Leadership and Change

Kouzes and Posner frequently iterate the growing need for today’s leaders to create harmony in a fast-paced world, to promote intergenerational enlightenment, to foster human connections, to nurture safety and sustainability, and to bring peace and hope back to the world. It is a compelling list completed with a promise that if the reader completes the book, they’ll reveal “the secret to success in life” (xv). Their model of leadership is apparently a panacea for life, applicable to every sector, every issue, and every daily dilemma. The book is a “field guide” that includes Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership and Ten Commitments of leadership behavior backed by case studies and enhanced with skill building exercises. Kouzes and Posner’s claims about the book are evangelical and the book is sold to the reader as the “bible” for leadership.

Whether or not the authors intended to create a cult of leadership is beside the point. The facts are that they are extremely experienced in leadership development and that their model for leadership has been approved and adopted by millions of people. The Leadership Challenge is one of the best-selling leadership books of all time and in a sense, the book is not only a physical guide to improve leadership skills, but the authors are also modeling exceptional leadership skills by inspiring their readers to “want to get extraordinary things done.” Notice the subtlety in this core truth of exceptional leadership; great leaders do not simply get people to do things, they get them to want to do things.

The authors have earned a pre-eminent status by defining a model of success that began by asking the right question 25 years ago. When they began their research they did not ask “star performers in excellent companies” what their best practices were. They asked ordinary people what constituted an extraordinary leadership experience and the stories revealed patterns of behavior and practices that led to success. Thus, the model for leadership emerged as well as the insight that leadership was not a genetic predisposition.

The authors claim that their 25 years of research show that leadership is not an esoteric quality of an elite few, it is a learnable quality that is “everyone’s business.” This is an empowering ideal that seems antithetical to modern culture wherein we are surrounded by authority figures whom we are supposed to follow (e.g. political leaders who decipher the constitution and know the best policies to make our society better, religious leaders who interpret spiritual texts and know how we should act to ensure our place in heaven/nirvana/etc, and even business experts who claim to know which products will enhance the quality of our lives). Indeed, the essential structure of our government and private businesses is very hierarchical, so the idea that everyone can and should lead goes against our general social framework. Still, this is precisely the new mindset that the authors claim that citizens should embrace in order to create personal, organizational, societal, and global change. As the authors state, “Leadership is important, not just in your career and within your organization, but in every sector, in every community, and in every country. We need more exemplary leaders, and we need them more than ever” (p. xvi)

I agree that we need good leaders more than ever. I also would not challenge the credibility of their research demonstrating that leadership is a learnable skill. I do questions whether leadership is indeed everyone’s business. Would it truly be a good thing if everyone was a leader? What would society be like if everyone was trying to lead? Don’t we need some followers? If leadership isn’t truly everyone’s business, whose is it and when?