188: The Leadership Challenge – Master the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership with Jim Kouzes

Ep188 The Leadership Challenge the 5 practices of Exemplary Leadership Jim Kouzes TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay

The world we live in is changing every day and keeping up with the ever-evolving norms of the workplace can be a daunting task for leaders. Drawing a useful distinction between the content of leadership and the context, co-author of The Leadership Challenge Jim Kouzes joins Halelly on this episode of The TalentGrow Show to share five practices of exemplary leadership that remain relevant across all workplace cultures and demographics.

The world we live in is changing every day and keeping up with the ever-evolving norms of the workplace can be a daunting task for leaders. Drawing a useful distinction between the content of leadership and the context, co-author of The Leadership Challenge Jim Kouzes joins me on this episode of The TalentGrow Show to share five practices of exemplary leadership that remain relevant across all workplace cultures and demographics. Discover what the five practices are and how to leverage them in your own leadership strategy, what it means to apply a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset to leadership development, and what leaders can do to prepare for increasingly complex workplace situations such as the one we’re facing today amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Plus, find out why it’s especially important to be mindful of learning opportunities in a fast-paced, changing environment! Tune in and be sure to share this episode with others.

ABOUT JIM KOUZES: 

Jim Kouzes is an Executive Fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University and the coauthor with Barry Posner of the award-winning and best-selling book, The Leadership Challenge, now in its sixth edition, with over 2.5 million copies sold. Jim has co-authored over a dozen other books, including Stop Selling & Start Leading, Learning Leadership, The Truth About Leadership, Credibility, Encouraging the Heart, and A Leader’s Legacy, as well as the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI)—the top-selling off-the-shelf leadership assessment in the world

The Wall Street Journal named Jim one of the ten best executive educators in the U.S., and he received the Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance Award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). He was presented the Thought Leader Award by the Instructional Systems Association. Jim has also been recognized as one of HR Magazine’s Top 20 Most Influential International Thinkers, as one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior by Trust Across America. He currently serves on the advisory board of the School of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University and is a Fellow of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

  • Jim shares a brief overview of the five practices of exemplary leadership (6:05)

  • How and why the five practices continue to be relevant across various workplace cultures and demographics (8:57)

  • Jim shares some of his favorite recent studies on leadership, and comments on the interesting conclusions drawn from them (13:04)

  • The fixed mindset vs the growth mindset as applied to leadership development (17:00)

  • Jim draws a distinction between the content of leadership and the context, and what that distinction means when we’re responding to trends and shifts in the workplace (20:25)

  • How can leaders prepare for an increase in complexity in situations like the one we’re facing today, with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the workplace? (23:22)

  • The importance of being mindful of finding learning opportunities, especially when things around you are changing at a rapid pace (26:31)

  • What’s new and exciting on Jim’s horizon? (28:37)

  • One specific action you can take today to ratchet up your own leadership skills (30:25)

RESOURCES:

Episode 188

Soundbite: Also it’s helpful to know that there are certain leadership practices that work globally. So you don’t need to learn a different leadership model when you go to the Middle East or when you go to South America or when you go to Australia and New Zealand or when you go to Europe or any region of the world. You don’t have to learn a new leadership operating system, if you will. That same operating system will work globally, so it enables those of us in leadership development to really focus on the skills and abilities rather than on some nuanced, particular cultural attribute. So I think that’s heartening to those of us involved in leadership development. There are some fundamentals that people need to learn and engage in frequently around the world.

Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Intro Hey there TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, the company that sponsors the TalentGrow Show so that it can stay free for you every Tuesday. So leadership development is my jam and I am so grateful and honored and happy to be able to speak to one of the gurus of the leadership development field, Jim Kouzes and he will talk with us about the five core practices of excellent leadership, based on his mega-bestselling book The Leadership Challenge. We’re also going to talk about some new research that’s coming out in the field of leadership development, the implications for us globally, the context of the ever-changing world in which we’re living and the trends and how that affects leadership, and of course the age old question, are leaders born or made? Jim answers that quite plainly and it gives me a chuckle. I hope that you enjoy this episode. It’s excellent and let me know what you thought about it after. Let’s dig in!

