them I have the secret to success in life. So I'm leaning in, making sure I'm really attending to this response. And he says, the secret to success in life is stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to really ignite other people, to see inside other people, to have a greater desire to get things done than other people. A person who is not in love doesn't really feel the kind of excitement that helps them to get ahead and lead others into achieve. I don't know any other fire, any other thing in life that is more positive and exhilarating a feeling than love is. I didn't expect to hear that from a major general, but that's what he said. And as we reflected on that response, and we continue to reflect as we review new personal best cases from the next generation of leaders, what we hear is that when they are in love with passion, feel passionately about their cause, they really love the people they are working with, they love the projects and the customers with whom they are working, they can get extraordinary things done on a daily basis. And so that is the secret to success in life. Stay in love.

So inspiring. And again, I read this book around the same time I read Barbara Fredrickson's Love 2.0. And it's a pretty introverted, deliberately hermit mode, you know, lover of wisdom. For the last couple years, this idea in Her Love 2.0 just really opened my heart to those micro moments of positivity resonance as she describes them, beyond our little circle of, you know, connection to our families and whatnot. But the way you describe it, of loving life, loving the people with whom we're blessed to work and serve and the projects we're engaged in and.

Just.

Being in love, I mean, that's just such a beautiful concept that to really take it out of the abstract and to actually be it, you know, and to embody it, to model the way, as you would say in your language, has been deeply impactful for me. And I appreciate the eloquence with which you just expressed that. So thank you.

It's a pleasure. And I have, you know, I love using that example and telling that story. I just, I get inspired every time I tell it and recall it. You know, John was such a loved leader because of that philosophy. When he passed away sadly of leukemia, they had a plane fly over the funeral and it was pulling a banner that said love him and lead him because that's how people remembered him. And so I've adopted that with his earlier, with his permission to use in my signature line I sign my all my emails and letters, love them and lead them. Wow. That's amazing because I want to reinforce that message.

Yeah, well, on that note, let's love them and lead them. I can't recommend the Leadership Challenge strongly enough. If you haven't read it yet, get a copy if you feel inspired and make extraordinary things happen in not just organizations, but in the world and in communities and families. Jim, thank you so much and I'm very excited to be connected.

Thanks Brian. It's a pleasure.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule.

Of course it's too late to go.

Back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisks and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me, connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes, where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer. I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson me join.