An Instructor’s Manual is available online at: www.wiley.com/college/perry.
Edited by
James L. Perry
We are pleased to provide additional articles free on our website. Please visit www.josseybass.com/go/nonprofitreader to download pdf versions of the articles.
Originally appeared in the Fall 2004 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (www.SSIReview.org).
Originally published in Managing at the Leading Edge: New Challenges in Managing Nonprofit Organizations (2005).
Originally published in Working Across Generations: Defining the Future of Nonprofit Leadership (2009).
Originally published in Leading Beyond the Walls, edited by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Iain Somerville (1999).
Originally published in Artful Leadership: Managing Stakeholder Problems in Nonprofit Arts Organizations (1996).
Instructors can access an Instructor’s Manual at the following web address: www.wiley.com/college/perry.
In the interest of relevance and readability, the editor has slightly adapted the selections for this volume. For the complete texts, please refer to the original sources.
Chapter 1
Max DePree, “What Is Leadership?,” Leadership Is an Art. (New York: Doubleday, 1989).
Chapter 2
John W. Gardner, “The Tasks of Leadership,” On Leadership. (New York: The Free Press, 1990).
Chapter 3
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, “The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership,” The Leadership Challenge (4th ed.). (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).
Chapter 4
Ray Blunt, “Leaders Growing Leaders,” Growing Leaders for Public Service. (Washington, DC: IBM Center for the Business of Government, 2003).
Chapter 5
John Carver, “Maintaining Board Leadership: Staying on Track and Institutionalizing Excellence,” Boards That Make a Difference (3rd ed.). (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).
Chapter 6
Montgomery Van Wart, “Public-Sector Leadership Theory: An Assessment,” Public Administration Review, 63. (March/April 2003).
Chapter 7
Jim Keddy, “Human Dignity and Grassroots Leadership Development,” Social Policy. (Summer 2001).
Chapter 8
Larry C. Spears, “Practicing Servant-Leadership,” Leader to Leader, 34. (Fall 2004).
Chapter 9
Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, “Share Leadership,” Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008).
Chapter 10
Ann Marie Thomson and James L. Perry, “Collaboration Processes: Inside the Black Box,” Public Administration Review, 66. (December/Special Issue, 2006).
Chapter 11
John M. Bryson, “The Strategy Change Cycle.” In Robert Herman (Ed.), The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management (2nd ed.). (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
Chapter 12
Jeffrey L. Bradach, Thomas J. Tierney, and Nancy Stone, “Delivering on the Promise of Nonprofits,” Harvard Business Review, 86. (December 2008).
Chapter 13
Robert D. Behn, “Performance Leadership: Eleven Better Practices That Can Ratchet Up Performance.” (Washington, DC: IBM Center for the Business of Government, 2004).
Chapter 14
Edgar H. Schein, “The Learning Leader as Culture Manager,” Organizational Culture and Leadership. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996).
Chapter 15
Warren Bennis and Joan Goldsmith, “Maintaining Trust Through Integrity,” Learning to Lead. (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
Chapter 16
Terry L. Cooper, “Administrative Responsibility: The Key to Administrative Ethics.” In Terry Cooper (Ed.), The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role (5th ed.). (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).
Chapter 17
Bill George, “Empowering People to Lead,” True North. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).
Chapter 18
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, “Enlist Others: Attracting People to Common Purposes,” The Leadership Challenge (2nd ed.). (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).
Chapter 19
R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., “Diversity Management: An Essential Craft for Leaders,” Leader to Leader, 41. (Summer 2006).
Chapter 20
Lisa Blomgren Bingham, “Negotiating for the Public Good.” In James L. Perry (Ed.), Handbook of Public Administration (2nd ed.). (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996).
Chapter 21
Talula Cartwright and David Baldwin, “Seeing Your Way: Why Leaders Must Communicate Their Visions,” Leadership in Action (pp. 15-24). (July/August 2007).
Chapter 22
William F. Kumuyi, “Seven Communication Tips an Effective Leader Must Have,” New African (July/August/September 2007).
Chapter 23
Salvatore P. Alaimo, “Nonprofits and Evaluation: Managing Expectations from the Leader’s Perspective. In J. G. Carman and K. A. Fredericks (Eds.), Nonprofits and Evaluation. New Directions for Evaluation, 119. (Fall 2008).
Chapter 24
Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, “Sustaining Impact,” Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008).
