Podcast EP 130 | Jim Collins Level 5 Leaders

What are Jim Collins Lev­el 5 leaders?

Lev­el 5 lead­er­ship is a con­cept devel­oped in the book Good to Great. Lev­el 5 lead­ers dis­play a pow­er­ful mix­ture of per­son­al humil­i­ty and indomitable will. They’re incred­i­bly ambi­tious, but their ambi­tion is first and fore­most for the cause, for the orga­ni­za­tion and its pur­pose, not them­selves. While Lev­el 5 lead­ers can come in many per­son­al­i­ty pack­ages, they are often self-effac­ing, qui­et, reserved, and even shy.

This week we dis­cuss what makes a lev­el 5 leader, why lev­el 5 lead­er­ship mat­ters, and the chal­lenge that comes with being a lev­el 4 leader. Also we pro­vide exam­ples that we’ve seen where indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies have suc­cess­ful­ly built lev­el 5 leadership.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Hey, wel­come to the growth whis­pers pod­cast where every­thing Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence, that’s the two of us, every­thing we talked about is about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, because we get a kick out of that. And today, we’re gonna dig into a top­ic. That’s very inter­est­ing. And we’ll tell you more about that in just a sec­ond. But before we do, I sup­port lead­er­ship and awe­some lead­ers ver­sus the ones who dri­ve us crazy. And we’ve all had those bad boss­es in our lives, who we just like, I nev­er want to be like that. So this is the oppo­site of the bad boss­es, but and more about that in a minute. But we always kind of got our, you know, some­thing that’s on our mind. So like a word or a phrase of the day. And Brad, what is your word or your phrase?

Brad Giles 00:57

Hel­lo, com­pound­ing. So com­pound­ing, I think it was Ein­stein said it’s the great­est force in the uni­verse. And we’re using com­pound­ing every time we’re meet­ing, doing quar­ter­ly and annu­al off to sites, lit­tle tiny bits here and there that are com­pound­ing against and along­side each oth­er to make over­all things sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter. So yeah, com­pound­ing has been on my mind of late, and how we use that in the work that we do.

Kevin Lawrence 01:25

Love that. Where he does build on it, and you build on it makes me think, because I’m work­ing with a com­pa­ny that got a lit­tle off the rails. And we just had our sec­ond strat plan­ning meet­ing last week. And like already, I saw an incred­i­ble amount of progress, more than you nor­mal­ly see. Now, they had to run the sys­tems and tools in the past, they just kind of lost their way. But yeah, it com­pounds and it builds on itself, like a like a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy. Awe­some. Mine is retreat. And we’ve been doing plan­ning for our team retreat, where we got a three day event for our team up in Whistler, we’re now up to get the num­ber on always get the num­ber wrong, but there’s around a dozen of us maybe even more. And we’re just going to spend a bunch of time com­ing togeth­er and cre­at­ing our own ver­sion of com­pound­ing. But com­ing togeth­er time togeth­er to build rela­tion­ships, share knowl­edge, and come away with an aligned focus of how we’re going to do bet­ter work for our clients. And it’s a lot of work plan­ning these things. We do it for clients all the time, but we’re doing it for our­selves. It’s like it’s even more it seems. Usu­al­ly we want to squeeze more out of it. I don’t know. Any­ways, so com­pound­ing impact of retreats, good retreats for teams, bring­ing them togeth­er, com­ing away with bet­ter out­put. Awe­some. So Brad, what did the heck are we going to talk about today? Today bad boss­es. Boy, we could do such a great show on bad boss­es. Oh, oh, we

Brad Giles 02:54

could do on a bad. Good boss­es. Yeah, that’d be more fun. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 02:59

We’re more con­struc­tive, let’s say for sure.

