A Funny Thing Happens Around Level 5 Leaders

Audio Transcript

A funny thing happens in the presence of a Level 5 leader: other people begin to be more like Level 5. We were able to look at the management teams in these companies broadly as well as at the very top. What we found is there’s a bit of a cascading effect, that you’d have a Level 5 leader who would start to build a Level 5 management team. People on that management team who were ambitious only for their particular parochial interest tended not to last on that management team. People who could argue and debate and yell and scream for the best answer, rather than for their personal best answer or for the sake of being right, tended not to last on the management team.

Those people tended to move more toward Level 5 by being in a Level 5 climate. That then cascaded down to their spans of responsibility, and it kind of bubbled out from there. The level of the management team would consequently rise over time.