The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (31 page)

In the mid-1980s, I had the privilege of spending a few days with management expert Peter Drucker. A group of leaders got a chance to sit with him, listen, take notes, and ask questions. I learned many wonderful things from Drucker, but there was one question he asked that challenged me more than anything else. During the session, he asked each one of us, “Who is going to replace you?”

Prior to that time, I had never asked myself that question. When Drucker asked it, I had no answer. But I walked away from my time with him determined to live in such a way that I would be able to answer it. And from that day forward, I dedicated myself to developing the top leaders in my sphere of influence and helping them to be ready to lead on as high a level as possible.

Leaving a successor is the last great gift a leader can give an
organization. Leadership-transition difficulties are far too common, and like the passing of the baton in a relay race, a leadership transition must be planned and executed well. Success is dependent upon the leader with the baton handing it off to the next leader when both of them are running at maximum speed. Writer Lorin Woolfe says, “The ultimate test for a leader is not whether he or she makes smart decisions and takes decisive action, but whether he or she teaches others to be leaders and builds an organization that can sustain its success even when he or she is not around.” True leaders put ego aside and strive to create successors who go beyond them. And they plan to hand off the baton of leadership in stride when they are still running at their peak. If a leader has already begun to slow down, the baton is being handed off too late. No leader should hurt the organization’s momentum by staying too long just for his or her own gratification. The number one problem in organizations led by Level 5 leaders is that they stay too long. So if you’re a Level 5 leader who runs an organization, plan your succession and leave
before
you feel you have to.

Someone once asked Billy Graham what the most surprising thing about life was. “The brevity of it,” he replied. Now that I’ve entered my sixties, I would have to agree with him. When you’re young, you can’t wait to get somewhere in life—to achieve success, climb the ladder, make an impact. If you have a type-A personality, you move fast and try to conquer as much ground as you can. But as you age, you realize there’s much more to life than success. You want to make a difference. And if you think about it early enough, you have the opportunity to leave a positive legacy. That’s what I desire to do. I hope you do as well.

One of the keys to arriving at the end of our lives without regret is doing the work of creating a lasting legacy. If you are a Level 5 leader, I want to encourage you to use the influence you have now to create a better world. How? First, recognize that what you do daily, over time, becomes your legacy. Whether it’s spending quality time with your family every day, saving money and investing every month, speaking kind and encouraging words to others each day—these actions result in a legacy of positive impact.

Second, decide now what you want your legacy to be. How do you want to be remembered? What would you like people to say about you at your funeral? Do you have a vision for the positive impact you want to leave behind you? Do you know what you can invest in potential leaders who will want to help you build it?

Finally, understand that a legacy is the sum of your whole life, not just snippets. If you have failed, that’s okay. Has your life taken a path that is less than ideal? Put it behind you. Set off in the right direction and begin to change the way you live starting today. Fulfill your mission and vision for your life. Do it now before it is too late to change.

Don’t let yourself get to the final days of your life wondering what could have been. Decide today what your life will be, and then take action each and every day to live your dreams and leave your legacy!

A
s you consider the different aspects of Level 5, please be aware of how the following laws of leadership come into play:

When I wrote the overview of the 5 Levels of Leadership in the first chapter of this book, I used the word
respect
to describe Level 5. On the Pinnacle, leaders have led so well for so long that they have become larger than life, and people are influenced by their reputation even before there is any direct contact between leaders and their followers. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man.” That sentiment is a good description of Level 5 leaders. Their presence makes an impact.

It’s true that leaders gain respect on every level. They earn it by showing worthiness for the chance to lead on Level 1, developing relationships on Level 2, creating a productive team on Level 3, and developing people on Level 4. But on Level 5 the respect they’ve earned begins to compound. Everyone wants to follow a true Level 5 leader.

Everybody is intuitive. We all have strong intuition in the areas of our giftedness. What Level 5 leaders possess in abundance is leadership intuition, and as a result, they see everything with a leadership bias. Good leaders learn to trust what Emerson called the “blessed impulse.” That’s the hunch that informs you that something is right. Level 5 leaders learn to trust those instincts and act upon them.

Of all the laws of leadership that I teach, the Law of Intuition is the most difficult. Why? Because most people have a difficult time teaching in the areas where they are intuitive. Intuition is the ability to experience immediate insight without rational thought. If you can perform leadership tasks, knowing they’re right but not having examined them with rational thought, it’s difficult to explain why you did what you did.

