What Is Level 5 Leadership? The Real Meaning of Leadership

In his well known book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes level 5 leadership. Because this idea has become popular, we need to be clear about what it means.

Collins based his views on exhaustive research into a number of businesses that transformed themselves from just getting by to great performers in a short space of time. His research showed that the Chief Executives of such businesses did not match the usual macho image we have of great leaders. They turned out to be humble and modest though very single-minded. The idea of level 5 leadership has been very popular because it makes a virtue out of humility.

Level 4 Leaders

Level 4 leaders have their own visions of what the business needs to do to succeed. They decide on direction and then get people to implement their vision. This is what Collins refers to as "first what, then who." Level 4 leaders are very much in the conventional mode. They may be effective when it is not too difficult to decide what to do, but they struggle in more complex, high tech businesses that compete through rapid innovation. In these contexts, the world is too complex for any one person to be confident of what direction to pursue.

Level 5 Leaders

The reason these leaders are humble is that they see clearly their own limitations in a complex environment. So, instead of promoting their own visions, they get their best people together and grill them with penetrating questions to draw new strategies out of them. Hence the related Collins slogan: "first who, then what." Because Chief Executives can't decide what to do alone, they need the input of a team of smart associates. They get the best "who" into a room and together decide the best "what." This makes them participative leaders.

The essential difference, therefore, is that the level 4 leader provides direction while the level 5 leader is a facilitator who draws ideas for new directions out of others. Level 5 leadership is really a modern version of the participative leadership style that has been around for decades.

The Meaning of Leadership Transformed

This move by Collins seems innocent enough but it must be noted that he has thrown out a very old way of defining leadership. Traditionally, there have been two essential features of leadership. One is that leaders are those people who make it to the top in any group. The second feature is that leaders provide direction. Collins has cast aside the second feature in order to preserve the first. An alternative approach is to do the opposite. This means that the Chief Executives Collins celebrates are really not providing leadership at all. We need to recognize that facilitating a discussion does not become leadership just because the person in charge is doing it. Facilitation is really just a good management technique. The advantage of this way of defining leadership is that we can now say that anyone in an organization or outside it who successfully promotes a new direction has shown leadership regardless of whether that person is in charge or not.

Collins tells us that his "great" organizations excel at facing reality. We also need to face the reality that the world is now too complex for Chief Executives to provide all the leadership an organization needs. They can provide some, of course, but so can front-line knowledge workers who succeed in promoting new products or services. Complexity means that Chief Executives do in fact need to be good facilitators, but we should recognize that, in so doing, they are wearing a managerial hat, not showing leadership.

This is important because, in our knowledge-driven age, we need all employees showing leadership. By redefining leadership as he does, Collins preserves the status quo that effective Chief Executives must be leaders whatever they do, but the cost is to throw out the essence of leadership which is to show the way, to promote a new direction.

Aug 30, 2008 11:44 AM

Guest :

MY OPINION OF THE LEVEL 5 LEADERSHIP IS THAT GOOD BAS IT MAY SEEM SOME LEADERS DONT LIKE THE IDEA OF BEING GIVEN IDEAS AND SO THEY TEND TO WANT TO GET ALL THE CRDIT FOR AND TO THEMSELVES ALONE

Sep 28, 2008 6:44 AM

Guest :

The difficulty with the concept of redefining leadership, as you indicate in your article, is that he is trying to define an emerging 21st paradigm for leadership from his research in 'actual practice', and that people like you and I, brought up in the 20th century managemetn, leadership and work paradigm, may struggle with idea that challenge our 'beliefs'. The problem with a paradigm shift is that you do not know you are in it, until the new paradigm becomes the 'conventional wisdom' (rarely do people like Einstein come along and write a small book and shatter a paradigm, as he did overturning Newtonian physics which had dominated for hundreds of years and, within the scientific community, was the prevailing paradigm of thought). The, what we consider today, great thinkers on management, leadership and organisational theory from the start of the 20th century (Fayol, Taylor, Maslow, etc,) must have faced similar scepticism and ridicule when they espoused thier theories and challenged 'conventional thinking' (the prevailing beliefs paradigm). I think, based on my 30 years working in international organisations, that he (and others like him, writing similar things in differnt ways over the last decade or so) might just be right, and I for one would have much preferred to be starting my career today working for a Level 5 leader (or 4 or 3 for that matter !) than some of the terrible managers and leaders that I had to work for in teh 20th century. Management and leadership theory is still in it's infancy (just over 100 odd years old), so I think I for one am going to reserve judgement and keep an open mind on this.

Sep 28, 2008 7:01 AM

Mitch McCrimmon :

Very thoughtful comment on leadership paradigms - must have read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn also said that existing paradigms have anomalies which get overlooked or ignored. With conventional leadership theory, leading by example is such an anomaly. Conventional leadership theory portrays leadership as being in charge of a group and directing its efforts toward a goal. But anyone can show occasional leadership by example without being in charge of anyone, even informally. Leading by example is a great instance of simply showing a better way. I think the only way to create a general theory of leadership, one that accounts for all instances, is to say that leadership promotes new directions. There isn't enough space here to develop this further but I think we can upgrade management to do what Collins says level 5 leaders do.

Sep 30, 2008 12:44 PM

Mitch McCrimmon :

I felt I must say more in response to the comment suggesting that I might be portraying Collins as a misunderstood revolutionary. My article clearly failed to make it clear that I see Collins as a reactionary, not a revolutionary. Sure, his idea of encouraging CEOs to be more facilitative is laudable. Who can argue with that? My quarrel with Collins is that he has changed the definition of leadership to save the status quo of CEOs being seen as leaders. I agree that we need a new definition of leadership but I feel we need something far more radical. In my several Suite101 articles relating to leadership, I define it as simply promoting new directions. This means that everything to do with getting things done must be assigned to management - where management is suitably upgraded to be as facilitative and supportive as Collins suggests. On my definition, leadership can be shown bottom up by employees who have no inclination or skill to take charge of a group. Such leadership has a range of novel features, including having nothing to do with managing people. Enough said here. See my other articles or website www.leadersdirect.com, for more.