Coaching practices for Collins Good to Great Leadership

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Collins Good to Great Leadership, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I keep catching myself making calls based on how they’ll make me look rather than what’s actually best for the thing I’m building
  • I keep nailing down the exact plan before I’ve sorted out who’s actually in the boat with me, and then the plan shifts and the wrong people can’t adapt
  • I keep lurching from one big new initiative to the next, each one wiping out whatever momentum the last was building, and I’m exhausted with nothing to show
  • My team only performs when I’m watching, and I keep bolting on more rules to control it, which just makes everything rigid
  • Part of me wants to keep my best people in roles that serve me and to pick a successor who won’t outshine me

Practices that may help

  1. Channel ambition to the institution, not yourself
    Care more about the organization’s success than your personal legacy.
    Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
  2. Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
    Jim Collins’ Good to Great research found that the leaders who took companies from good to great shared a paradoxical combination of fierce personal will and deep personal humility — what Collins calls Level 5 Leadership. They channeled ambition into the institution, not themselves, and set up successors for greatness rather than engineering dependence.
  3. Get the right people on the bus before setting direction
    Prioritize who is doing the work before deciding what to do.
    Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
  4. Build the flywheel through consistent small pushes
    Great results come from sustained, consistent effort in one direction — not a single dramatic transformation.
    Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
  5. Build a culture of discipline, not a disciplinarian culture
    Hire self-disciplined people, then give them freedom within a clear framework.
    Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
  6. Develop successors who will surpass you
    Invest in your successor’s success as a deliberate act of institutional ambition.
    Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
  7. Find your hedgehog concept — the one thing you can be best at
    Identify the intersection of what you can be best at, what drives your economic engine, and what you are deeply passionate about.
    Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
  8. Ruthlessly prune commitments outside the intersection
    Once the intersection is visible, say no to opportunities — even good ones — that fall outside it.
    The Hedgehog Concept
  9. Commit to the long game the Hedgehog requires
    Expect the intersection to take years to inhabit fully — and protect it against urgency and short-term pressure.
    The Hedgehog Concept
  10. The Hedgehog Concept
    Jim Collins’s Hedgehog Concept, drawn from his Good to Great research, proposes that enduring excellence comes from focusing on the intersection of three circles: what you can be world-class at, what drives your economic engine, and what you are deeply passionate about. It is a strategic framework derived from systematic study of high-performing companies; its application to individual purpose is widely used but the evidence base is organizational, not individual.

Related concerns

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