Let’s dig in

TalentGrowers, I’m so excited and honored to have Jim Kouzes on with me today. He is an executive fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, and the co-author with Barry Posner of the award-winning and bestselling book, The Leadership Challenge, now in its sixth edition with over 2.5 million copies sold. That’s amazing. Jim has co-authored over a dozen other books, including Stop Selling and Start Leading, Learning Leadership, The Truth About Leadership, Credibility, Encouraging the Heart and A Leader’s Legacy, as well as The Leadership Practices Inventory, LPI, the top-selling, off-the-shelf leadership assessment in the world. The Wall Street Journal named Jim one of the 10 best executive educators in the U.S. and he received the distinguished contribution to workplace learning and performance award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), now the Association for Talent Development – they’ve rebranded. He was presented the thought leader award by the Instructional Systems Association. Jim has also been recognized as one of HR Magazine’s top 20 most influential thinkers, as one of the top 100 thought leaders in trustworthy business behavior by Trust Across America. He currently serves on the advisory board of the School of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University and is a fellow of the Door Institute for new leaders at Rice University. Jim, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.

Thank you very much Halelly. It’s a pleasure to be with you and with all of your listeners.

I am sure that they will be thinking the same thing. They’re going to be glad you’re here because you have so much to share. Before we dig into that, I always ask my guests to describe their professional journey briefly. Where did you start and how did you end up where you are today?

Well, I think I started on this journey back when I was an Eagle Scout and I was selected to be in John F. Kennedy’s honor guard when he was inaugurated President of the United States. My interest in leadership really started at a very young age. In terms of my career, it began when I left the Peace Corps in the mid-60s. I graduated from college in 1967 and joined the Peace Corp in 1967-69, served in Turkey, and when I came back, I wanted to do something to be of service in the United States, not just abroad, but in this country. So I was looking for a job and found one in the Community Action Program Training Institute in Austin, Texas, where we would fly around in the south and southwestern United States and train communication skills, train team-building skills to people who were involved in the war on poverty. The led me to San Jose State, where I directed a grant program in mental health for several years until I was recruited by the School of Business at Santa Clara University, which is where I met my co-author Barry Posner and we met in about 1981 and we had the opportunity to work together. Found we had some common interest and collaborated on our first book, The Leadership Challenge, which is now in its seventh edition. Fast-forward, that brings us to 2020, where we are currently working together now on the seventh edition of The Leadership Challenge, which will be out in 2022.

Amazing. And of course along the way you have made an impact on so many leaders and the book that you wrote, the seminal books, sort of one of the classics of leadership advice or leadership direction, The Leadership Challenge, and with Barry Posner, you say in there that leaders, when they experience their personal best, they display five core practices and you describe in the book these five practices that you call the five practices of exemplary leadership. They are model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act and encourage the heart. Now, of course, people should read your book and I will link to it in the show notes – we’re not going to replicate the book here – but I’d love for you to describe for those who are not yet familiar, give us a brief overview of these five practices?

I’d be delighted to, Halelly. Barry and I wanted to approach leadership from the perspective of what individual leaders do when they’re performing at their best, so this is essentially a best practices model. What we discovered is when people describe their personal bests, leadership experiences, a pattern emerged that was similar across industries, across functions, across countries, in fact, as we extended our research outside of the United States, and those practices as you mentioned begin with model the way. Model the way is about clarifying values, by finding your voice and affirming shared values, and then setting an example based on those values and aligning your actions with shared values. The second practice that emerged from personal best leadership studies was inspire a shared vision. When people were operating at their best, they envisioned the future by imagining exciting and noble possibilities and then they enlisted others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations and in performing at their personal best, leaders reported they also challenged the process. They searched for opportunities by taking the initiative and looking outside of their own organizations and their own functions for innovative ways to improve and then experimenting and taking risks which naturally resulted in sometimes mistakes, so they learned from those mistakes that they make along the way. Also, they enabled others to act with fostering collaboration, fostering trust and facilitating relationships and then strengthening others by increasing their self determination, developing their competence involving them in decisions and so on.

The fifth practice and not necessarily fifth in any particular rank order, but the fifth practice we uncovered, was encourage the heart. It’s tough making these climbs to the submit of excellence, and so people need encouragement along the way. You need to encourage the heart as a leader by recognizing contributions individuals make and then by celebrating the values and the victories as a community. So the five practices in brief are model, inspire, challenge, enable and encourage.