Chapter 25
Ann Gilley, Pamela Dixon, and Jerry W. Gilley, “Characteristics of Leadership Effectiveness: Implementing Change and Driving Innovation in Organizations,” Human Resource Development Quarterly, 19. (February 2008).
Chapter 26
Sandford Borins, “Leadership and Innovation in the Public Sector,” Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 23. (2002).
Chapter 27
Frances Kunreuther, “The Changing of the Guard: What Generational Differences Tell Us About Social-Change Organizations,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 32. (2003).
Chapter 28
Michael Allison, “Boards and Executive Transitions,” Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 12. (April 2002).
Chapter 29
Marcia Marsh, “Leadership and Leading: Leadership Challenges,” American Review of Public Administration, 36. (April 2006).
Chapter 30
Thomas J. Tierney, “Understanding the Nonprofit Sector’s Leadership Deficit.” In Frances Hesselbein and Marshall Goldsmith (Eds.), The Leader of the Future 2. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).
Chapter 31
Jeffrey Yip, Serena Wong, and Christopher Ernst, “The Nexus Effect: When Leaders Span Group Boundaries,” Leadership in Action, 28. (September/October 2008).
Chapter 32
Leslie Lenkowsky, “The Politics of Doing Good: Philanthropic Leadership for the Twenty-First Century.” In William Damon and Susan Verducci (Eds.), Taking Philanthropy Seriously: Beyond Noble Intentions to Responsible Giving. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006).
Chapter 33
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “New Models of Public Leadership.” In Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Iain Somerville (Eds.), Leading Beyond the Walls. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).
Chapter 34
Barbara Kellerman, “The Ties That Bind,” Reinventing Leadership. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999).
By Jim Kouzes
Name an historical leader whom you greatly admire—a well-known leader from the distant or recent past whom you could imagine following willingly. Who is that leader?
We’ve asked thousands of people to do this over the last twenty-five years. Although no single leader receives a majority of the nominations, in the United States, the two most frequently mentioned are Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Other historical leaders who’ve made the list include Aung San Suu Kyi, Susan B. Anthony, Benazir Bhutto, César Chávez, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Miguel Hidalgo, Nelson Mandela, Golda Meir, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, His Holiness Pope John Paul II, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, Margaret Thatcher, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
What do these leaders have in common? One quality stands out above all else. The most striking similarity we’ve found—and surely it’s evident to you—is that the list is populated by people with strong beliefs about matters of principle. They all have, or had, unwavering commitment to a clear set of values. They all are, or were, passionate about their causes.
The lesson from this simple exercise is unmistakable. People admire most those who believe strongly in something, and who are willing to stand up for their beliefs. If anyone is ever to become a leader whom others would willingly follow, one certain prerequisite is that they must be someone of principle.
And there’s something else striking about this list. The vast majority of people who are nominated as admired historical leaders are largely from the domains of nonprofit and public leadership. They are individuals who lead movements for social justice, who guided us through our darkest hours, and who seized the initiative to improve the quality of our lives. They are, in other words, leaders from the types of organizations that are the focus of this book. Far too often the discussion of leadership makes heroes of those who are driven to make money, failing to recognize the lasting contributions made by those who are driven to make meaning.
Famous figures from history, most assuredly, aren’t the only leaders with strong beliefs on matters of principle. For over twenty-five years, Barry Posner and I have been researching personal-best leadership experiences, and the people we’ve studied are everyday leaders from all types of organizations. They could be leaders in the local community, the neighborhood school, ones down the hall from you, ones next door—and also you. The personal-best leadership cases we’ve collected are, at their core, the stories of individuals who remained true to deeply held values.
Representative of this group is Arlene Blum, biophysical chemist, mountaineer, and tireless campaigner for better policies for fire retardants and related chemicals. She’s also the first woman to lead a team of all women to the summit of Annapurna, the tenth highest mountain in the world. She certainly knows firsthand the challenges of leadership under life-and-death conditions.
In talking about what separates those who make a successful ascent from those who don’t, Arlene says, “The real dividing line is passion. As long as you believe what you’re doing is meaningful, you can cut through fear and exhaustion and take the next step.” Arlene could easily be talking about the leaders in nonprofits and public organizations. It’s about the meaning of the work. What gets leaders—and all of us, really—through the tough times, the scary times, the times when you don’t think you can even get up in the morning or take another step, is a sense of meaning and purpose. The motivation to deal with the challenges and uncertainties of life and work comes from the inside, and not from something that others hold out in front of you as some kind of carrot.
