The Trusted Executive by John Blakey

The Trusted Executive by John Blakey

Author:John Blakey [Blakey, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2016-03-11T14:13:24+00:00


FIGURE 4.2 Hierarchy of leadership

Where do we look for our role models in Level 5 leadership? By definition, we are unlikely to find these leaders amongst the celebrity business figures we watch on TV or read about in the media. We are more likely to come across them at a personal level as we pursue our own careers. The CEOs I interviewed shared with me stories of Level 5 leaders who had influenced them at critical points in their own leadership development. Whenever they did this, their tone of voice changed and they spoke with some reverence about the humility they had witnessed. The following words from one interview are typical of the sentiment they expressed:

I worked for a Permanent Secretary when I first went to Revenue & Customs who fell on his sword as a result of the scandal when tax-payers’ data was lost. It was nothing to do with him and I found it emotionally very moving that he should stand down. He was a man of intense integrity. Your belief in the system is bolstered by somebody doing that and you think, ‘Crikey, I’d rather some other people fell on their swords as well.’

In other interviews, I saw further glimpses of Level 5 leadership at work:

‘To be a CEO you have to have a high degree of self-confidence but you’re never fully in charge. It’s not black and white. It’s a balance of probabilities. You can skew these in your favour but you can’t always be right, you can’t always have the answer.’

‘We have a tendency to say that if we do better than the average then it is down to our skill and if we do worse than the average then it is down to bad luck That attitude doesn’t do anyone any good.’

‘A lot of the great leaders in my working career are not extroverts, they don’t shout and scream. People can achieve an awful lot without shouting and screaming about it.’

But if you are the Level 3 or level 4 executive leader of today how do you prepare yourself to be the Level 5 trusted executive of tomorrow? Collins did not research this question, though his own gut feeling was that there are some leaders who have the Level 5 ‘seed’ within them and others who don’t. My own hypothesis is that we all have the Level 5 ‘seed’ within us, it is just that in some of us it is buried deeper than in others. But then I am an executive coach so I would say that, wouldn’t I? Where I agree with Collins is that the qualities that get a leader to Level 4 (personal ambition, drive, confidence) are the same qualities that need to be transformed to reach Level 5. Marshall Goldsmith captured this irony in the title of his book, What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There.18

Maybe the clue to this transition lies in Collins’ use of the ‘seed’ analogy? What does it take for a once dormant seed to suddenly sprout into life? We know the answer to this question.



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