Humility – The Key to Leadership

Author Jim Collins (Good to Great & How the Mighty Fall) has given us a useful leadership model in his July 2001 & 2005 Harvard Business Review article: “Level 5 Leadership -The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve”.

It is useful because it gives us both a chronological development sequence as well as outlining distinct and practical leadership attributes. Here is the progression:

Level 1: Achiever

Collins describes this individual as highly capable making productive contributions through individual talent, skills and know-how, as well as honed working habits.

Level 2: Cooperator

We see this leader as a team member who works effectively with others in group mode, jointly contributing to the team’s goals.

Level 3: Organizer

Now, the individual rises to learn management competencies, in organizing people and resources effectively to the pursuit of objectives from on high.

Level 4: Visionary

At this level we see a leader who has the ability to unite people to vigorously pursue a clear and compelling vision; stimulating the collective and catalyzing their commitment to high performance outputs in attaining the dream.

Level 5: Sculptor

This Is Collins key contribution: he discovered that some few business leaders could build “enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will”.

Now we add what we see as two yet higher levels of leadership development:

Level 6: Humanitarian

This is the skill and attitude to transcend “self” and our personal empires (including the sculptor’s empire). Here we find the empathy and objectivity to see and feel from the perspective of other cultures and individualities’ needs, wants, burdens and hopes. The humanitarian is able to translate this learned “outgoing concern” into unifying words and subsequent movements, on scales both small and big.

Level 7: Liberator

This emancipator goes beyond support from followers to personally lead those followers to relieve the troubles and burdens of an oppressed group. Usually this leader can bust the compromises an industry or government imposes on people. Most often this is done through strategic innovation. Because innovation, at least at first, does not directly affect the status quo, it often begins quietly, going unnoticed until its impact begins to build momentum. At that point, the energy behind the innovation begins to change the world and its old burdensome ways – – people are liberated from the oppression. Liberators are leaders who have developed the know-how and attitudes to bust all sorts of imposed compromise.

Above we have, an outline, a thumbnail sketch of leadership development in the context of humility and vision.

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