THE FISH ROTS FROM THE HEAD

As I noted last week, Stage 1 of Jim Collins’ Good to Great Framework is Disciplined People. The first question to be answered is: do you have the right leadership. Collins believes, based on his years of research, that you need what he refers to as Level 5 Leadership.

He notes that:

“The essence of Level 5 leadership is a paradoxical combination of personal humility and indomitable will. The humility expressed at Level 5 isn’t a false humbleness; it’s a subjugation of personal ego in service to a cause beyond oneself. This humility is combined with the fierce resolve to do whatever it takes (no matter how difficult) to best serve that cause. Level 5 leaders are incredibly ambitious, but they channel their ambition into building a great team or organization and accomplishing a shared mission that’s ultimately not about them.” (BE 2.0)

Note the AND: Personal Humility AND Indomitable Will. The Genius of the AND. The essence of Level 5 leadership is a paradoxical combination of PERSONAL HUMILITY and INDOMITABLE WILL.

Level 5 leaders are obsessed with making the company or organization truly great and ensuring it lives on and continues to grow long after they are gone.

CHARISMA AND LEVEL 5 LEADERSHIP

In a recent episode of Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast he discussed Charisma and its downsides with Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers. The episode reminded me why humility is so important for Level 5 Leadership and building great companies. As they noted:

Charisma seems like an asset, but if you're not careful, it can become a liability. Research suggests that leaders and followers often fall into three charisma traps.

1. Charisma can get in the way of substance. It becomes a crutch. Instead of preparing, you know you can get away with winging it. You focus on the big picture and wind up neglecting all the small but important details. Empirically, highly charismatic leaders tend to be heavy on vision but light on execution. And as the saying goes, vision without execution is hallucination.

2. Creating a cult of personality. Charisma makes it easy for people to get attached to the leader instead of the mission. In one study at a bank, employees who worked for charismatic leaders were more likely to identify with the bank, but also more likely to identify with their leaders personally. And the more they identified with their leaders, the more dependent they became on them, and the more difficult they found it to do their job without them.

3. Lack of Critical Thinking or The Awestruck Effect—what Adam refers to as the Dumbstruck Effect. This is when people focus on pleasing the boss rather than advancing the cause. That leaves them vulnerable to manipulation. When leaders are charismatic, employees are less likely to challenge them. When we fall under their spell, we often stop thinking critically. Over time, as loyalty intensifies, charismatic leaders who are unscrupulous or misguided can lead their people to abandon rationality and blindly embrace ideas they wouldn't normally support. There's even evidence that charismatic leadership increases the odds that people will lie and cheat in a twisted effort to support the leader or the organization.

Adam and Liz suggest that you look for these warning signs that you're under the influence of the dark side of charisma:

1. People never disagree with the leader, privately or publicly—a sign that they're drinking the Kool-Aid

2. A leader is asking you to violate your values. Instead of standing by your principles, you're expected to conform to theirs.

3. You can't think of anything that would cause you to withdraw your support of the leader. No leader deserves unconditional love.

DIMINISHERS

As a leader, what signs should you be looking for?

Liz Wiseman, in her research, noticed that charismatic leaders had a bad habit of diminishing others. As she noted, there are a lot of smart, talented, capable leaders who are so focused on their own intelligence and ideas that they underutilize people around them. They diminish the intelligence and capability of others. They love a creative environment, so they toss out ideas. And what tends to happen is that people get idea lazy around people who are idea rich, simply because they don't have to contribute. The leader has all the answers. The leader gets out ahead of their team. They show people what good looks like. But the problem is, once the leader gets out ahead of their team, people don't tend to speed up and catch up to match that. Their people are not with them. They are watching from the sidelines.

MULTIPLIERS

Liz calls the opposite of a diminisher, a multiplier. A multiplier is a leader who amplifies the capabilities and contributions of others. They get other people thinking. They ask hard questions. They give you an intellectual puzzle that ends up energizing you.”

Liz's suggestions for changing the harmful kind of charisma into the helpful kind follows three key practices:

1. Set expectations. Explain to your team that you're making a change, especially if they're used to you dominating the room. When leaders acknowledge their limitations out loud, it builds psychological safety for their teams to speak up.

2. Shine the spotlight on the supporting cast. Be willing to play the supporting actor role in meetings and let others own the leading role. Co-create the strategy with the team. After all they must execute it with your support. A growing body of evidence suggests that listening and question asking are undervalued leadership skills. Learn to ask more questions and create space for others. Instead of being the sole source of charisma, evoke charisma in others. By asking thoughtful questions and playing close attention to the responses, you stimulate new insights and energy in your team.

3. Don't be a fountain of more ideas than you can execute. Research shows that effective leaders are careful to balance imagination with implementation. That means maintaining a healthy ratio of dreaming to doing. Focus on two or three top priorities at a time.

So how many level 5 leaders do you have in your team? More importantly, how are you building level 5 leadership skills in the team that you have? I believe that we can choose to be humble and if we are really passionate about what we do, we will focus and get it done. These disciplines can be acquired; they can be learnt. I believe that leadership is a skill and with coaching and practice can be improved.

I would like to emphasize that Level 5 leaders build great teams and together they and their teams build great organizations. If the organization dies with the leader, and some leaders are actually happy with this, then it is not a great organization. As Collins notes in BE 2.0, “A great enterprise transcends dependence on any single extraordinary leader; if your organization cannot be great without you, then it is not yet truly great.”

As we scan the regional landscape, how many great organizations do we see? ANSA McAL, Republic Holdings, Massy, Sandals, Grace Kennedy, Bhagwansinghs, Associated Brands, HADCO, NCBJ, Blue Waters, Bermudez, Label House, Goddards, Jusamco, Southern Sales, etc. How many of these have Level 5 leaders? How many will still be around 10, 50 or 100 years from now?

Next week we will look at the second element of Disciplined People—Getting the Right People on the Bus. How do you find disciplined people? Do you have the right people in the right roles? How do you know?