People commit to causes, not to plans. How else do you explain why people volunteer to rebuild communities ravaged by a tsunami, ride a bike from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money to fight AIDS, or rescue people from the rubble of a collapsed building after an earthquake? How else do you explain why people toil 24/7 to create the next big thing when the probability of failure is 60-70 percent? People are not committing to the plan in any of these cases. There may not even be a plan to commit to. They are committing to something much bigger, something much more compelling than goals and milestones on a piece of paper. That’s not to say that plans aren’t important to executing on grand dreams. They absolutely are. It’s just to say that the plan isn’t the thing that people are committing to.
Here’s something else to consider. For a long time now we’ve been asking people about the leader role models in their own lives. Not the well-known historical leaders, but the leaders with whom they’ve had personal experience. We’ve asked them to identify the person they’d select as their most important role model for leadership, and then we’ve given them a list of eight possible categories from which these leaders might come. They can choose from business leader, community or religious leader, entertainer or Hollywood star, family member, political leader, professional athlete, teacher or coach, or other/none/not sure. From which category do you think the largest percentage of leader role models comes? Answer: Family member.
Regardless of whether one is young or old, when thinking back over our lives and selecting the most important leader role model, it’s more likely to be a family member than anyone else. Nearly 50 percent of people find their leader role model among a member of their family. For respondents under 30, the second most frequently selected category is teacher-coach, and the third is community leader. For the over 30 crowd, business leader is number two. (And when we probe further, what people really mean when they say business leader is someone who was an immediate supervisor at work.) In third position is teacher-coach.
What does this selection of leader role models tell us? It says that leadership is not about position or title. Leadership is not about organizational power or authority. It’s not about celebrity or wealth. It’s not about being a CEO, president, general, or prime minister. And it’s definitely not about being a superstar. Leadership is about relationships. The leader role models we most admire come from those people we know well and who know us well. They are the ones with whom we have had intimate contact. They are the people we are the closest to.
If you’re a manager in an organization, to your direct reports you are the most important leader in your organization. You are more likely than any other leader to influence their desire to stay or leave, the trajectory of their careers, their ethical behavior, their ability to perform at their best, their drive to wow customers, their satisfaction with their jobs, and their motivation to share the organization’s vision and values.
If you’re a parent, teacher, coach, or community leader, you are the person who’s setting the leadership example for young people. It’s not hip-hop artists, movie stars, or professional athletes they seek guidance from. You are the one they are most likely going to look to for the example of how a leader responds to competitive situations, handles crises, deals with loss, or resolves ethical dilemmas. It’s not someone else. It’s you.
The leaders who have the most influence on us are those who are the closest to us. We have to challenge the myth that leadership is about position and power. And, once challenged, people can come to see leadership in a whole new light.
For example, when we asked Verónica Guerrero, one of the leaders we had the good fortune to interview, to name her most admired leader, she selected her father, José Luis Guerrero. And, in telling us his story, she underscored for us just how extraordinary those around us can be.
She told us about her father’s leadership in the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS) back in the early 1940s. She related in detail what her father did and then summed up his influence with this observation from José Luis: “I think the work that I did back then helped me extend myself and others to levels that I didn’t know I could reach . . . . If you feel strongly about anything, and it’s something that will ultimately benefit your community and your country, don’t hold back. Fear of failing or fear of what might happen doesn’t help anyone . . . . Don’t let anyone or anything push you back.”
Verónica closed her description of her father (who was then dying of pancreatic cancer) with this observation: “As I heard his story and I saw a sick, tired, and weak man, I couldn’t help thinking that our strength as humans and as leaders has nothing to do with what we look like. Rather, it has everything to do with what we feel, what we think of ourselves . . . . Leadership is applicable to all facets of life.” That’s precisely the point. If you are to become a better leader, you must first believe that leadership applies to you and that you can be a positive force in the world.
The question for each of us is not Do I matter? but How do I matter? If others look to you for leadership, how are you doing in leading them right now? Not how is my boss doing, or how is the CEO doing, or how is that famous leader doing, but how am I doing? None of us needs a ton of statistical studies to tell us how we respond when people are providing terrific leadership and when they’re doing a lousy job of it. We just know. Developing better leaders really begins right here at home when we take a look at how we are doing.
Leadership is everyone’s business. No matter what your position is, you have to take responsibility for the quality of leadership your constituents get. You—and that means all of us—are accountable for the leadership you demonstrate. And, because you are the most important leader to those closest to you, the only choice you really have is whether or not to be the best leader you can be.
