How good leaders become great
I've always known that my kids will be better than me at things one day. But this past weekend skiing up north was the first time I've understood it in my bones. Not only that my 6yo will be better on the slopes than me -- but that he already is.
I'm a good snowboarder. He has a chance to be a great skiier.
Speaking of, I just read Jim Collins’ Good to Great for the first time. Published in 2001, the process Collins outlines by which a company can go from good to great is just as relevant today as when it was first published more than a decade ago.
Through extensive research across 26 of the most consistently successful companies in the world, Collins and his team were able to isolate a set of variables which consistently transformed middling companies to masterpieces.
What he didn’t outline (but what maybe shouldn’t be surprising) is how those very same principles can be used to transform a good LEADER into a great one.
Want to become a great leader? Follow the map laid out by Good to Great.
Let's dive in.
How good leaders become great
If you haven’t read Good to Great, it’s worth at least asking ChatGPT for a summary, as the findings are quite persuasive and replicable. But in essence, what Collins and his team found after extensive research was that great companies become great by doing the following things:
They have great leaders who possess a unique combination of humility and fierce resolve. (We’ll get to that in a bit.)
They get the right people on the bus.
They figure out who they are as an organization by confronting the honest and sometimes painful facts about their strengths and weaknesses and passions and opportunities, and then use that information to understand themselves and their situation deeply.
They lean into the thing that the company can be the best at, to the detriment of all else. And, just as importantly, they are right about this. They are right as a product of their being honest and rigorous in finding out who they are, rather than projecting who they’d like to be.
They resist the natural human urge toward entropy, toward distraction, and toward following the winds of technology and markets. They are disciplined and stick to the company they are, saying no to everything they are not.
What Collins and his team found after more than a decade of cumulative study is that the companies who did these five things outperformed the market by 6.9x and sustained that success for over 15 years – more than twice the performance rate of General Electric under the legendary Jack Welch. Statistically, they showed that this process works to transform a company from good to great.
And in reading their work, I couldn’t help but notice that this is also the process a leader can take, to help themselves transform from good to great.
I’m going to presume you are already a good leader. You’ve found your way to this newsletter, you want to keep getting better, and you presumably have already had some career success from which to draw upon.
So good leader, how can you become a great one? How do you become what Collins called a “Level 5 Leader”? Far from a mystery, the same lessons and principles Collins and team found for good to great companies apply for the development of individual humans and leaders as well. Let’s dive into each one in turn.
They get the right people on the bus.
The first and most important principle of the Good to Great methodology is getting the right people on the bus. As Collins says, “first who, then what.”
The same is true for leaders. To become a great leader, you must begin with who you are before worrying at all about what you’re building. This means that before you spend too much time or energy on what you’re doing, what your strategy is, or any other what, you must first prioritize your own development. Like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
The best leaders in the world are ruthless about investing in their own growth. They constantly push themselves to improve. To identify blind spots and strengths. To iterate practices and structures to perfection. No matter their specific flavor of improvement, the best leaders are always looking for ways to develop themselves.
This relentless forward motion – applied to one’s own personal development – is the fuel for any transformation from good to great. If a leader fails to invest in their own growth, or if they apply all their soul to their enterprise (the “what”) without also focusing on their own personal progress, they will never become great. The what is important, but it comes second to the who.
But to what does a leader going from good to great apply this relentless forward motion?
They figure out who they are, deeply, including the brutal facts.
The primary thrust of the forward motion required to become a great leader, like becoming a great company, is toward developing self awareness.
The good to great companies Collins wrote about were fearless in confronting reality, both the reality of themselves and their situations (no matter how challenging – and in some cases things were bleak). As a result they were able to focus their attention on the areas in which they could best drive success. On the other hand, the comparison companies often avoided the brutal facts. They looked on the bright side, papered over hard truths, or otherwise avoided dealing with the hard stuff, leading them to focus in all the wrong places.
