The Student Leadership Challenge E-Book

James M. Kouzes

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B Leadership Challenge: Kouzes/Posner
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 448

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Note from the publisher: This edition includes an access code so students can take the Student Leadership Practices Inventory Self Online, a brief, 30-question assessment to help them explore their own leadership behaviors and skills and determine the steps they can take to liberate the leader within and become their best selves. If you rent or purchase a used book, the access code may have been redeemed previously and will no longer work. In this updated and expanded second edition of The Student Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner apply their extensive research and expertise to demonstrate that anyone can be a leader, regardless of age or experience. They challenge high school and undergraduate college students to examine their leadership actions and aspirations. Your students will learn from first-hand leadership stories from young leaders like themselves around the world, helping them to deeply understand and explore The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: * Model the Way * Inspire a Shared Vision * Challenge the Process * Enable Others to Act * Encourage the Heart The book guides students through the concrete actions they can take to become exemplary leaders, from finding their voice and clarifying their values, to recognizing others' contributions and celebrating others' victories. The authors ask readers to reflect at the end of each chapter on their own leadership experiences and abilities now and for the future.

Leseprobe

Contents

Important Information About the Student Leadership Practices Inventory® Self Online

Preface: Making Extraordinary Things Happen with Others

Chapter 1: Introduction: When People Are at Their Best as Leaders

The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership

Notes

Practice 1: Model the Way

Chapter 2: Commitment #1: Clarify Values

Find Your Voice

Affirm Shared Values

Take Action: Clarify Values

Notes

Chapter 3: Commitment #2: Set the Example

Live the Shared Values

Teach Others to Model the Values

Take Action: Set the Example

Notes

Practice 2: Inspire a Shared Vision

Chapter 4: Commitment #3: Envision the Future

Imagine the Possibilities

Find a Common Purpose

Take Action: Envision the Future

Notes

Chapter 5: Commitment #4: Enlist Others

Appeal to Common Ideals

Animate the Vision

Take Action: Enlist Others

Notes

Practice 3: Challenge the Process

Chapter 6: Commitment #5: Search for Opportunities

Seize the Initiative

Exercise Outsight

Take Action: Search for Opportunities

Notes

Chapter 7: Commitment #6: Experiment and Take Risks

Generate Small Wins

Learn from Experience

Take Action: Experiment and Take Risks

Notes

Practice 4: Enable Others to Act

Chapter 8: Commitment #7: Foster Collaboration

Create a Climate of Trust

Facilitate Relationships

Take Action: Foster Collaboration

Notes

Chapter 9: Commitment #8: Strengthen Others

Enhance Self-Determination

Coach for Competence and Confidence

Take Action: Strengthen Others

Notes

Practice 5: Encourage the Heart

Chapter 10: Commitment #9: Recognize Contributions

Expect the Best

Personalize Recognition

Take Action: Recognize Contributions

Notes

Chapter 11: Commitment #10: Celebrate the Values and the Victories

Create a Spirit of Community

Get Personally Involved

Take Action: Celebrate Values and Victories

Notes

Chapter 12: A Call to Action for Young Leaders

Your Continuing Leadership Journey

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

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Index

PRAISE FOR THE SECOND EDITION OF THE STUDENT LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE

“Within the academy, we are constantly seeking additional tools to assist us in teaching the valuable lesson of leadership development for students. The Student Leadership Challenge is an excellent resource to assist in the important goal of helping students to become better leaders and, ultimately, stellar citizens in the communities of the world.”

—Victor K. Wilson, vice president for student affairs, The University of Georgia

“Student leadership challenges are quite similar to adult challenges, and yet they differ as well—in scale and in the power of peer perspective. Kouzes and Posner have constructed a wide and sturdy bridge across these worlds. My college students will find relevant lessons and great inspiration in the diverse and compelling stories that are retold. We’d have a lot less adult leadership problems if more teachers and students used this great book.”