The more naturally gifted you are in leadership, the stronger your leadership intuition is likely to be. Learn to trust it. And if your gifting in leadership isn’t high, don’t lose hope. While it’s true that your leadership intuition will never be as high as that of a natural leader, you can still develop leadership intuition based on leadership experience and reflective thinking on your failures and successes.

Closely related to the Law of Intuition is the Law of Timing, because timing is also largely instinctive. Knowing what to do can be relatively easy for an effective leader at Level 3. Knowing the right timing can be much more difficult. Why? There are so many intangible factors. Often a hunch is all we have to rely on to make a timing decision, and that can be difficult to explain. People are apt to listen to hard facts and
respect the point of view of the person who expresses them. Intuition doesn’t carry as much weight—unless you have a proven track record of right assessments to back it up.

Leaders on Level 5 have so much experience and credibility that others listen to their hunches when it comes to timing. If you’re not yet on Level 5, then be aware that others may not trust your advice when it comes to timing. But don’t despair. Listen to your intuition, take note of when it’s wrong or right, and develop a track record that will bring you the credibility you desire.

I’ve already discussed the importance of legacy on Level 5, so I don’t need to say a lot here. Allow me to leave you with this thought: The goal in life is not to live forever. The goal in life is to create something that does. The best way to do that as a Level 5 leader is to invest what you have in the lives of others.

Every time you develop a potential leader to Level 4, you change your organization for the better and increase its potential. Why? Because…

That is why Level 5 leaders are so powerful and why their organizations have unlimited potential!

A
t this point in previous sections of the book, I discussed the beliefs that would help you to move up to the next level of leadership. However, when you’re on the Pinnacle level, there is no higher place in leadership. So what am I going to do in this section? Teach you how to help
others
to move up to the higher levels of leadership. Once you reach Level 5, your focus shouldn’t be on advancing yourself anyway; it should be on helping
others
move up as high as they can go.

What is the secret of learning to lead? Leading. That’s like saying that you learn to drive a car by driving a car. Or that you learn to cook by cooking. All are true. As novelist Mark Twain once said drily, “I know a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned 40 percent more about cats than the man who didn’t.” This may sound like a catch-22, like the old lament that you can’t get a job without first having experience, yet you can’t get experience without first having a job. That’s where you come in.

As a mentor, you can give the inexperienced leaders leadership experiences that make them better. A little experience goes a lot further than a lot of theory. You’ve probably heard the saying, “When a person with money meets a person with experience, the person with experience usually gets the money and the person with the money gets the experience.”
As an experienced leader, you can identify potential leaders, you can figure out what kinds of experiences they need, and you can help to provide them in a controlled environment where their failures and fumbles won’t completely take them out of the game of leadership.

Can you identify the experiences that taught you invaluable leadership lessons and shaped you as a person and leader? I certainly can. These are crucible moments. While I was writing
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership,
I was surprised to discover that I could remember a specific experience for each law that cemented it in my leadership consciousness. For example, the Law of Victory had become a reality to me in 1970 when I led my organization to reach a goal that nearly everyone believed was impossible. The Law of the Inner Circle became clear to me on my fortieth birthday when I had to admit to myself that I was not as successful as I had hoped to be, and if I was going to accomplish all that I desired to, I needed to develop an inner circle of other leaders to work alongside me.

The key incidents in your life—crucible moments—have shaped you. They’ve created breakthroughs for you. And the leadership experiences you’ve had—both good and bad—have made you the leader you are today. The same will be true for those you lead and develop. Why not help others experience as many positive breakthroughs as possible while they are under your care?

I recently read an article by Robert J. Thomas in the
MIT Sloan Management Review
that confirms my observations on leadership development. Thomas argues that organizations that do a good job developing leaders use crucible experiences as “a kind of superconcentrated form of leadership development.” He writes,

Thomas goes on to describe two very dissimilar organizations that orchestrate and manage crucible experiences to help their leaders develop and grow: the Mormon Church and the Hells Angels. Thomas asserts,

Thomas also points out, less dramatically, that Toyota, Boeing, General Electric, and MIT also take an experiential approach to leadership development.

If you want to make the most of your influence on Level 5, then you need to create crucible moments that will enable your best leaders to reach their leadership potential. Here’s how I suggest you go about doing it.