The latest edition of the gold-standard guide for leadership development

In the new seventh edition of The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, best-selling leadership authors and business scholars James Kouzes and Barry Posner deliver an essential strategic playbook for effective leadership. The book’s actionable advice is grounded in robust research and deep insights into the complex interpersonal dynamics of the workplace.

Premier authorities in the field, the authors frame leadership as both a skill to be learned and as a relationship to be nurtured. They demonstrate how to achieve extraordinary results in the face of contemporary business challenges with engaging stories, current case studies, and straightforward frameworks for those who seek continuous, incremental improvement.

The book also offers:

• Incisive commentary on the shift toward team-oriented and hybrid work relationships
• Key insights into how to break through a new and pervasive level of cynicism amongst the modern workforce
• Strategies for leveraging the electronic global village to deliver better results within your team, in your department, and across your organization

Perfect for every practicing and aspiring leader who wants to stay current, relevant, and effective in a rapidly evolving business environment, The Leadership Challenge will help you remain impactful and capable of inspiring and motivating your constituents at every level.

The Leadership Challenge is the gold-standard manual for effective leadership, grounded in research and written by the premier authorities in the field. With deep insight into the complex interpersonal dynamics of the workplace, this book positions leadership both as a skill to be learned, and as a relationship that must be nurtured to reach its full potential. This new seventh edition has been revised to address current challenges, and includes more international examples and a laser focus on business issues; you'll learn how extraordinary leaders accomplish extraordinary things, and how to develop your leadership skills and style to deliver quality results every time. Engaging stories delve into the fundamental roles that great leaders fulfill, and simple frameworks provide a primer for those who seek continuous improvement; by internalizing key insights and putting concepts into action, you'll become a more effective, more impactful leader.

A good leader gets things done; a great leader aspires, inspires, and achieves more. This book highlights the differences between good and great, and shows you how to bridge the chasm between getting things done and making things happen.

• Gain deep insight into leadership's critical role in organizational health
• Navigate the shift toward team-oriented work relationships
• Motivate and inspire to break through the pervasive new cynicism
• Leverage the electronic global village to deliver better results

Business is evolving at an increasingly rapid rate, and leaders must keep pace with the changes or risk stagnation. People work differently, are motivated differently, and have different expectations today—business as usual is quickly losing its effectiveness. The Leadership Challenge helps you stay current, relevant, and effective in the modern workplace.

Learn how you can tackle everyday leadership challenges regardless of your title, position, or authority with this insightful resource

A book about leadership for people who are not in formal or hierarchical leadership positions, Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership provides readers with a comprehensive and practical approach to addressing leadership challenges, no matter the setting or circumstance. Esteemed scholars and sought-after consultants Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner adapt their trademark The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership^® framework to today’s more horizontal workplace, showing people that leadership is not about where you are in the organization; it’s about how you behave and what you do.

Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership draws on the authors’ deep well of research and practical experience to cover key subjects:

• The essence of making a difference in any role, setting, or situation 
• The difference between positions of authority and leadership
• The importance of self-development in leadership development

This book is perfectly applicable and accessible for anyone who wants to improve their own leadership potential and who isn’t yet in an official leadership role. Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership offers authoritative new insights, original case studies and examples, and practical guidance for those individuals who want to make a difference. You supply the will, and this book will supply the way.

As the world falls deeper into economic downturns and warfare, the question of credibility (how leaders gain and lose it) is more important than ever. Building on their research from The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner explore in Credibility why leadership is above all a relationship, with credibility as the cornerstone, and why leaders must "Say what you mean and mean what you say." This first full revision of the book since its initial publication in 1993 features new case studies from around the world, fully updated data and research, and a streamlined format. Written by the premier leadership experts working today, Credibility:

• Reveals the six key disciplines that strengthen a leader's capacity for developing and sustaining credibility.
• Provides rich examples of real managers in action
• Includes updates to the applications and research

This personal, inspiring, and genuine guide helps you understand the fundamental importance of credibility for building personal and organizational success.

Real-world leadership training for real-world students

The Student Leadership Challenge tailors one of the world’s most respected leadership models to students’ unique needs, and provides a proven pathway to success. Based on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, this book merges solid research with personal stories from real-world student leaders to help students develop the critical skills they need to lead both now and after graduation. Useful from high school to graduate school and beyond, these lessons are reinforced by reflective and critical thinking activities to help students internalize important concepts while honestly assessing their own practices. Updated and expanded, this new third edition includes four extra chapters to allow deeper investigation, while broader, deeper, and more vivid examples from real-life students illustrate what student leadership looks like around the world. New discussion delves into the research behind the model, as well as the usefulness of leadership in the transition to post-graduate life.

