Why quiet leadership may be the key to getting results

Some say a leader is best when people barely know they exist, and studies have backed this up – find out why quiet leadership may be the key to getting results

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Management Today

In the Tao te Ching, a book of 81 short chapters attributed to the founder of Taoism in China, Lao Tzu, there is a powerful passage that captures a very modern take on leadership two millennia before it emerged in our post-industrial society.

It translates something like this: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

After a longitudinal study of success and failure in nearly 1,500 companies, the assumption – that there would be a strong correlation between organisational success/longevity and the ideal of the strong, extrovert, and charismatic leader – proved quite false.

Only 11 companies made the transition from strong performance to consistent outperformance of others in their sector. In every case where this was achieved the person in charge was not the outgoing, high-profile and larger-than-life character that usually appears as a role model in the media.

Such stars may be effective in the short term, but they tend to bring division and personal ego to the organisation. Collins noted that great leaders, in commerce at least, began by surrounding themselves with the right team and then credited those people for any success.

Collins also found that those leaders were strong-willed professionally while humble personally. He called them ‘Level 5’ leaders. They certainly have egos but their energy is focused on service to the organisation and not on praise for themselves.

Collins also found that these leaders had often undergone a personal trauma in their lives, and that this had been where they learned this life lesson.

Good to great companies, according to Collins:

• Confront current reality head-on with the belief that they will survive
• Take their time in getting things done – they keep steady and do not swing wildly from one change programme or restructuring to the next
• Keep their business model simple – you find what is your passion, do the one thing you are best at, engage the right people in the process. This is sometimes known as the ‘hedgehog concept’, innovating only in line with what you already do well
• Are highly disciplined in rejecting hierarchies and bureaucracy while highly focused on promoting activity, new ideas and entrepreneurship

This sort of leadership requires not just a grand vision, but an attention to detail in the small things. There is definitely some value in reflecting on these attributes in your own practice or experience.

Collins used a metric of stock market valuation to measure and evaluate what defined greatness, and this clearly has its limitations. In addition, these are by no means eternal guarantees of success or even of accurate leadership definition. And yet, there may be a wider truth about the nature of organisational effectiveness at the heart of the phenomenon.