That is what we hope to offer you in this book—the opportunity to make a few strides along the path to being the best leader you can be.
To paraphrase the title of a recent book, “leadership—if not now, when?” it seems that our public affairs are in a constant state of crisis. Crises have become so commonoplace—9/11, the subprime crisis, the credit crisis—that the word “crisis” may be in danger of losing its shock value. Our sense of constant crisis has elevated the salience of leadership for all of us. Recent crises have magnified flaws in some of our leaders, made heroes of others, and produced a longing among many that someone step forward to fix the mess in which the modern world finds itself.
The rise of a new American leader, Barack Obama, has also triggered renewed interest in leadership. For older generations, President Obama is a reminder of another youthful president, John F. Kennedy. To the world’s youth, Obama represents possibility. Becoming the first African-American president opens the door to others in our diverse society who believed that ascending to the presidency was not possible. Both Obama’s election and his leadership style symbolize a changing order.
This book seeks to provide some answers about leadership for people to whom leadership may have renewed salience because of crises and awareness of possibility. The book’s domain of interest is the arena of public affairs—the nonprofit and public sectors. Leading in most public and nonprofit situations is a big challenge, and no one needs to exaggerate difficulties or equate them with recent public crises. Public and nonprofit leaders are confronted by the lights that shine on their public work, resource, authority, and power distributions that sometimes set off a free-for-all for influence among stakeholders and hard choices about who wins and who loses.
One question that may occur to some readers is, “Why bring readings about leadership in the nonprofit and public sectors together in the same book?” Several factors contribute to featuring readings about the nonprofit and public sectors in the same volume. I will touch on three of these factors here. One reason is the belief among many professionals and scholars that the nature of leadership in different sectors is converging. This perception is reflected as a theme in several of the readings contained in this reader, most prominently Barbara Kellerman’s closing chapter. Some of the other readings treat leadership as a generic function in organizations, which presupposes some degree of convergence across sectors. I do not take a position about convergence in my editorial commentaries later in this reader, but the widespread perception that leadership tasks and skills are converging contributes to the rationale for including readings about the nonprofit and public sectors in the same volume.
Another factor contributing to presenting nonprofit and public sector readings in the same volume is that both nonprofit and government organizations are public-benefit organizations. Organizations from each sector are fundamentally about the public good. Government and nonprofit organizations also differ in many ways—for example, the distinctive voluntary character of nonprofit enterprises versus the coercive nature of much government activity. But their shared attention to the public or common good also unites them in important ways. The affinity of leaders in both the nonprofit and public sectors for the idea of servant-leadership is one indication that similarity around public purpose unites the ways in which leaders in each sector see themselves.
A final factor is that many parts of the two sectors are closely intertwined. As some of the authors note, public work that had once been done by government is now done by nonprofit organizations. What’s more, large parts of the nonprofit sector, particularly at the local level, work hand-in-hand with government to deliver social services. The close working relationships across the sectors feeds some parallelism across the sectors and also demands that leaders from one sector appreciate the situation of their counterparts in the other sector. Just as important is the fact that the education of leaders in the nonprofit and government sectors often occurs in the same academic settings under the auspices of programs affiliated with American Humanics and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration.
The intended audience for this reader includes: (1) graduate and advanced undergraduate students who are preparing for leadership careers in the nonprofit and public sectors; (2) managers and professionals already working in nonprofit and public organizations who are seeking to broaden their perspectives about their enterprises; and (3) faculty members in professional schools that prepare students for the public, nonprofit, and social sectors. The readings are intended primarily for those who are embarking on leadership careers, but may also prove valuable to more experienced professionals who want to refresh or add to their stock of knowledge.
The reader is organized in four parts. Part I, Aspirations for Leaders in the Nonprofit and Public Sectors, consists of five readings. They focus on the ends to which nonprofit and public leaders aspire as leaders. The readings begin with perspectives offered by two of the most acclaimed and articulate leaders of the late twentieth century, Max DePree and John Gardner. The third contribution in Part I, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner, indicates that the opening perspectives DePree and Gardner provide are not idiosyncratic, but are replicated in grounded research on a large sample of leaders. The final two readings in Part I look at intermediate steps toward leadership excellence in identifying the developmental processes by which leaders and boards grow in their capacities as leaders.
Part II, Leadership Theories for the Nonprofit and Public Sectors, also consists of five readings. It begins with a chapter that extensively reviews leadership theories developed during the last century. The opening chapter is followed by four chapters that explore theories that are particularly well suited to the contexts in which nonprofit and public leaders find themselves. In succession, the readings discuss grassroots, servant, shared, and collaborative leadership. As a whole, the readings in Part II provide a strong introduction to the range of what scholars and practitioners have come to know as leadership theory.