—Dan Mulhern, Distinguished Practitioner of Law and Business, University of California, Berkeley, and author, Everyday Leadership: Getting Results in Business, Politics, and Life

“Kouzes and Posner provide a comprehensive, research-based, and values-driven resource that is packed with real-life examples. This book makes leadership highly accessible to college students and is sure to empower the next generation to tap into their potential as leaders and social change agents.”

—Jennifer R. Keup, director, National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition

“The Five Practices has provided a framework for students to reflect on their leadership experience and restructure their philosophy and theories relating to leadership as they challenge themselves through these five practices.”

—Amy Kuo Somchanhmavong, associate director, Service-Learning, Public Service Center, Cornell University

Copyright © 2014 by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. All Rights Reserved.

Published by The Leadership Challenge®

A Wiley Brand

One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594

www.leadershipchallenge.com

Cover design: Adrian Morgan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and is on file with the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-118-39007-8 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-60253-9 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-60255-3 (ebk.)

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE STUDENT LEADERSHIP PRACTICES INVENTORY® SELF ONLINE

If you purchased an new electronic copy of this book, you are eligible to receive one single-use access code for the Student Leadership Practices Inventory Self Online assessment. Follow these instructions to retrieve your code.

Go to

www.studentlpi.com/ebook

Fill out the required information to verify your purchase.

Your code will be automatically e-mailed to you.

Go to:

slpiself.studentleadershipchallenge.com

and enter your code to take the inventory.

If you are using a free-sample, used, rented, or borrowed copy of this e-book, you are not eligible to receive a free code, but may purchase one at

www.studentlpi.com/assess

The Student Leadership Practices Inventory (Student LPI®) is the cornerstone of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® model. Created by leadership educators James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, this powerful leadership development model approaches leadership as a measurable, learnable, and teachable set of behaviors, because everyone can be a leader—whether in a designated leadership role or not. The Student LPI offers you a method for accurately assessing your leadership skills based on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, by measuring the frequency with which you engage in 30 behaviors that research shows lead to the best leadership outcomes.

Preface: Making Extraordinary Things Happen with Others

Leaders get people moving. They energize and mobilize. They take people to places they have never been before. The leadership challenge never goes away. In uncertain and turbulent times, accepting that challenge is the only antidote to chaos, stagnation, and disintegration. Times change, problems change, technologies change, and people change. Leadership endures.

Change is the province of leaders. It is the work of leaders to inspire people to do things differently, to struggle against uncertain odds, and to persevere toward a distant yet compelling image of a better future. Without leadership there would not be the extraordinary efforts necessary to solve existing problems and realize unimagined opportunities. We have today, at best, only faint clues of what the future may hold, but we are confident that without leadership the possibilities will neither be envisioned nor attained. This is as true for leaders in business and industry as it is true for you while you’re still in school or preparing for your career.

THE STUDENT LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE

The Student Leadership Challenge is about how young leaders, people just like you, mobilize others to want to make extraordinary things happen. It’s about the practices they use day to day. Leaders use these practices to transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards. It’s about leadership that creates the place in which people turn challenging opportunities into remarkable successes.

The publication of this second edition of The Student Leadership Challenge marks six years since the book was first published. We’ve continued over that time to research, consult, teach, and write about what young leaders do and how anyone, regardless of age, can learn to be a better leader. We’re honored by the reception we’ve received in the education marketplace. While we and other authors regularly contribute new works, we are blessed that students, educators, and practitioners continue to find that The Student Leadership Challenge is still useful to them, both conceptually and practically, and that it stands the test of time.

We persist in asking today the same basic question we asked when we started our journey into understanding exemplary leadership: What did you do when you were at your personal best as a leader? One of the most typical and profound realizations from this reflection is, as one student explained: “Growing up, I assumed leaders had certain traits and qualities that I didn’t seem to have. I thought there were ‘natural’ leaders who were born to lead. I thought leadership was the description of what these people did. When you asked me to describe my personal-best leadership experience, I found to my surprise, that I had those leadership abilities myself.” Another student told us that “writing down and thinking through my personal-best experience really helped me identify my skills and areas for improvement.” Still another student said that she learned “that anybody can be a leader. I had never considered myself a leader, but when I was needed to step up and deal with a situation, I was able to find the leader within me.”