Brad Giles 03:02

Yeah. So I think a few weeks ago, we saw Jim Collins speak­ing about his lev­el five lead­ers con­cept. And that’s what’s prompt­ed this episode is us reflect­ing on that think­ing about some of our key take­aways. What it means, where it comes from, and how can you aspire or think to become more like a lev­el five leader. So that’s real­ly what we’re talk­ing about today. So maybe we’ll kick off by say­ing what is a lev­el five leader so this is from Jim’s web­site. Lev­el five, lead­er­ship is a con­cept deliv­ered in the book, Good to Great lev­el five lead­ers dis­play a pow­er­ful mix­ture of per­son­al humil­i­ty, and indomitable will. They’re incred­i­bly ambi­tious, but they’re ambi­tious. It’s their ambi­tion is first and fore­most for the cause, and for the orga­ni­za­tion and its pur­pose, not them­selves. While lev­el five lead­ers can come in many per­son­al­i­ty pack­ages, they’re often self effac­ing, qui­et, reserved, and even shy, even Good to Great Tran­si­tion. Every part of me every good to great tran­si­tion in our research began with a lev­el five leader who moti­vat­ed the enter­prise more with inspired stan­dards than inspir­ing per­son­al­i­ty. They were amaz­ing humans.

Kevin Lawrence 04:20

Yeah, those are the best that’s as good as it gets as a leader. And that’s the ones that we obvi­ous­ly want to work for, we want to work with. And so real­ly the chal­lenge we’ll talk about today is that like, you know, for our teams, that the chal­lenge is to iden­ti­fy and devel­op those lev­el five lead­ers and they can be devel­oped, they need devel­op­ment often to get there. And for our­selves, this is the aspi­ra­tion to get to that lev­el and stay there. Some­times a bunch of suc­cess and that gets to our head and peo­ple can draw from Lev­el Five far­ther down. And recent­ly I did a con­ver­sa­tion with a bunch of CEOs in your great coun­try, Aus­tralians to our friends that yes, Aus­tralia. Thanks to our friends at the Growth Fac­ul­ty, we had a con­ver­sa­tion with a bunch of CEOs about their expe­ri­ence around lev­el five lead­er­ship. And, you know, it was real­ly a great con­ver­sa­tion. And I can share some more with that lat­er. But, you know, there was a ques­tion that came up of what indi­ca­tors of lev­el five are. And there’s lots. You know, when Jim talks about this, and we’ll talk about some of these things here, too. But one of the ones I recall, that’s, and I don’t remem­ber whether it was Jim Collins or Liz Wise­man, I believe it was one of the two. Liz Wise­man has a book called mul­ti­pli­ers, her first book, and she talks about mul­ti­pli­ers ver­sus dimin­ish­ers mul­ti­pli­ers mul­ti­ply peo­ple’s intel­li­gence and capa­bil­i­ty dimin­ish­ers, bring it down. And it’s it’s in har­mo­ny with lev­el five lead­er­ship, although dif­fer­ent. But one of the one of the ques­tions they said is that, you know, if you want to fig­ure out, tru­ly, if they’re in that kind of lev­el five cat­e­go­ry, just ask them about their team, say, hey, you know, and you’re going back, and I have been in talk read­ing as well, I’m not sure. But go back when you’re, when you’re ask­ing them about their pre­vi­ous roles, or their cur­rent role. Tell me about your team. Well, you know, in Liz’s lan­guage, if they’re a mul­ti­pli­er in gyms, if they’re a lev­el five leader, they’re going to go off and tell you how amaz­ing their team is, like they’re brag­ging about their grand­chil­dren, they’re gonna tell you all the great stuff and who and why and how, and by the way, they’re gonna have left a trail of amaz­ing lead­ers who went on to do great things. And if they’re not, there, very quick­ly, with­in a very few sec­onds, you’re gonna bring the con­ver­sa­tion back to me, me, me, because that’s their favourite top­ic, they’re gonna bring it back to talk­ing about them­selves very quick­ly, because they don’t real­ly care about the team, they care about them­selves. And it’s not about the cause. It’s about them­selves. So it’s, it’s, it’s an indi­ca­tor of real­ly, a per­son­’s focus on whether it’s help­ing to grow and devel­op oth­ers, or for their own benefit.

Brad Giles 07:10

I love the dis­tinc­tion between a lev­el four leader and a lev­el five leader, and that is, Jim calls it the genius with 1000 helpers. And it’s a trap that so many peo­ple can so eas­i­ly fall into. All of the answers are com­ing from the leader. And, and the peo­ple are there to help. And real­ly what’s hap­pen­ing is, the leader is is pre­vent­ing the orga­ni­za­tion from tru­ly becom­ing great, because all every­thing’s stop­ping with them. So the tran­si­tion from lev­el four to lev­el five, is about say­ing, I want to build a busi­ness that’s big­ger than myself, that will endure myself and I am respon­si­ble, Jim’s got this con­cept that helps to clar­i­fy that, which is are you look­ing in the mir­ror? Or are you look­ing in out the win­dow? Yes. So if there was a prob­lem, lev­el five lead­ers would look in the mir­ror and say I was respon­si­ble. If there was suc­cess, they would look out the win­dow and say, Ah, the team has been suc­cess­ful. This is fan­tas­tic. It’s all on them, they’ve done a great job. And that speaks to that humil­i­ty that we’re talk­ing about. Yeah. And so

