‘I’ll stay down here’

WHEN Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected and first presented as the new pope, he declined to stand on a platform that would have made him tower over the other cardinals. “I’ll stay down here,” he said when asked to step up.

Ever since, Pope Francis has been adamant about living a simple life and never misses an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of humility. But make no mistake: He is no pushover. Since becoming pope, he has made radical changes in the Vatican and in the Catholic doctrine, against strong objections from seemingly unyielding powers. For many, even non-Catholics, the Pope has altered the standards by which we measure our leaders. In leadership literature, he would be categorized as a “Level 5 leader.”

In his best-selling book titled “Good to Great,” Jim Collins defines this type of leader as having two traits—a paradoxical mix of great ambition and humility. These leaders are highly ambitious but the focus of their ambition is not themselves but the greater good. With this focus, they feel no need to inflate their egos—hence the authentic humility.

Collins and his team did not pluck this theory out of thin air. The research that was undertaken to get to this conclusion was as rigorous as research can get. It is an empirical finding based on data, and not an ideological one.

For this book, Collins and his team analyzed all companies that appeared in the Fortune 500 list from 1965 to 1995.

Of these companies, they found only 11 “good to great” companies—i.e., those that outperformed the market by a

factor of three or more for 15 years or more. From all the data they gathered, they found that one key factor that made these companies succeed beyond their peers was having a Level 5 leader at the helm.

Said Collins: “Our discovery of Level 5 Leadership is counterintuitive. Indeed, it is countercultural. People generally assume that transforming companies (and, may I add, countries) from good to great requires larger-than-life leaders—big personalities like [Lee] Iacocca (of Chrysler), [Albert] Dunlap (considered one of the worst CEOs ever), [Jack]

Welch (of General Electric fame), and [Stanley] Gault (also a  former GE CEO), who make headlines and become celebrities.”

It was not what Collins and his researchers expected either. In fact, the original question they were trying to answer was: “Can a good company become a great one, and, if so, how?” They explicitly downplayed the role of top executives in the analysis so as not to slide to the simplistic “credit the leader” thinking. But there was no interpreting the data any other way. A humble yet ambitious leader was critical to the extraordinary performance of these companies.

One lesson for us is to never mistake outward modesty as a sign of inner weakness. There is no need for swagger to become an excellent leader. As many of us associate humility with weakness, it will indeed be a challenge to make this theory mainstream. There will always be seemingly successful leaders to whom we can point as examples of the opposite of humble. But think about it: Humility requires quite significant reserves of inner strength to embody authentically. Only a humble leader can genuinely roll with the punches, and accept feedback constructively, recognizing that the same is important for personal and professional growth.

Only humility can prevent excessive self-focus, allowing a leader to be more perceptive and capable of anticipating the future. With an a**hole leader, no one, especially among the people with whom he works, would even dare make any comment about his performance as a leader. It is a well-known fact in leadership research that arrogance, narcissism, and machiavellianism are primary factors that make leaders fail.

Another book, titled “The No A**hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t,” by Stanford University professor Robert Sutton, makes the case that a boss who demeans his or her coworkers causes irreparable damage to the mental and physical health of his/her colleagues, and that there are long-run financial costs (often hidden) of keeping such a leader. (If you want to know if you are a certified a**hole, you can take the test which the author calls the A**hole

Rating Self Exam or, aptly, the ARSE Test, which can be found here: https://electricpulp.com/guykawasaki/arse/.)

The next question is: Can Level 5 leaders be developed? Collins’ response to this question is: Only if you have the seed within you. He says that “leaders without the seed tend to have monumental egos they cannot subjugate to something bigger than themselves.”

Collins identifies the ability to self-reflect, and a profoundly transformative event, such as a life-threatening illness, as conditions that can stimulate the seed to sprout. At Search Inside Yourself, a Google-designed mindfulness-centered yearlong course I took in 2015, we are more optimistic than Collins. We believe that Level 5 leadership can be developed by anyone, even the a**holes among us, through compassion training. There is an 8-week compassion course offered at Stanford which combines traditional contemplative practices (meditation and mindfulness) with contemporary psychology and scientific research to develop the qualities of compassion and kindness. The inauguration is still a few weeks away.

Joel Villaseca ([email protected]) is a lawyer living in New York City.