Scott Edinger - The Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness Within Your Company

THE
HIDDEN
LEADER

Discover and Develop Greatness
Within Your Company

SCOTT K. EDINGER LAURIE SAIN

Foreword by James M. Kouzes
and Barry Z. Posner

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edinger, Scott K.

The hidden leader : discover and develop greatness within your company / Scott K. Edinger, Laurie Sain.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8144-3399-7 (hardcover) ISBN 0-8144-3399-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-8144-3400-0 (ebook) 1. Leadership. 2. Employee motivation. 3. Corporate culture. I. Sain, Laurie. II. Title.

HD57.7.E325 2014

658.4092--dc23

2014026448

2015 Scott K. Edinger and Laurie Sain
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.

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Printing Number

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To hidden leaders everywhere.
You are the powerhouses driving creativity,
productivity, and innovation in business.

Contents

List of Tools

As you read The Hidden Leader, you will find the worksheets and assessments in an order that helps you understand the concepts and ideas in the book. In the appendix, the tools are organized into a succinct process that you can use to evaluate hidden leaders and your organization. See the introduction to the appendix for more information.

Foreword

Leaders are everywhere we look. For more than three decades, weve been traveling the world constantly researching the practices of exemplary leadership and the qualities people look for and admire in leaders they would willingly follow. Weve talked to people from every type of organization, public and private, government and nongovernment, high tech and low tech, small and large, schools and professional services. They are young and old, male and female, and from every ethnic group. They represent every imaginable vocation and avocation. They reside in every country weve studied. And they all have a story to tell.

Conventional wisdom portrays leadership as if it were found mostly at the top. Myth and legend have treated leadership as if it were the private reserve of a very few charismatic men and women. Nothing is further from the truth. We have examined the immense variety of stories from so many different people and places, and it has become crystal clear to us that leadership is not a gene. Its not a birthright. Demographics play no role in whether or not someone is going to become an exemplary leader. Its not about position or title. Its not about power or authority. Its not about being a CEO, president, general, or prime minister. Leadership is not about who you are or where you come from. Its about what you do. Our images of whos a leader and whos not are all mixed up in our preconceived notions about what leadership is and isnt.

Scott and Laurie are right on target when they say any organization that can harness the leadership talent of all of its employees has a competitive advantage. By shining a light on the hidden leadersthose individuals who act like leaders, regardless of their position or job descriptionthey call our attention to what it takes to discover, nurture, and support the leadership talents within each persontalents that, while they may be hidden, are actually abundant in every organization.

Our multinational and cross-generational data, along with theirs, challenge the myth that leadership is about position and power. And those data support the fact that leadership is about the actions you take. One individual in Asia told us it became very clear to her, when she reflected on her personal-best leadership experience, that leadership is everywhere, it takes place every day, and leadership can come from anyone. It doesnt matter that you dont have the title of manager, director, CEO to go with it. In the end, thats all they aretitles on business cards and company directories. Being a true leader transcends all that.

Another individual contributor, from the United States, recognized that growing up, she had assumed leaders had certain traits and qualities that I didnt seem to have. I thought there were natural leaders who were born to lead. I thought leadership was the description of what these people did. Upon reflection she realized, to my surprise, that I had those leadership traits. Hidden leaders are those people in your organization who share the belief that what they do matters, that their project, team, or organization would be less successful if it werent for their efforts. These feelings translate into not only the additional discretionary effort they put into their work but also the leadership they are willing to exert to make extraordinary things happen.