Over the years, and I’m glad you mentioned that these seemed to also resonate across different cultures, have you found any changes or pushback about any of them as it came to maybe different norms that were either in the culture in a different country or even just in our culture in the U.S. here as it shifts and changes? People talk about diversity and generational diversity and so many different ways in which people are not necessarily the same or share the same values as the other generations or people from a different culture. Has there been any pushback about whether any of these still hold water?

Thank you for that question and it is something that comes up frequently. We have gathered, over the years – we’ve been at this for over 35 years – we’ve gathered data from 72 different countries. We’ve actually gathered data from about 150, but 72 that we have enough data from that we can make some generalizations. What we find, Halelly, is while the absolute scores on these five practices, which we assess using the practices inventory, can vary. The pattern that emerges is the same. By that I mean the more frequently people engage in each of these practices, regardless of which country or culture they may come from, as leaders more frequently engage in these practices, then the higher the levels of performance among their constituents and the higher the levels of engagement. So the pattern is the same and that is that frequency of engagement in these practices is what’s important, not necessarily the absolute score one gets.

We also find that a pattern that some things, regardless of where one comes from or one’s background, tend to be more challenging than others. For example, inspire a shared vision is universally the practice in which people engage in less frequently and it’s the one where leaders need the most development. It’s not something that one commonly learns when thinking about leadership and leadership development. It’s something that’s more challenging. So the pattern remains the same although the absolute scores can change. One other thing, Halelly, when we looked at the extent to which demographic variables – and we measure 10 of them, things like age and gender and education and ethnicity and tenure, etc. – we look at demographic factors. If you take a look at how much of employee engagement is explained by demographics alone, it is only two-tenths of one percent. So demographics really doesn’t matter when it comes to studying leadership. It is the frequency with which people engage in the behaviors that matters more than anything else.

I’m very heartened to hear that. It’s quite nice to know that humans – it sounds like sort of the therefore of your statements and your research – is that humans generally want to be led in a similar way, and that good leadership practices create engagement with humans, regardless of where they are. I mean, that’s beautiful.

It is reassuring, and it means, if we think about it, kind of rationally, it’s also helpful to know that there are certain leadership practices that work globally. So you don’t need to learn a different leadership model when you go to the Middle East or when you go to South America or when you go to Australia and New Zealand or when you go to Europe or any region of the world. You don’t have to learn a new leadership operating system, if you will. That same operating system will work globally, so it enables those of us in leadership development to really focus on the skills and abilities rather than on some nuanced, particular cultural attribute. So I think that’s heartening to those of us involved in leadership development. There are some fundamentals that people need to learn and engage in frequently around the world.

Yes. Good. I mean, I think that really just strengthens the call to practice and improve one’s leadership skills, because you can’t go wrong it sounds like. One of the other things I really was impressed by, and looking at your website I saw that you have so much empirical research that’s going on around the world that you’ve conducted and other scholars and graduate students and various academics, so there’s constant updating on what is leadership effectiveness in all kinds of settings – nursing, project management, school leadership, military leadership, community health systems, so many more. Of course people can go to your website, which we’ll link to, and go and read lots of studies, but what are some of your favorite most recent studies to share with us?

I think one of the most recent ones is one that was done actually by my wife, Tae Kyung Kouzes, and Barry Posner, we together have been looking at mindset and leadership. They wrote a paper that was published just last year on the relationship between mindset and leadership, which we believe is the first paper of its kind, first study of its kind. There has been lots of research on mindset and education, in particular education in grade schools and high schools and even in college, but not so much applied to the workplace mindset. For those of you who might not be familiar with it, it’s based on the research of Carol Dweck, Stanford University, who looked at growth and fixed mindsets, and found that those individuals with growth mindsets, that is a belief you can change. You can change your intelligence, you can change your personality, compared to those who believe that intelligence or personality or one’s skills are fixed. Those with the growth mindset do better in school, for example. Well, we also found the same kind of pattern in leadership, those individuals, those leaders, with the growth mindset, engage in the leadership practices more frequently than those with a fixed mindset. And so there are some really profound implications for the development of leaders, meaning that before we spend the time to develop skills and abilities, we need to first find out a whether a leader believes he or she can change. If there’s not a belief that leadership is learned, and that you can change your skills and abilities, you can learn new skills and abilities, then that educational experience, that development experience, might not be very productive. So that’s my favorite current one, for a lot of reasons.