Most leaders, when they embark upon the path of self-awareness, do the same. It’s easier to think about the fun stuff. The stuff that you do well. It’s hard to hear the things you’re bad at, so you simply don’t hear them. Or look for them. There’s even a logic behind ignoring the bad stuff – for many people hearing their deficits can have a profoundly negative impact on their confidence (and therefore effectiveness as a leader). It’s hard to hear – truly hear, and embrace your flaws in a way that enables you to make a change – that you are failing in surrounding yourself with great people and still maintain pure confidence that you will be successful.
But that’s what great companies do, and that’s what it takes to become a great leader.
“Success is going from failure to failure with zero loss of enthusiasm.”
This is a scary journey, which I and others have described in the past, but it is the path to becoming a Level 5 Leader.
I mentioned that term earlier, Level 5 Leader. But what is it? According to Collins, Level 5 Leaders are characterized by a unique combination of humility and fierce resolve.
“Level 5 Leaders embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are ambitious, to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not themselves.” – Jim Collins
Humility comes from knowing and embracing all your faults, as much as your strengths. By seeing yourself clearly, you see your own beauty and the beauty of everyone around you. And you see your own shortcomings, and you don’t hide from them.
That fierce resolve? It comes from knowing deep in your bones that you can succeed at what you’re doing. Not because you’re projecting a reality distortion field, but because you deeply understand reality, and the possibility of your success is evident in the same way that 2+2=4.
You aren’t creating that possibility. You’ve found it.
They lean into the thing they can be the best at to the detriment of all else.
Like great companies, great leaders do not choose who to be nor do they try to be anyone else. They discover who they already are and lead as that person.
At the center of the good to great transition for companies was the honest and fearless creation of their Hedgehog Concept – a document that outlined what they could be the best in the world at, what they were passionate about, and what allowed them to create sustainable revenue. Once they’d discovered their Hedgehog Concept (a process which sometimes took years), they’d align all their efforts around it and say no to everything else. The comparison companies instead chose compelling direction after compelling direction, flailing around in an attempt to read the winds and markets.
It’s the same thing for leaders. While good leaders figure out who they want to be as leaders – based on any combination of factors from what’s accepted in their culture to a biography they read from a famous leader – and try to live into that projection, great leaders figure out who they already are, including all the shadow shit. Including all the brutal truths about themselves they’d rather not look at. While the good leaders are creating an idealized version of who they think they ought to be, the great leaders learn who they really are. The good bits and the nasty bits, the bits that make them ashamed and the bits that make them proud.
Then they resolve to simply be that person. As best they can. Come what may.
This is harder than it appears at first glance. Not only are leaders beset by all sorts of influences asking them to be someone else (success more than anything else asks this of people), but some of those influences might actually be right. Some point out weaknesses in the leader, poking at the soft spots and insecurities, and if leaders do not know themselves well enough to already have integrated those weaknesses into their identities, criticism can throw them off course.
But great leaders already know their shortcomings and their strengths, and understand the thing that they can be successful at based on those shortcomings and strengths. They lean into being the type of human they are, as best they can, and avoid the latest fads no matter how well they work for others.
They resist the natural human urge toward entropy. They are disciplined.
The best leaders understand that their primary responsibility is not to set the strategy, but to ensure everyone executes against that strategy. Even when the results, at first, are small, and it’s very easy to lose focus. As Venkatesh Rao famously put it, “CEO’s don’t steer. CEOs are orientation locks.”
In the context of companies, Collins calls this a culture of discipline. Discipline to what? In the good to great companies, it’s primarily discipline to their Hedgehog Concept. To who they are, and more importantly, who they are not. Any group of humans, absent a great leader to orientation lock them, will inevitably succumb to entropy. They’ll die by a thousand cuts of distraction, opportunity, hesitation, and the rest, and they’ll never develop the focused, sustained momentum required to achieve breakthrough results.
Building momentum a little bit at a time is the only way for a company to achieve breakthrough results. The thing is that this process can take 10+ years. So the leader must orientation-lock consistently, over a long period of time, despite tremendous pressure from both inside and out to conform to the latest fad or seize the latest opportunity. It is the leader’s faith, both to confront the brutal facts, but also to maintain faith that they will prevail in the end, even if it’s not yet clear how, that helps a team take the consistent small steps to build that momentum. The difficulty of this cannot be overstated.