The largest number of readings in this volume appear in Part III, Critical Leadership Skills. As I explain in its introduction, Part III is a bridge between the high-minded principles introduced in Parts I and II and the “doing” of leadership. Given the volume of readings in Part III, thirteen in all, I organized the part around three skill-sets: conceptual, human, and technical. Within the conceptual set, the readings cover an important range of skills, including managing strategically, achieving results, shaping culture, leading ethically, and establishing trust. The human skills addressed involve motivating others, managing diversity, and negotiating for the public good. Part III concludes with two readings about technical skills, specifically communicating with stakeholders and evaluating achievements.
The reader concludes with Part IV, The Next Generation of Leaders and Leadership. This grouping of eleven readings looks to the future of leadership and leaders in the nonprofit and public sectors. The part begins with an article that looks at how leaders can institutionalize their impact beyond their tenure as leaders. The next readings about change and innovation explore the converse of institutionalization. The readings then shift to addressing who will be the next generation of leaders, how leadership transitions can be managed, and what can be done to ensure the quality of future leaders in the nonprofit and public sectors. The concluding readings in Part IV look holistically at leadership in the philanthropic, public, and business sectors.
James L. Perry is Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington. He is also an adjunct professor of philanthropic studies and political science. He has held faculty appointments at the University of California, Irvine; Chinese University of Hong Kong; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Yonsei University; and University of Hong Kong. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and M.P.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Dr. Perry’s recent research focuses on public service motivation, community and national service, collaboration, and government reform. His research appears in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Public Administration Review. He is author and editor of several books, including the Handbook of Public Administration (2nd ed.) (Jossey-Bass, 1996), Civic Service: What Difference Does It Make? (with Ann Marie Thomson; M. E. Sharpe, 2004), Quick Hits for Educating Citizens (with Steve Jones; Indiana University Press, 2006), and Motivation in Public Management: The Call of Public Service (with Annie Hondeghem; Oxford University Press, 2008).
Dr. Perry is recipient of several national awards. He received the Yoder-Heneman Award for innovative personnel research from the Society for Human Resource Management. He is recipient of two awards, the Charles H. Levine Memorial Award for Excellence in Public Administration and the Distinguished Research Award, given jointly by the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration. He is recipient of the Best Book Award from the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management. ASPA has recognized him with two awards, the Paul P. Van Riper Award for Excellence and Service and the Dwight Waldo Award for career contributions to the literature of public administration. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
When a U.S. President goes before a joint session of Congress to fulfill the constitutional injunction to “give to the Congress information of the state of the union,” the President is usually prone to proclaim that the state of the union is strong. Can the same claim be made about the state of leadership in the nonprofit and public sectors? Well, the answer depends on whom you ask. One claim about which we are more certain is that we know a good deal about what leaders should do. Whether our leaders measure up, however, is sometimes another matter. And the divergence between what ought to be and what is helps to explain why leadership fascinates us.
Max DePree and the late John Gardner, whose writings open this volume, built outstanding careers by offering insights about the essence of leadership and practicing what they preached. DePree distinguished himself in the world of business as chairman of Herman Miller Incorporated, one of the world’s largest and most successful office furniture designers and manufacturers. DePree is a member of the Fortune magazine National Business Hall of Fame. His four books about leadership, lectures, and philanthropy have disseminated widely his perspectives about leadership.
John Gardner’s career was one of extraordinary breadth that included education, philanthropy, and politics. He served as president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson. Among his enduring legacies are founding Independent Sector, the leadership forum for charities, foundations, and corporate giving programs committed to advancing the common good, and Common Cause, a nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy organization whose mission is to help citizens hold their elected leaders accountable to the public interest.
DePree and Gardner’s understanding of the essence of nonprofit and public leadership, each drawing from more than forty years of accumulated wisdom in different arenas of American society, is surprisingly similar. They identify leadership in functional terms, that is, the tasks that leaders perform. As I hope you will agree after reading DePree and Gardner, the overlap in the tasks, although expressed in different ways, is striking. What is also striking are some of the underlying themes that unify DePree and Gardner’s perspectives about leadership.