There are a lot of other studies we’ve done. I mentioned the study on demographics. We take a look at the impact of demographics on behavior versus practice on the frequency of practice on engagement. Another fun one is the percent of people who demonstrate no leadership at all. One of the questions, Halelly, we get very frequently and probably the most frequent question we get asked is, “Is leadership made or born?”

Oh yes.

All the time. We always tell people, we’ve done the research and we have found that we have never met a leader who was not born. Leaders are human beings, so all human beings are born! The most productive question to ask ourselves is can people learn to develop themselves as leaders over time? Do you have the capacity? We took a look at our data. We have over 5 million people that have used the LPI, and we took a look at the sampling of that and looked at the extent to which people demonstrated no leadership ability versus those who had some leadership, at some leadership capability. We found the percentage of people who demonstrate no leadership ability whatsoever is 0.00013 percent.

Wow, okay, that would have been my guess – it seems like it’s impossible to have none.

If leadership is born, then 99.99987 percent of people have the capacity.

Good news.

That’s one in one million people that do not, and often I present that figure and people will say, “Well, I know that one person.” There was a little fun piece of research to do, just to reassure folks that yes, in fact, you already come into the development of yourself as a leader with some capability. It’s not whether or not you have it, it’s how frequently you use it that really is the question.

It sounds like in the assessment and the work that you’ve done showing leadership capabilities that you said it’s really just growing all of the capabilities you probably naturally have a strength with some and are not as good with others, and so it’s really just about finding a way to upgrade the ones, to balance them, and to develop them so that your pattern is more balanced rather than spiking up and down between them?

Yes. You’re absolutely right. There are individuals who may come into a leadership development experience already prepared to do some or all of these better than other people from their background in training, from their experiences in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts or their experiences with parents who have provided them opportunities to learn these skills by observing their parents, engaging them with coaches, lots of opportunities and others may have had fewer experiences like that. People may not come, it may not be essentially a level playing field when they begin, but through training and development, everybody that we have assess can increase their skills. That’s an important fact for all of us to recognize. It isn’t something about we have to go about selecting those people who will become our best leaders. Leadership widely is distributed in the population and becoming an exemplary leader is a matter of development, learning and application and testing and experimenting, learning from the mistakes that you make and putting in the time. I think that’s another important lesson from our research. We have found that those leaders who engage more frequently in learning experiences engage more frequently in the leadership practices. Now, that makes a lot of sense of course. The more we practice something, the better we’re going to get at it. But people are often not willing to put in the hours and time because they’re discouraged by some belief that leadership skills can’t be developed.

Yes. And that’s right back to that mindset. By the way, I have been trying to find a way to get Carol Dweck on this show, so if you have any leverage with her, I would really love to bring her on because I also teach in the workshops that I do on leadership, I start with mindset and it’s beyond what you just described about whether a leader believes, I mean, it’s fundamentally first that you should believe that you can develop your skills to be able to grow as a leader and be a good leader, but also as a leader, your job is to develop others. If you have a fixed mindset, it means you don’t believe that it’s of any use to give people developmental feedback or to allow them to experiment and take risks and fail. If you don’t think there’s any use to it, because either they know it or they don’t, you’re not going to engage in that which means you’re going to fail as a leader.

Absolutely. And we also affirmed that in the research that we did with those leaders who don’t believe that other people can change aren’t investing the time in the development of others.

So it creates a vicious cycle. I look forward to pulling up that study. That sounds exciting. So, you are on the cusp of constant research in the field and even though your book was published quite a long time ago, the world is dynamic and changing so what do you think are some trends or developments in leadership or in leadership development that we should be paying attention to for now in the future?

One of the things that we have found over the years is how stable these practices are and I’m sure, as we look back at the beginning, really development of this applied behavioral science field in leadership development and team development, which is kind of post-World War II, pre- and post-World War Ii, in that time frame, so it hasn’t been that long – 100 years or so, a little bit less than that – the findings have been relatively consistent as to what leaders should be doing in order to perform at higher levels and in order to have more and more engaged workforce and a more productive workforce. So the content of leadership is staying relatively stable. The context, however, has changed, and I think that’s where we need to make a distinction. For example, as we are speaking, around the world the coronavirus has changed fundamentally the context of global business and global travel. I have just been exchanging emails with a number of colleagues in our field who are reporting that they’ve had four or five engagements cancelled just in the past week.

