Manila, 17 June 2021 — What leadership behaviors do you show frequently?

“Leadership is not about personality; it’s about behavior.” — James Kouzes and Barry Posner

Story

It happened in 2016. Kouzes and Posner, a pair of leadership specialists at Santa Clara University, put to rest a persistent myth that some people are born as leaders while others are not. “Leaders are born and so are you,” the globe-trotting duo wrote with relish as they showed research that leadership is something we need to develop and work on day by day. That clarification also put an end to the idea that you could develop leadership simply by gaining more knowledge and discussing case studies in an MBA program.

What we can thank Kouzes and Posner for in particular is their explanation that what matters most in leadership development is what you practice in specific behaviors and actions. The challenge, they wrote in Learning Leadership, is “how to increase the frequency with which you engage in these leadership practices, learning about what they mean and becoming more comfortable and confident in their use.” In other words, leadership is about showing up with certain behaviors more frequently than other people.

I am grateful to Kouzes and Posner for bringing us this clarity, and also for focusing our attention on five practices that they consider fundamental to transformational leadership. These are to Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. I have seen how working on these practices day by day will make you a more effective transformational leader. That said, these are not the only leadership behaviors that you need to learn and use to bring positive change to your workplace. There are more.

Challenge

From research at the Center for Creative Leadership, we know that another fundamental guide to growing as a leader is to use the 70:20:10 rule for leadership development. This rule shows that (only) 10% of your leadership growth will come from gaining additional knowledge, whereas 70% will come from engaging in challenging on-the-job assignments. The remaining 20%, which I like to compare to the glue that binds the elements together, comes from the developmental relationships that you form with your peers, mentors, and coach.

Working with leaders ‘in transition’ has shown me how essential the challenges of on-the-job learning are to growing your leadership. That’s where your daily work on Kouzes and Posner’s practices will help you advance. And that also goes for additional leadership behaviors, such as the ones we explore in the #Grow3Leaders Challenge, where each monthly theme covers an effective leadership behavior. 

Question

The question to start with is what leadership behaviors you show frequently in your workplace. How many can you see?

And, following on from that, what behaviors you are currently working on in order to show up as a better leader in your workplace?

As Kouzes and Posner mentioned, it matters how frequently you show up with leadership behaviors, beginning with the ones that you choose to learn and practice with priority.