The Performance Gap: Issue 6

Last week I wrote about judgement - specifically about the gap between confidence and accuracy, and what organisations that reward the former at the expense of the latter tend to produce. This week I want to look at what the evidence says about the leaders who actually produce enduring results. The answer is in tension with almost everything the leadership industry has told us to look for.

The best leaders don't look like leaders

Jim Collins and his research team spent five years studying companies that made the leap from good to great performance (defined as cumulative stock returns at least three times the market average over fifteen years). They expected to find exceptional leaders; visionary, charismatic, decisive, large-personality CEOs who drove transformation through force of will.

What they found instead was so unexpected they initially tried to discount it.

The leaders who produced the most enduring results were, almost without exception, modest in demeanour, reluctant to take personal credit, and intensely focused on the organisation's success rather than their own visibility. Collins called this Level 5 Leadership - a combination of fierce professional will and personal humility that looks, from the outside, nothing like the dominant cultural archetype of the transformational leader.

The charismatic, high-profile leaders (the ones who looked like great leaders from the outside) were more likely to be found at the helm of comparison companies; organisations that performed well for a period and then declined when the leader left, because the results had been built around a personality rather than a system.

What this means for how organisations develop leaders

The Level 5 finding has a direct implication for leadership development that most organisations haven't absorbed.

If the most effective leaders are characterised by humility, by a willingness to attribute success to others and take personal responsibility for failure, by a focus on succession and institutional strength rather than personal legacy - then development systems that reward visibility, confident self-promotion, and personal brand are selecting for exactly the wrong qualities.

The leaders who surface fastest in most organisations are often those who are best at being seen to be leading. The leaders who produce the most durable results are often those who are least interested in being seen at all.

This is not an argument against visibility or communication - both matter. It is an argument for examining what your organisation's development and promotion systems are actually selecting for, and whether those qualities predict the outcomes you need.

The manager as coach - why it matters here

The humility that Collins identifies as central to Level 5 Leadership is also the quality most necessary for a manager to function effectively as a coach for their team.

A manager who is focused on their own performance and reputation will use development conversations to demonstrate their own insight. A manager who is genuinely focused on the other person's growth will use those conversations to ask rather than tell, to create conditions for thinking rather than to supply answers.

One of my richest LinkedIn threads was about exactly this: The conditions under which managers can hold genuinely developmental conversations - the contracting, the psychological safety, the coaching competence required. The Level 5 research suggests this isn't just a nice-to-have. It is what the most effective leadership actually looks like from the inside.

The question for the week

Think about the most effective leader you have worked with or observed. How much of their effectiveness was about what they did visibly - and how much was about what they created around them? And how does your organisation's development and promotion system weight those two things?

Next week: Why culture is defined not by what organisations say they value, but by what behaviour they consistently tolerate.

Dr Andrew A Walker | Chartered Psychologist | Leadership Coach | andrewantonywalker.com

If something in this issue resonated and you’d like to think it through in the context of your own organisation or leadership - a Chemistry Session is a free 30-minute conversation. No pitch, no obligation. Book here.