One of the themes of John Gardner’s chapter, “The Tasks of Leadership,” is the importance of leadership to the health and maintenance of institutions, which Gardner defines as “the structures and processes through which substantial endeavors get accomplished over time.” Institutions, according to Gardner, are not only the means by which accomplishments are achieved, but the vehicles that leaders use to help others carry on after the leader’s exit. In his contribution, “What Is Leadership?,” Max DePree also gives institutions a central role: “Leadership is a concept of owing certain things to the institution.”
Another theme shared in the two introductory readings is the centrality of followership. DePree writes: “The measure of leadership is not the quality of the head, but the tone of the body. The signs of outstanding leadership appear primarily among the followers.” Gardner sounds a similar note, observing “that the purpose of leaders is not to dominate nor diminish followers but to strengthen and help them to develop. In the nonprofit and public sectors, followership merits a special status because the citizens of governments and constituencies of nonprofits are the raison d’être for these organizations.”
The venerable management thinker Peter Drucker once described leadership in a Wall Street Journal article as “more doing than dash.” To some extent, Gardner’s task list evokes Drucker’s contention, but both DePree and Gardner give extraordinary attention to values, obligation, and responsibility. DePree and Gardner leave no doubt that leadership is a moral enterprise.
The DePree and Gardner readings give us checklists for assessing what and how well public and nonprofit officials perform leadership functions. In “The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership,” James Kouzes and Barry Posner condense the essence of leadership to a handful of exemplary practices. Max DePree and John Gardner learned from many years of experience. Kouzes and Posner’s insights come from grounded research spanning more than two decades looking at personal-best leadership experiences. The sample of leaders Kouzes and Posner studied cuts across a wide range of organized activities, including many government and nonprofit organizations. The breadth of their sample of leaders gives them confidence in the generalizability of their findings.
Kouzes and Posner emphasize, echoing a point from DePree, that “leadership is not about personality; it’s about behavior.” Their five exemplary practices therefore dwell on behaviors that can make a difference to leaders in nonprofit and public organizations. The first practice they offer, model the way, is one that you will encounter frequently in the leadership literature if you read enough of it. Being a good example to others is critical for developing bonds between leader and follower, establishing trust, and modeling practices you want others to follow.
The second practice involves inspiring a shared vision. Recognize this: inspiring a shared vision is not the same as having a vision. Inspiring a shared vision depends as much on expressing the vision in ways others comprehend it and communicating the vision to enlist support as it does on the content of the vision itself.
Kouzes and Posner’s third practice is challenge the process. One thing we know about human behavior is that change is difficult. Leaders are the ones who must marshal people to act contrary to a natural tendency. They can do so by modeling the way for others and inspiring a shared understanding that the status quo must be abandoned.
The fourth practice arising from Kouzes and Posner’s research is enable others to act. One facet of being an enabler is to build a climate within which trust flourishes and collaboration and cooperation are commonplace. Organizations that are endowed with rich climates of trust and collaboration empower their members.
Even if leaders do all the right things, they must help followers find ways to sustain commitment and effort. Kouzes and Posner call this practice encourage the heart, and the metaphor of a vital organ is well placed. Leaders who can help followers sustain effort and commitment are a vital part of organizational achievement.
After reviewing functional, philosophical, and behavioral imperatives for leadership, it might be appropriate to ask: What makes leaders in these images? Ray Blunt and John Carver offer sound advice for growing leaders in both nonprofit and public service. In “Leaders Growing Leaders,” Blunt suggests several processes applicable for leader development in both the nonprofit and public sectors. These processes intersect directly with one of the practices suggested by Kouzes and Posner, which is growing leaders by personal example. Blunt goes beyond the power of example to suggest three other processes: mentoring, coaching, and teaching.
Although we associate leadership with managerial roles in organizations, the chapters throughout this book reinforce there are many other places in which we need to find and develop leadership. John Carver’s “Maintaining Board Leadership: Staying on Track and Institutionalizing Excellence” illustrates the importance of leadership in governance forums and how leaders can be developed in these contexts. The principles Carver suggests for securing leadership from nonprofit boards apply to public forums as well. A city manager must be as concerned about the readiness of a city council to lead as is a nonprofit executive director about the readiness of her board.
The five chapters in Part I provide visible signposts for the aspirations of leaders in the nonprofit and public sectors. The signposts derive from the accumulated wisdom of DePree and Gardner, the grounded research of Kouzes and Posner, and the developmental insights of Blunt and Carver. They collectively offer a strong foundation for our exploration of leadership in this reader.
Drucker, Peter. “Leadership: More doing than dash.” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 1988, p. 1.