We’ve talked to thousands of young men and women, representing many educational institutions and youth organizations from many different places around the world. Their stories, and the behaviors and actions they’ve described, combined with those of thousands of other leaders, reveal The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® framework, which you can use to become a better, more effective leader. When leaders do their best, they Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. These are The Five Practices we have discovered by studying thousands of leaders, your age and older, around the world. And these are the practices we describe in great detail in this book.

The Student Leadership Challenge is evidence-based. The Five Practices are derived from research, and are illustrated with examples from real student leaders doing real things. With the second edition of this book, we update the research—both our own findings and those from other scholars around the globe. We report new stories, cases, examples, and illustrations of exactly what young people like you do when they are at their leadership best. Also, with this new edition we get the chance to be clearer about what is still important, throw out what’s not, and add what we have learned that is new about young leaders. We get the chance to make concepts easier to understand so you can focus on applying what works. We get the chance to help you answer the call to be the best leader you can be.

The more we research and the more we write about leadership, the more confident we become that leadership is within the grasp of everyone and that opportunities for leadership are everywhere. No matter what your past experience is as a leader, we know that you have the capacity to lead if you choose to. Leadership is not about a position or title, as many young leaders presume. It is about a role you chose to take throughout your life—a role with the goal to make extraordinary things happen on a regular basis.

Of course, with each edition, we also get to address a new generation of emerging leaders. This motivates us to collect new stories, examine new research findings, and talk with people who have recently demonstrated extraordinary leadership. It encourages us to perform a litmus test of the relevance of our results: Does this model of leadership still make sense? If we started out all over again, would we find new leadership practices? Would we eliminate any of the practices? In this regard, we are aided by the ongoing empirical data provided by the online version of the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) and Student Leadership Practices Inventory (Student LPI). These inventories, which assess The Five Practices, provide several hundred thousand responses annually, and keep us on guard and on target in identifying the behaviors that make a difference.

Also, with this new edition, we get a chance to speak again with those of you who might have read the earlier edition of The Student Leadership Challenge or our classic work, The Leadership Challenge. If you’re reading this book for the first time, welcome. If you are returning to it again, welcome back. We are thrilled you have chosen to explore your potential to lead. We know that you can, we know that your leadership matters, and we know that building your leadership capacity will shape our world for years to come.

In reading this new edition we hope you get a deep understanding of The Five Practices and what they look like in action today. In using The Five Practices in your life, we hope you continue to grow, to develop yourself as a leader, and to make a difference. You are in a stage of life where those opportunities to make a difference are all around you: in your schools, youth groups, clubs and organizations, athletics, classes, and your community. As you take advantage of these opportunities to learn and lead, others will begin to take note and look to you to help them figure out how they can develop themselves as leaders. You don’t just owe it to yourself to become the best leader you can possibly be. You have a responsibility to others as well. You may not yet know it, but people all around you need you to do your best and be your best.

A GUIDE FOR STUDENT LEADERS

How do you get other people to want to follow you? How do you get other people, by free will and free choice, to move forward together on a common purpose? How do you get people energized to work hard together to get something done that everyone can feel proud of? These are the important questions we address in The Student Leadership Challenge. Think of this book as a guide to take along on your leadership journey. Think of it as a manual you can consult when you want advice and guidance on how to get extraordinary things done. Think of it as a place to go when you’re not really sure what to do as a leader.

In Chapter 1 we introduce our leadership framework by sharing a Personal Best Leadership Experience—a case study about how one leader acted on her values and pursued a path of commitment and action to make a difference for the environmental future of her country. We provide an overview of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, summarizing the findings about what leaders do when they are at their best, and show how these actions make a difference.