Same here.

So there you go. That’s a contextual change. That’s not a content change. But what it tells us is, at this moment in time, people feel we’re in some kind of crisis. We are experiencing adversity. We are experiencing a big shift, a big change, in how we are currently and may in the future be interacting with each other. That doesn’t change the fundamental fact that leaders still need to model and inspire, challenge, enable and encourage. Just applying it to a different context. So I think we have to be careful when we’re talking about change, to make a distinction between context and content. Having said that, we have a much deeper understanding of the nuances of each of these practices. We were talking about Carol Dweck and mindset, her research along with ours has spanned about the same period of time, and we know a lot more about mindset now than we did know 30 years ago. But we know a lot more about emotional intelligence than we did 30 years ago. So we are deepening our understanding and therefore also coming to the realization that this stuff isn’t simply. The models and the frameworks may be easy to understand, but developing the skills at an advanced level are much more difficult than we might have assumed. So that just, the implication of that is that leaders are going to have to spend their entire lives continuing to learn and deepening their own understanding of what it means to engage other people and making extraordinary things happen.

The rate of change and the complexity of what’s happening in our world is increasing. So, the context is ever shifting. So learning how to do this becomes much, much more difficult, if you will, or challenging, if you will, than it looks on paper. To be a good leader, you’re saying you need to be prepared for the long journey and put in the work?

True in any field, particularly in leadership.

Do you think there’s something from your perspective, what is a way that leaders can prepare for that increasing complexity? Because putting in time, okay fine, you do work on it, but everything you need to do faster and there’s less time and less resources and so on. What are some ideas that you have for maybe learning more quickly or developing more just in time kind of skills for this?

One of the things that is important for leaders to understand as we have been talking about is they need to devote some period of their time, daily, to learning. I remember a colleague of mine, an individual who we had the opportunity to interview, Don Chalk was his name, and he had a coach at university. His coach used to comment on, at the beginning of every season – his baseball coach – he said, “Practice begins at 3:00 and ends at 5:00. If that’s all you do, we won’t win and you won’t play.” I think that’s a wonderful metaphor to remind all of us that we have to devote more of just what’s expected of us if we’re going to win and if we’re going to play. As leaders, we need to find whether it’s between 3:00 and 5:00 and add another hour, sometime during the day, to learning. But it doesn’t mean we have to add on time, it just means we have to avail ourselves of every opportunity to learn. So if I’m going to give a speech to others, I might want to have somebody in the back of the room who observes me and afterward I spend a half hour debriefing how I did. If I’m going to do a 1-on-1, I need to spend some time afterward doing an after action review of that process and how did it go and what did I learn from that? I’m probably going to need to work with a coach throughout my entire life as a leader and have someone who will help me throughout my career. Probably will need ever-changing personal board of directors I know I can turn to to provide me with advice and counsel along the way. Not just about the nature of the business, the nature of the work, but also my leadership skills and abilities. I think all leaders need to get used to having that kind of assistance.

If you think about it, every professional athlete I know, and every professional musician I know, every professional artist, has a mentor or a coach. And we understand when you’re playing basketball or when you’re playing soccer that you need coaches and you often have more than one. We need to apply that same understanding to the development of leaders, that we’re going to need coaches in order to become the best professional leaders that we can be.

And in your statement, you included how we can think about coaches outside of the official box and having to pay and transact and all of that. Having someone sit in the back of your speech and just ask them to be prepared to give you feedback, you can do that with a peer. You can do that with almost anyone. There are so many opportunities for us to enlist peer coaches and peer mentors and many, many people board of directors and so on that can help us grow, so it’s being mindful about seeking coaching, rather than having a coach that you pay.

Absolutely. It really is that sense of there’s always an opportunity for me to learn from any experience and do I take advantage of that?

Yes.

Do I take that time during the day to reflect at the end of the day on how my day went and what I could have done, what I did well, what I didn’t do so well, and what I can do differently tomorrow. That kind of reflection, that kind of time spent learning is absolutely critical to dealing with these kinds of contextual changes. Going back to the example of the coronavirus, people right now are using technology to exchange information in a way that we never had before. So sharing experiences, talking about what happened to them, some tips that they’re offering – that’s new learning that’s helping us to adapt and to deal with something that’s currently going on. Just understanding, I’m going to have to be doing that everyday. I can’t escape learning new things everyday. I have to apply myself. And, by the way, those people who spend more time learning actually enjoy the work they’re doing more than those who don’t.