Kevin Lawrence 08:27

These lev­el five lead­ers have this incred­i­ble com­bi­na­tion of will incred­i­ble dri­ve to do hard things well and be suc­cess­ful, suc­cess­ful orga­ni­za­tion, and humil­i­ty, that it’s not all about them. And they’re the oppo­site of what you see in the movies in the CD CEOs or lead­ers and movies. They’re not arro­gant. They’re hum­ble down to earth. And I think about this one client that I have here in Cana­da, and we were in a social gath­er­ing recent­ly. And you know, he intro­duced him­self, it was just a car­pen­ter. And that’s his, and his demeanor is like, he has a car­pen­ter, he is incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful. You’d nev­er know it. He’s focused on build­ing a great orga­ni­za­tion, build­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple and hav­ing an impact on his com­mu­ni­ty. He’s like, he does­n’t, he does­n’t, he’s not doing it for the mon­ey. He’s doing it to do some­thing great in the world and to leave a lega­cy. So it’s inter­est­ing on this, you know, recent­ly I met what I believe is a lev­el five exec had a con­ver­sa­tion with him. And, you know, we, we were hav­ing a chat about lead­er­ship, and he’s going off about, you know, just give me a real­ly dri­ven leader in her ear­ly 30s, who’s real­ly try­ing to do great stuff. And I just love to help groom them and shape them and prove them and help them to become more effec­tive. Lead­ers like that’s yeah, he’s talk­ing about this with joy. He’s done very well in the past. And he’s rejoined a busi­ness because he loves it. And he’s just lit up by it. But what’s inter­est­ing is that, you know, so he’s dri­ven by this help­ing oth­er peo­ple to thrive in his senior lead­er­ship role. He has been CEOs of orga­ni­za­tions and such. But then, you know, at one point, when a meet­ing because it was his first meet­ing, he pulls me aside and asked me for feed­back. Hey, how am I doing? How can I do bet­ter? I’m like, so I give him a cou­ple ideas. Yeah, I was think­ing about that. I was won­der­ing, but Okay, cool. And then, you know, lat­er that night, we’re going out, and I just observed some­thing that he did. And were, you know, hav­ing a chat. I said, Hey, can I give you anoth­er lit­tle piece of feed­back? Yeah, sure. Please tell me. And I said, Hey, you know, in the sit­u­a­tion, when such and such hap­pened, and you did such and such, you inad­ver­tent­ly, were dis­re­spect­ful to some­body might go, Yeah, I think I go well, I think he made a com­ment as well, hey, if you noticed, they noticed because they were on the receiv­ing end, he goes, Hey, give me a cou­ple of min­utes. He stops our con­ver­sa­tion, grabs his phone, and com­mu­ni­cates with the per­son to apol­o­gize and clean it up, like with­in sec­onds. So this is not a junior exec­u­tive, this is a very senior exec­u­tive. So thriv­ing, and lov­ing, devel­op­ing lead­ers telling me about a bunch of he’d devel­oped, ask­ing for feed­back, act­ing on the feed­back, giv­en extra feed­back, going and clean­ing it up imme­di­ate­ly. I mean, that’s, that’s the kind of peo­ple you want to be with. Yeah, that’s the kind of peo­ple who make great things and pull the best out of you. So the lev­el five lead­ers are absolute­ly amaz­ing. I’ll share one more thing, Bri­an, and then you know, Brad, you got some more shirts here. But, you know, I, I was chat­ting with anoth­er CEO. And we had a break­fast meet­ing. And you know, this guy’s built and sold quite a few busi­ness­es. And we’re hav­ing this chat, and we got talk­ing about activ­i­ties, you know, I was talk­ing to about how I like, you know, rac­ing in motor­sports because it chal­lenges me was, that’s why I like golf. because I spent so much mon­ey try­ing to get good at golf. And I’m still mediocre. And I try prac­tice, I play a lot. I prac­tice a lot. And I can’t seem to get good because you know what I real­ized it was com­e­dy. And I real­ized, it’s great for me, it keeps me hum­ble. Right, because there’s peo­ple that can go and do things that they’re only good at all the time to go and do some­thing and suck at it. It’s very hum­bling and allows you to have the begin­ner’s mind and com­pas­sion and under­stand­ing for oth­er peo­ple that are in that place. And we’ve said that, so golf is his, one of his mech­a­nisms for humility.