The ten chapters that follow describe the Ten Commitments of Leadership—the essential behaviors—that leaders use to get extraordinary things done. We also explain the fundamental principles that support each of The Five Practices. A great thing about accepting and adopting this framework of leadership is that it isn’t difficult to understand, doesn’t cost any money or require anybody else’s permission. It simply requires a commitment from you and ongoing practice to make them habits in your life.

In Chapter 12, we offer a call to action to accept personal responsibility to be a role model for leadership and to make these leadership practices part of your daily life, in all aspects of your life. The first place to look for leadership is within you. Accepting the leadership challenge requires practice, reflection, humility, and making the most of every opportunity to make a difference. In the end, we conclude: Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart. You’ll see what we mean by that and how that applies to you in the final chapter.

We recommend that you first read Chapter 1, but after that there is no right order to proceeding through the rest of this book. Go wherever your interests are. We wrote The Student Leadership Challenge to support you in your leadership development. Just remember that each practice is essential. Although you might skip around in the book, you can’t skip doing any of these fundamentals of leadership.

Finally, technology allows us to offer you insights beyond those in this book. On our website, http://www.studentleadershipchallenge.com, you can find out more about how you can work on The Five Practices with tried-and-true tools in addition to new ones. You can also learn what others are doing in schools and youth organizations as well as more about our research.

The domain of leaders is the future. The leader’s unique legacy is the creation of valued organizations and groups that survive over time. The most significant contribution leaders make is the long-term development of people so they can adapt, change, prosper, and grow. This includes groups you can lead now as well as those you will find yourself leading throughout your life: community organizations, clubs, religious congregations, and even your own family.

We hope this book contributes to the success you have working with others, to the creation of new ideas and enterprises, to the renewal of healthy schools and prosperous communities, and to greater respect and understanding in the world. We also fervently hope that it enriches your life.

Leadership is important in every sector, every school, every community, every organization, and in every country. It is important right now, wherever you are in your life, no matter what stage or what level of experience you have in school or your community. More exemplary leaders are needed right now, and more than ever leaders who can unite us and ignite us. There is so much extraordinary work that needs to be done, and so many opportunities ahead.

Leadership development is fundamentally self-development. Meeting the leadership challenge is a personal—and a daily—challenge for everyone. We know that if you have the will and the way to lead, you can. You have to supply the will. We’ll do our best to keep supplying the way.

James M. Kouzes

Orinda, California

Barry Z. Posner

Berkeley, California

Leadership defined:

Leadership is the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations.

Chapter 1

Introduction: When People Are at Their Best as Leaders

You don’t have to be a superstar or an overachiever to lead; you just need to care about something and do something about it. It doesn’t have to be big, just do something. Every great change starts small. You just need to take that first step, not because you necessarily have the authority or responsibility, but because you care.

—Elliese Judge, Panama City, Panama

This was the thinking that got Elliese Judge going. When she was nineteen, she helped start a nonprofit organization called Arvita that continues to focus on improving environmental awareness through organic recycling and sustainable reforestation.1

Elliese was born in Australia and moved with her family to Panama when she was fourteen. When she got a part-time job at a Panama City bank she wanted to recycle some of the papers in the office. “While I was working there,” Elliese told us, “I realized how inconvenient it was to recycle and how nobody seemed to think it was important. There was no truck or pick-up; you had to take everything to the landfill yourself and nobody wanted to be bothered.”

When Elliese went to the landfill she met some of the people in the community who were living right next to it. The whole neighborhood smelled terrible and this bothered her deeply. She realized that her family and others like it were producing a great deal of waste that was being dumped directly next to these people. That didn’t feel right. Her new perspective on the whole cycle of waste in the country deepened her belief that this was a significant issue, a problem that needed to be addressed. So she decided to do something about it, first at the bank, then in her own home, and from there the idea started to grow, bit by bit.