Coaching practices for Level 5 Leadership

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Level 5 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 either throw someone in too deep and watch them flounder, or I keep a hand on everything long after they’ve outgrown it and can feel them getting stifled
  • Everything still flows through me
  • 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. 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.
  2. 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
  3. Match the delegation level to the person’s current competence and confidence
    Over-delegate to someone who isn’t ready and they fail; under-delegate and they stagnate.
    Delegation Levels, Made Practical
  4. Distribute leadership rather than centralizing it
    Develop leadership capacity throughout the team, not just in the designated leader.
    Transformational Leadership, Made Practical
  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. Look out the window for credit, in the mirror for blame
    When things go well, credit others; when things go wrong, look at yourself first.
    Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
  8. Model the values you expect (idealized influence)
    Become a living example of the values you want your team to hold.
    Transformational Leadership, Made Practical
  9. Leading from behind — the servant leader stance
    Influence others more through example, listening, and restraint than through assertion and command.
    The Tao Te Ching, Made Practical
  10. Lead from the executing domain — deliver on goals consistently
    People strong in executing know how to take an idea and make it happen.
    Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical

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