Like the organization itself, every leader is beset on all sides by opportunities as well. By best practices (including this one, ironically). By models and frameworks and all sorts of things they ought to be doing differently. By new technologies. By new values. By opportunities. By their public persona. By their success and media. And perhaps the most nefarious of them all (particularly for ADHD founders like myself) by new ideas. Leaders, more than any other individual within the company, are pressured by entropy to become anything, or everything, else.
And most leaders succumb to this pressure. They see other leaders’ success and try to emulate them. They conjure an image of a great leader in their minds and try to live into it. They see the latest mindset and try to adopt it. They see the market changing and try to time it, or to take advantage of it. They see Elon Musk or Steve Jobs leading as a modern day Alexander and try to become that. Or they study Lincoln, leading as a servant, and they try to become that.
Most leaders, as hard as they try to emulate greatness, never become great.
Great leaders, like great companies, have done the work to know who they are. Not who they think they ought to be, wish they were, or hope they might become. Great leaders know who they ARE. And they do not try to be anyone else.
They are humble, understanding their shortcomings and their strengths, and embracing all parts. And they have the fierce resolve of knowing – not believing or projecting or reality distorting, but simply knowing with the calm clarity of a math proof – who they are and what work they’re here to do. And they have the bravery to be that person and do that work, no matter the obstacle.
Yeah, but I/this situation/our company is different, right?
No.
Collins again:
"People who say, “Hey, but we’ve got constraints that prevent us from taking this longer-term approach,” should keep in mind that the good-to-great companies followed this model no matter how dire the short-term circumstances— deregulation in the case of Wells Fargo, looming bankruptcy in the cases of Nucor and Circuit City, potential takeover threats in the cases of Gillette and Kroger, or million-dollar-a-day losses in the case of Fannie Mae.
The path to becoming a great leader is the path to becoming a great leader. All leaders are beset by pressures to think short term. To focus on what they’re leading rather than who they are. To focus on the “doing” of leadership as opposed to the “becoming” of leadership. All leaders are tempted to look for silver bullets.
You and your situation are not unique.
The great leaders embrace the process of self-awareness – awareness of both who you are, and what work you can naturally be great at – not in spite of the pressures, but as the means to navigate them skillfully.
To recap
Jim Collins’ exhaustive study showed us the process by which a company can transform from good to great.
“If you have Level 5 leaders who get the right people on the bus, if you confront the brutal facts of reality, if you create a climate where the truth is heard…if you frame all decisions in the context of a crystalline Hedgehog Concept, if you act from understanding, not bravado—if you do all these things, then you are likely to be right on the big decisions. The real question is, once you know the right thing, do you have the discipline to do the right thing and, equally important, to stop doing the wrong things?
“Those that stay true to these fundamentals and maintain their balance, even in times of great change and disruption, will accumulate the momentum that creates breakthrough momentum. Those that do not, those that fall into reactionary lurching about, will spiral downward or remain mediocre. This is the big-picture difference between great and good, the gestalt of the whole study captured in the metaphor of the flywheel versus the doom loop.”
With how easy it is for a leader to enmesh their identity with the company they lead, I suppose it’s not surprising that the same process that helps a company go from good to great, can help a leader make the same journey.
If you’re on your own journey to becoming a great leader, leverage the more than a decade of research coming from one of the brightest minds in business to guide you along your way.
Invest in your own continuous improvement as a human.
Find out who you really are, including the brutal facts.
Be that person, and nobody else. Improve what needs improving from the inside-out.
Maintain resolve and stay the course, even when it’s tempting to take a shortcut.
As I've said before, leadership is often quite simple. But it's rarely easy.
Things I read this week
One: How A Bit Of Awe Can Improve Your Health (New York Times)
The experience of being in wonder of something, anything, can be a salve for a troubled mind. Even the experts agree.
LINK >>
Two: Sacred Sunday Check-ins (Jonny Miller @jonnym1ller)
6 questions Jonny and his wife answer every weekend, which have had an incredibly positive impact on their marriage and partnership. Not gonna lie, it's got me curious about what it'd be like to do these with Laura.
LINK >>
Want to dive deeper?
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