What does leadership mean to you? Although it may be difficult to put into words, we all know it when we see it. Effective leaders tend to exhibit a specific set of traits, possess certain skills, and practice particular habits. This book helps you hone your natural talents and shape your path to success as the leader you want to become.  

• Learn The Five Practices of Leadership, and how they help you succeed beyond school
• Discover how students around the world are exhibiting the best in modern leadership
• Practice critical leadership techniques and engage in thought-provoking discussion
• Assess your own potential with the Student Leadership Practices Inventory

Great leadership is more important than ever before, and students are in a prime position to develop these critical skills. The Student Leadership Challenge provides a comprehensive framework with real-world application to help students become their very best.

A fresh look at what it means to lead from two of the biggest names in leadership

In these turbulent times, when the very foundations of organizations and societies are shaken, leaders need to move beyond pessimistic predictions, trendy fads, and simplistic solutions. They need to turn to what's real and what's proven. In their engaging, personal, and bold new book, bestselling authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner reveal ten time-tested truths that discuss what every leader must know, the questions they must be prepared to answer, and the real-world issues they will likely face.

In the book, you’ll find:

• Material based on thirty years of research, more than one million responses to Kouzes and Posner's leadership assessment, and the questions people most want leaders to answer
• Explorations of the fundamental, enduring truths of leadership that hold constant regardless of context or circumstance-leaders make a difference, credibility, values, trust, leading by example, heart, and more
• Demonstrations of emerging leaders and what they need to know to be effective

Fans of The Leadership Challenge will find a dynamic new look at the real challenges leaders face today. The book draws from cases spanning three generations of leaders from around the world. It’s an indispensable resource leaders can use to do their real and necessary work-bringing about the essential changes that will renew organizations and communities.

Model and encourage leadership by focusing on encouraging the best in others

All too often, simple acts of human kindness are overlooked and underutilized by people in leadership roles. Advising mutual respect and recognition of accomplishments, Encouraging the Heart shows us how true leaders encourage and motivate those they work with by helping them find their voice and making them feel like heroes.

Best-selling experts in the field of leadership, authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner show us that, through love, leaders can encourage those around them to be their very best. Readers will find:

• Discussions of the Five Practices that drive followers to be their very best: Modelling the way, Inspiring a shared vision, Challenging the process, Enabling others to act, and Encouraging the heart
• Enlightening examples of how ordinary individuals demonstrate extraordinary leadership
• Hands-on strategies and practical tips from real leaders, like utilizing the Encouragement Index to measure how well you display the principles of leadership

Both practical and inspirational, Encouraging the Heart gives readers a thoughtful approach to motivating individuals within an organizational structure.

Uncover the latest developments in leadership development and coaching with insights from two of the most respected voices on the subject

In this provocative book, leadership experts and authors of the best-selling The Leadership Challenge, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner take on a unique challenge and explore questions of leadership and legacy. In 22 stand-alone chapters, Kouzes and Posner examine the critical questions all leaders must ask themselves before they can leave a lasting impact.

These powerful essays are grouped into four categories: Significance, Relationships, Aspirations, and Courage. In each essay the authors consider a thorny and often ambiguous issue with which today’s leaders must grapple—such as how leaders serve and sacrifice, why leaders need loving critics, why leaders should want to be liked, why leaders can't take trust for granted, why it’s not just the leader’s vision that matters, why failure is always an option, why it takes courage to “make a life,” how to liberate the leader in everyone, and ultimately, how the legacy you leave is the life you lead.

In the book, you’ll find:

• A free-flowing discussion of leadership topics and lessons
• Incisive explorations of ambiguous issues and paradoxes that have bedeviled leaders for generations
• Concise and to-the-point essays representing new approaches to familiar themes, new stories, and new experiences

A Leader’s Legacy is an indispensable resource for managers, executives, and other business leaders looking for insightful new ways to push their leadership development further than they ever thought possible.

Uncover the extraordinary leader in you with straightforward exercises and advice from two of the world’s foremost leadership experts

From the bestselling authors of The Leadership Challenge and over a dozen award-winning leadership books comes a new book that examines a question of fundamental importance: How do people learn to become leaders?

Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader is a comprehensive guide to unleashing the inner leader in us all and to building a solid foundation for a lifetime of leadership growth and mastery.  The book offers a concrete framework to help individuals of all levels, functions, and backgrounds take charge of their own leadership development and become the best leaders they can be.

Arguing that all individuals are born with the capacity to lead, bestselling authors Kouzes and Posner provide readers with a practical series of actions and specific coaching tips for harnessing that capacity and creating a context in which they can excel. Supported by over 30 years of research, from over seventy countries, and with examples from real-world leaders, Learning Leadership is a clarion call to unleash the leadership potential that is already present in society today.

Learning Leadership provides readers with evidence-based strategies to ignite the habit of continuous improvement and the mindset of becoming the best leaders they can be. Emerging leaders, as well as leadership developers, internal and external coaches and trainers, and other human resource professionals will learn from first-hand stories and practical examples so that they can deeply understand and apply the fundamentals for becoming the best leaders they can be.

Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader is divided into digestible bite-sized chapters that encourage daily actions to becoming a better leader. Key takeaways from the book include:

• Believe in Yourself.  Believing in oneself is the essential first step in developing leadership competencies. The best leaders are learners, and they can’t achieve mastery until and unless they truly decide that inside them there is a person who can make and difference and learn to be a better leader than they are right now.
• Aspire to Excel. To become an exemplary leader, people must determine what they care most about and why they want to lead. Leaders with values-based motivations are the most likely to excel. They also must have a clear image of the kind of leader they want to be in the future—and the legacy they want to leave for others. 
• Challenge Yourself. Challenging oneself is critical to learning leadership. Leaders must seek new experiences and test themselves. There will be inevitable setbacks and failures along the way that require curiosity, grit, courage, and resilience to persist in learning and becoming the best.
• Engage Support. One can’t lead alone, and one can’t learn alone. It is essential to get support and coaching on the path to achieving excellence. Whether it’s family, managers at work, or professional coaches, leaders need the advice, feedback, care, and support of others.
• Practice Deliberately. No one gets better at anything without continuous practice. Exemplary leaders spend more time practicing than ordinary leaders. Simply being in the role of a leader is insufficient. To achieve mastery, leaders must set improvement goals, participate in designed learning experiences, ask for feedback, and get coaching.

Leaders are no strangers to challenges; in recent years, businesses have experienced unprecedented layoffs, dismal sales, dwindling retirement accounts, and the bankruptcy of once-heralded institutions. While these uncertain times are difficult, they also provide the opportunity for great leadership. Over three decades of research, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, the bestselling authors of The Leadership Challenge, have asked thousands of leaders to describe their personal leadership best. Across the board, people say their greatest moments arise out of the most difficult periods of their careers.

Turning Adversity Into Opportunity reveals how leaders at any level can transform difficult circumstances into opportunities for growth and success. Kouzes and Posner offer a clear set of six actionable strategies, showing how extraordinary leaders navigate through uncertainty, hardship, disruption, transformation, transition, recovery, new beginnings, and other significant challenges. Exemplary leadership disrupts the status quo, and Kouzes and Posner show how to awaken and pursue new possibilities and opportunities, no matter what the circumstances.

Wherever you find yourself in your organization or community, Turning Adversity Into Opportunity will help you embrace the chance within any challenge to make a real difference.

Leadership doesn’t happen without courage. In fact, leadership might be defined as "courage in action."  But the truth is that courage is poorly understood and not what you typically think. In their second original short format work, Finding the Courage to Lead, James Kouzes and Barry Posner offer a perspective on what ordinary leaders say about what courage is to them, and what their courageous experiences mean for the daily practice of leadership.

Courage is one of those big, bold words. It has the reputation of being something way out there on the edges of human experience, commonly associated with superhuman feats, life-and-death struggles, and overcoming impossible odds. It gives rise to images of daring feats of bravery and nerves of steel. It has such a mystique about it that many think the concept doesn’t apply to them. But, when you look beyond the headlines, you find out that this account of courage is certainly not the whole story.

There is very little relevant discussion of courage in the leadership literature. For all the talk about how leaders need to be courageous, there is next to nothing written about what it really means for leadership. Grounded in award-winning original research and rich with insight, Finding the Courage to Lead is valuable for leaders at any level to understand how courage shapes our leadership potential on and off the job, and is required reading for any fans of Kouzes & Posner's work.