Great Leadership Creates Great Workplaces

Book excerpt: How can you inspire your employees to the high levels of engagement that drive strong results across the board? Drawing on over 30 years of research and data from more than two million constituents around the world, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, the bestselling authors of The Leadership Challenge, expand on their work with The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership to create a new metric—Positive Workplace Attitudes—addressing how leaders affect employee engagement. Their research shows how positive feelings about being part of the workplace strongly influence people's willingness to apply discretionary effort to their work. People put forth much more effort for their best leaders and very little for their worst leaders. Leaders who more frequently exhibit exemplary practices foster engagement and inspire people to go from acceptable to good and even to great. Filled with new findings from Kouzes and Posner's original research, Great Leadership Creates Great Workplaces expands the reach of The Leadership Challenge to address pressing, critical issues around employee engagement, and how leaders can improve it to outperform the competition.