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How to Become a Level 5 Leader

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How to Become a Level 5 Leader - Part 1 by Carl Robinson, Ph.D., copyright 2004
Jim Collins discovered when analyzing the research for his book "Good to Great," that the leaders who ran the "great" companies during the transition from good-to-great were all "Level 5" leaders. For those of you not familiar with "Good to Great," the qualifying criteria was that a company had to have achieved an average cumulative stock return of at least 3 times the market over a 15 year period. Only 11 of the Fortune 500 companies met all the criteria they used.
Collins said that the "data won" when it came to understanding the forces behind all good to great companies. In other words, his findings were derived from hard data not from personal opinion or intuitions about what helped propel a company grow from good to great. "...Level 5 leadership is an empirical finding, not an ideological one."
"The good-to-great executives were all cut from the same cloth. It didn't matter whether the company was consumer or industrial, in crisis or steady state, offered services or products. It didn't matter when the transition took place or how big the company. All the good-to-great companies had Level 5 leadership at the time of the transition. Furthermore, the absence of Level 5 leadership showed up as a consistent pattern in the comparison companies..."
In a nutshell, Level 5 Leaders "blend extreme personal humility with intense professional will."
In a previous executive briefing (Charisma Is No Panacea), I wrote about my similar experiences and other research findings that show that the so called charismatic leader is more often than not a drag on a company "in the long run." The operative words are "in the long run." Extreme examples of the charismatic leader who implode include Martha Stewart and Lee Iacocca. In this and subsequent briefings, I will outline some steps you can take

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