The best and most difficult

# Chapter 109

These five practices are real and difficult work. They will mark you as exceptional in leadership practices. These behaviors produce the best followers and clients and partners. These five practices will foster the finest and most solid gains for those you lead.

Model the way

Inspire a shared vision

Challenge the process

Enable others to act

Encourage the heart

-Kouzes and Posner

These are not just polite ideas. They are gobsmacked thermonuclear concepts that require a great deal of discipline to practice. You think them easy when you are the one wanting them to be applied to you and your situation. You will find them almost impossible to do when you are the leader and must take all initiative and responsibility for seeing them done well. What that really means is that they are easy to receive, and incredibly difficult to deliver. They are welcome to the recipient and costly for the one leading.

There is one posture that assists greatly in reducing all these strains though. It is the posture of servant. Not like in a British novel, but more like in quartermaster in the military sense. The quartermaster is expected to make certain that each person has the right equipment, gear, and tools to effectively do his or her function. Humility will go a long long way in greasing these rails of serving, but while very helpful, it is not required. Some of the best leaders and quartermasters of my leadership training had all of the grace of bull and the humility of a crocodile, but I was certain that they wanted me to succeed even more than I wanted me to succeed.

What power there is, in a leader determined to make me succeed! There was practically nothing that I would not attempt in order to gain their approval, and to further what they could see (even while I could not see what they saw) in me.