Not What We Expected, Either
We’ll look in depth at Level 5 leadership, but first let’s set an important context for our findings. We were not looking for Level 5 or anything like it. Our original question was, Can a good company become a great one and, if so, how? In fact, I gave the research teams explicit instructions to downplay the role of top executives in their analyses of this question so we wouldn’t slip into the simplistic “credit the leader” or “blame the leader” thinking that is so common today.
But Level 5 found us. Over the course of the study, research teams kept saying, “We can’t ignore the top executives even if we want to. There is something consistently unusual about them.” I would push back, arguing, “The comparison companies also had leaders. So what’s different here?” Back and forth the debate raged. Finally, as should always be the case, the data won. The executives at companies that went from good to great and sustained that performance for 15 years or more were all cut from the same cloth one remarkably different from that which produced the executives at the comparison companies in our study. It didn’t matter whether the company was in crisis or steady state, consumer or industrial, offering services or products. It didn’t matter when the transition took place or how big the company. The successful organizations all had a Level 5 leader at the time of transition.
Furthermore, the absence of Level 5 leadership showed up consistently across the comparison companies. The point: Level 5 is an empirical finding, not an ideological one. And that’s important to note, given how much the Level 5 finding contradicts not only conventional wisdom but much of management theory to date. (For more about our findings on good-to-great transformations, see the sidebar “Not by Level 5 Alone.”)