Alaa Ahmed
MBA Candidate
Introduction Leadership is an important concept in every sector, in family, school, organization, company, and in every community. The secret behind the success of any organization is its leadership. Academic analysis has given us more than 850 definitions of leadership (bennis, 1997). All of them have the same factors but in different formulations. After I read many of these definitions, I saw leadership as guiding a group of people toward achieving a specific goal. Scholars researched and studied leadership styles, and leadership patterns, whereas Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner studied leadership from a different perspective. They dealt with leadership as a challenge and the leader who succeeds in facing the challenge and gets extraordinary result is considered exemplary. As a result, Kouzes and Posner started their journey since 1983 looking for how the leader becomes exemplary and achieves extraordinary results. Their study covered leadership in all sectors and on all the continents of the world. They collected data from different people and mangers during 25 years and analyzed them. They found that in order for a leader to be exemplary and able to get extraordinary results, he/she has to be able to transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards (Kouzes & Posner, 2002). To get all this done, they outlined a mechanism that they called “The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership“ ; there are two commitments that go along with each practice which are the subject of our research.
Model the way Model the way is aligned with two commitments .The first one is find your voice by clarifying your values. A leader must clarify the values that he believes in, look for the common values, and have the ability to transfer these values into actions. A clear guiding principle is
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