Name: Heroic Interview: The Leadership Challenge with Jim Kouzes
Uploaded: 2026-02-06T02:23:07.000Z
Duration: 32 min 51 s
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You're listening to the Leadership Challenge, an optimal living interview with Jim Kouzes and Brian Johnson.

Today I'm thrilled and honored to be chatting with Jim Kouzes, who co wrote one of the most popular and impactful books on leadership in the world.

I was introduced to Jim's work via John Maxwell.

I was reading one of John's great books and he said that this book, the Leadership Challenge that we're going to talk about today, is one of the five best books he's ever read, period.

When I read someone like John Maxwell, who I respect a great deal, say something like that, I pay attention and immediately find my way to Amazon and buy the book.

This book has really been transformational for me personally.

Again, the Leadership Challenge, subtitled How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations.

There's no question our world needs leaders now more today than ever before.

And Jim, I really appreciate you and your work and taking the time to share your wisdom with us today.

Well, thank you, Brian, and the feeling is mutual.

I read them every night if I'm up when they come in at midnight or in the morning when I do my reading.

I'm honored and touched to hear that and excited to explore all the different things that we have in common and find ways to play together beyond just this conversation.

So the Leadership Challenge, obviously embracing challenge is a big part of your work in this book.

Can you tell us why you guys decided to name the book the Leadership Challenge?

Well, Barry and I had met at Santa Clara University in 1981, and

this big tall guy, 6 foot 4, arrives in my door frame and knocks on the door and introduces himself.

And we began to chat about our mutual interests.

And we came to understand that we had mutual interest in personal values and managerial values in particular.

And 1981 into 82, we were exploring how we might work together.

And so we were wondering, how do we explore this idea of managerial excellence, that's what we called it at the time, later began to expand that to all leaders.

And we said, why don't we ask people, because it's an Olympic year, about their personal best leadership experiences.

And the light bulb went off and we both said, why don't we do that.

So we began to explore with a few executives and that expanded to more personal interviews.

And what we learned, Brian, is something very interesting.

When you ask people to talk about their personal best leadership experiences, they talk about challenges, they talk about adversity, they talk about difficult times, turning around a losing operation, starting something up, doing something nobody had ever done before, taking on a challenge in their lives, perhaps one that was handed to them or one that they personally initiated.

But every personal best involved a challenge.

And so we decided that the book had to be named the Leadership Challenge because that was in fact what every extraordinary accomplishment was about, overcoming some kind of adversity.

And one of my mantras to myself is from an interview with Steven Kotler, who wrote the Rise of Superman.

I asked him at the end, what's your number one piece of wisdom?

Being willing to lean into that challenge and not run away from it, but

realize that's as we're going to talk about a call to greatness.

But before we get into that, can you just share briefly the five practices of leadership that form the kind of backbone of the book?

Well, in asking people to tell us about their personal best leadership experiences, we uncovered five common themes that cut through all the cases, whether it's from somebody who works as a principal in a school, to someone who's a CEO of a company, to a volunteer in a not for profit organization.

When people tell their personal best leadership experiences, they talk about doing five, we call them practices engaging in five practices.

The first of those is modeled away, so you have to be clear about what you believe in.

And then you have to practice what you preach.

The second practice we call inspire assured vision.

You need to envision the future, think long term, imagine those possibilities and then enlist other people.

Communicate it in such a way that people want to join in.

The third practice, apropos to challenge, is what we call challenge the process.

If you can do something new and different, something no one has ever done before, achieve something extraordinary, you have to innovate.

You make mistakes, so you have to learn from those mistakes.

The first, fourth practice is you can't do it alone.

You need a team, a group, an organization.

And so you have to collaborate with other people.

And then you have to strengthen their capacity to deliver.

The heart is the fifth practice, which is, you know, it's difficult when you're trying to do extraordinary things.

People need to be encouraged, people need to be recognized and they need to celebrate their successes.

So those are the five Model, inspire, challenge, enable and encourage.

I'm excited to chat briefly about some of those and your fifth, which we'll talk about.

The best kept secret of leadership was just such a beautiful idea.

So we'll wait for that, for the, for the, for the final.

It is such a, you know, so we'll have our listeners think, what do you think the best kept secret of leadership is?

We'll see if we surprise you at the end of our chat.

For now, let's talk about the foundation of leadership.

So one of the things we also did, Brian, when we were doing our research is we, we took these cases as the leader's perspective on what they did, but

we wanted to know what their constituents, their followers expected of them.

So we asked the question, what do you look for and admire in a leader?

Someone whose direction you would willingly follow.

The key word in that question is willingly, not because you have to, but because you want to.

And we initially asked it as an open ended question.

Well, no one can be 150 different things.

So we had to narrow that, we had to narrow that list down to a manageable number.

And we came up with 20 keywords each followed by some synonyms.

And we asked people in a survey to indicate the ones they most look for.

What people said they most look for over 60% for each of these was first of all honest, secondly, competent, inspiring and forward looking.

So the order of those, with the exception of honest, changes over time.

But those four, the only four that over 30 years have received over 60% of the vote.

That's an amazing finding when you think about how much things have changed.

So the context of leadership has changed a lot.

But what people look for and admire in a leader has not changed much at all.