Brad Giles 12:49

It’s a trap. We’re all human. It’s a trap that any­one can fall into, we can look at peo­ple and say, Oh, that per­son isn’t hum­ble, like they’ve been cat­e­go­rized. But I love the fact that this guy is try­ing to get him­self to stay hum­ble. Like it’s so impor­tant. One of the one of the sto­ries that Jim Collins told was just fan­tas­tic. It I’d say it was a com­pa­ny called trek bicy­cles. Now, I spoke to anoth­er leader that I work with now, and he had said that he just bought a trek bicy­cle for 14,000 euros, a quite an expen­sive push bike, right? But so they do high end, good qual­i­ty, right? Endurance, bicy­cles, trek bicy­cles, Water­loo, Wis­con­sin, John Burke is the pres­i­dent there. And he’d explained to Jim that they have 450 lead­ers in track bicy­cles, and 42 of them are lev­el five. And then he said, there’s a lot of work to do. So they’ve built a lev­el five Uni­ver­si­ty at track bicy­cles, how to get peo­ple and they mea­sure them, they know where peo­ple are. And every leader in the orga­ni­za­tion, they’re try­ing to build the largest group of lev­el five lead­ers on the plan­et. And I got­ta tell you, you go to the trek bicy­cles web­site and look up their cul­ture book. This thing is phe­nom­e­nal. It’s about 270 pages of cul­ture book, and it tells exact­ly who they are, what they val­ue, every­thing. How could it pos­si­bly be 270 pages? I don’t know. But I got­ta tell her, this is the best cul­ture book I’ve ever seen in my life. And that is because they’re ded­i­cat­ed to build­ing endur­ing and endear­ing right busi­ness. And they focused on this con­cept of lev­el five leaders.

Kevin Lawrence 14:54

Yeah, anoth­er exam­ple like that as Patag­o­nia. They’re known for being very dif­fer­ent than their approach. But the founder of Patag­o­nia just gave the busi­ness away. Right. And he and he was­n’t he was inter­est­ed in build­ing an amaz­ing com­pa­ny, I’m sure and I don’t know him per­son­al­ly. But I’m sure there’s a lot of humil­i­ty and will to build that kind of orga­ni­za­tion. And at the end, just give it away because he’s not inter­est­ed in in the wealth and every­thing else. So let’s, let’s talk about the thing that by the way, if you want more on there’s an episode 49, how to become a lev­el five leader, an ear­li­er pod­cast we did. Also, there’s a bunch of both Brad’s in my books in my book, in par­tic­u­lar, Chap­ter Six deal with your emo­tion­al junk, that’s what gets in the way of a lot of lev­el five lead­ers, is they have inter­nal stuff that does­n’t allow them to be hum­ble and stay in their best place, get­ting tough feed­back, chap­ter nine, and then make your­self use­less, which is the ulti­mate accom­plish­ment of any leader is build­ing an incred­i­ble team that does­n’t need you as chap­ter 10. And Bri­an, your book over­all cov­ers this kind of stuff. So

Brad Giles 16:01

your book is called your oxy­gen mask first, right? And my book is, Yeah, got­ta know what

Kevin Lawrence 16:08

it’s made and made to thrive is Brad’s Yes.

