Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Fierce Resolve

I often tell my circle of colleagues and close professional friends that personal humility will trump every triumph in the world of work. Humility takes you closer to greater success like no other trait. This is also a differentiating factor between good and great. Good can be the enemy of great and being average is suicidal for anything to ever become good, let alone great.

Great companies are built on fierce resolve coupled with complete honesty and humility practiced by its leaders at every step. In absence of these, companies remain average or below average at best. Enduring greatness is a result of dogged persistence and ambitions of highest order in most ethical manner possible. Ethics is not something you just throw around a term to make things look good. It’s a deeply practiced value.

Greatness is something truly inherent in a company and its culture will speak for itself over time manifested through its leaders and employees and it wouldn’t have to come out and defend every now and then. Great culture doesn’t have to be defended and explained, it defends itself like great art and survives the test of times. It always does.

Level 5 Leader, a concept coined by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great, says Level 5 Leader, an executive in whom extreme personal humility blends paradoxically with intense professional will. He goes on to identify the characteristics common to Level 5 Leaders are humility, will, ferocious resolve and the tendency to give credit to others while assigning blame to themselves. There is a neat diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Leadership that he has put forth. Referenced in the article above.

Humility + Will = Level 5 Leadership

If you look closely, Level 5 leaders are a study of paradoxes. Humble and fearless, modest and fiercely willful in their mind. This duality will be evident when you watch the Level 5 leaders closely. They never let their ego get in the way of primary resolve and mission. They come across as shy and modest but should never to be taken as signs of weakness. In fact, it is the other way. These very traits are their fuel that keeps them going towards their mission with quiet resolute every day, defeat after defeat, win after win.

There is a narrative in the book on Dave Packard of HP that I am quoting verbatim to give an insight on what personal humility embodies that leads to greatness:

“Shortly before his death, I had the opportunity to meet Dave Packard. Despite being one of Silicon Valley’s first self made billionaires, he lived in the same small house that he and his wife built themselves in 1957, overlooking a simple orchard. The tiny kitchen, with its dated linoleum and the simply furnished living room bespoke a man who needed no material symbols to proclaim “I am a billionaire.” I am important. I am successful. […]. Packard bequeathed his $5.6 billion estate to a charitable foundation and upon his death, his family created a eulogy pamphlet, with a photo of him sitting on a tractor in farming clothes. The caption made no reference to his stature as of the greatest industrialists of the twentieth century. It simply read: David Packard, 1912 -1996, Rancher, etc.”