I agree and why do you think?

That’s what the research shows. When people are surveyed on the amount of time that they spend in learning, those who are what’s called high learners – those who spend over five-plus hours a week in some kind of learning mode – report that they are happier in their jobs than those who spend less time.

Wonderful. I love it. Before you share one specific action, we always end with that, what’s new and exciting on your horizon? What’s got you energized these days Jim?

Well, right now, I’m working with my colleague Barry Posner and some of our colleagues in a book on Leadership is Everyone’s Business. That’s the working title but it’s the theme of the book. We are applying these same five practices to people who don’t have titles as leaders, people who might be inside organizations leading a project or have an idea they want to take initiative on, to people who are coaches of kids in the AYSO – American Youth Soccer – or people who are in community volunteer organizations or even at home, and how are these skills applicable in those environments? So we’re telling their stories and then providing them with some tips about how they can apply this to those areas, non-former leadership roles. That’s fun to do. It’s fun seeing all kinds of stories about people from patient advocates who have suffered from cancer and are now applying their own learnings to leading others to help their own conditions to influencing physicians on how they can treat patients better to working with kids in athletic environment or after school kind of programs to people inside organizations who have a great, new idea and are trying to advance that idea in the organization and want to make something extraordinary happen but don’t have a formal title or budget to do that. It’s fun. It’s just fun reading those stories and it gets me energized and hopeful.

Yes, because we do need more people to be leader-like and that will create positive changes everywhere. Sounds exciting. I look forward to reading it when it comes out. So, what’s one specific action the TalentGrowers can take today, tomorrow, this week, that can help them ratchet up their own leadership skills?

Exemplary leadership is the next five minutes, if you will. It’s always what you’re doing right now that’s important, so what I like to do is give people something they can do in the moment. Here’s a question, two questions, that I’d like to suggest. Two tips, if you will. One is at the end of everyday, you could do this at the beginning if that’s a better time for you, ask yourself, “What have I done in the last 24 hours to improve as a leader so that I am a better leader today than I was yesterday?” Just asking yourself that simple question, day after day after day, will help you become more focused on your learning and on your development. Now, specifically, when you’re in an interaction with another human being, here’s another question I recommend you ask yourself, whether the interaction is one minute or one hour, whether it’s with one person or a small group of people, ask yourself, “What can I do in this interaction that is about to happen so that the other person or other people at the end of this interaction feel more confident, capable and able to do things that maybe even they didn’t think they could do? What can I do in this interaction so that the other people feel more powerful, more competent, more capable than they did before we started this interaction?” If every leader were to pause for just a moment and reflect on that question and then act, I think we’d see a lot more exemplary leadership than we now do.

I agree. Thank you so much. That is a great tip and I hope that our listeners take your advice and enact it because it will make the world a better place. People are going to want to stay in touch with you, learn more from you and about you – what are some of the best places online, on social media, where should they follow?

I’m on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, just my name, Jim Kouzes, and also LeadershipChallenge.com has more information about me and Barry and our products and services as well as books we’ve published and the other programs that we offer and if you want to write to me, the best place is really leadership@Wylie.com. Our publisher gets those emails and then those that are directed to me and Barry they send out to us. Or, you could send Jim@Kouzes.com.

We’ll print all of that on our show notes page and hopefully people will take advantage of this opportunity. Thank you so much for spending time with us on the TalentGrow Show. I really appreciate all of your insights and advice. Thank you.

Halelly, it’s been a pleasure and thank you for the work that you’re doing.

Outro And that’s it for another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I hope that you enjoyed it. I would love to hear what you thought. Please send me your feedback and most importantly, I hope that you will take action based on Jim’s suggestion – those two questions that you can ask yourself will indeed make you a more mindful leader and a more mindful lifelong learner, which will make you a better human and a happier one as he suggested the research shows. So let me know how that goes and what you thought and what you’d like to learn about in the future because this show is for you, so I need to know what do you want? That’s it for another episode. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and this has been the TalentGrow Show. Thank you so much for listening and until the next time, make today great.

Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.


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