Brad Giles 16:10

Good, good, good call. So

Kevin Lawrence 16:13

a cou­ple of prin­ci­ples. And we’re just gonna cov­er this at a high lev­el. But, you know, there’s a two pieces, your will and humil­i­ty and will, and they, they lev­el five lead­ers have both and real­ly, Will is like the inter­nal motor and tie inside of a per­son. And based on peo­ple’s expe­ri­ences through­out their life in their child­hood, and every­thing else. Some peo­ple got a big motor, and some don’t. And at the end of the day, our job as lead­ers is to look for the peo­ple with the motor, try and cre­ate lots of dif­fer­ent path­ways for peo­ple to find their motor, because some­times they got­ta find it, you know, look­ing for what peo­ple are excit­ed about, and what fires them up, but you’re look­ing for peo­ple that have that will. And I don’t know how it’s cre­at­ed. I do know that it’s obvi­ous when peo­ple have it. And gen­er­al­ly, if I look, I look at the CEOs that I get the chance to work with the exec­u­tives I get a chance to work with, there’s pat­terns at a fair­ly young age that start to emerge, and they con­tin­ue on that motor is, is that motor is there at some point it gets built. And so the main thing is just like with ath­letes, you can’t moti­vate a per­son to do this. And if you have to moti­vate peo­ple, that’s not fun for you or them, the thing we got to look for, so we look for the mor­tar, and just be care­ful, we don’t kill it. Right, the wrong leader can kill the motor and kill the moti­va­tion. And I’m sure there’s some oth­er research there on how you could cre­ate it. But in the busi­ness­es that we’re in, we’re not in the moti­va­tion, cre­at­ing busi­ness, we’re look­ing for peo­ple that already have that inter­nal drive.

Brad Giles 17:53

I think one thing that’s impor­tant is what Jim Collins said is that great lead­ers aren’t born. Okay, that that rocked the lead, it’s a real­ly impor­tant dis­tinc­tion that you have the abil­i­ty to fol­low the bounc­ing ball over many, many years. And to get to this lev­el five. Point. Yes, it was there’s one leader in par­tic­u­lar that I worked with, who will remain name­less, many years ago, he was quite brash, quite arro­gant, want­ed to build a great com­pa­ny for sure he had the will. But we’ve tem­pered that, I would say, I would say con­scious­ly, he might say sub­con­scious­ly, if he acknowl­edged it over time. And yeah, he’s, he’s now a lot more dis­ci­plined in his think­ing and think­ing more about the busi­ness in an endear­ing man­ner, and is a lot more hum­ble in his approach to peo­ple broad­ly. So I think that yeah, I think it’s impor­tant to note, it’s not an easy job that you can do this,

Kevin Lawrence 19:01

just like that exec­u­tive, I talked about the loves to take those dri­ven 30 year old exec­u­tives and groom them, I would say myself, I have worked a lot on on round­ing off the cor­ners, we’ll call it over the years, and I’ve learned basi­cal­ly, I’ve always had the will. It’s the humil­i­ty, I had the dri­ve, but there would always be a lit­tle too much car­nage in a way I’d be more like­ly to get in argu­ments more like­ly to want to stand my ground. And just learn­ing more skills and a lot of it’s tied into it’s just, it’s gen­er­al­ly lead­er­ship skills and man­age­ment skills that you can learn and there’s an ele­ment of humil­i­ty in it and there’s an ele­ment of just chill­ing out for peo­ple like me in par­tic­u­lar and lots of I work with Yeah, but but jel­ly. The wheel was already there. You can work on the oth­er things and most peo­ple that have the will can learn to be high­ly effec­tive lead­ers. Just work. Yeah. So let’s get again, just so we don’t get too long. We got anoth­er few min­utes or we’ll cov­er off the high­lights but I want to cov­er off humil­i­ty a lit­tle bit. And the idea is that like, humil­i­ty is basi­cal­ly the oppo­site of arro­gance, arro­gance, peo­ple are try­ing to over­com­pen­sate gen­er­al­ly for the weak­ness­es. And I pulled this off a dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion, exag­ger­at­ing or dis­posed to exag­ger­ate. Or one owns worth, or impor­tance by an over­bear­ing man­ner. Basi­cal­ly, you’re exag­ger­at­ing stuff and you’re just try­ing hard to make your­self seem big­ger, bet­ter than you might be or big­ger or bet­ter than oth­er peo­ple. We’re humil­i­ty. Gen­er­al­ly, peo­ple are very com­fort­able with them­selves. They’re very con­fi­dent. They’re con­fi­dent with their, you know, con­fi­dence is defined as self assur­ance aris­ing from one’s appre­ci­a­tion of one’s own abil­i­ties. And humil­i­ty is not proud, or haughty, or not arro­gant or assertive.

Brad Giles 21:01

I don’t know what that that haughty word. I don’t even know how that

Kevin Lawrence 21:05

I either did it but I looked it up. Thanks. Adi hot­tie reli­gious­ly and dis­dain­ful­ly proud, hav­ing or show­ing an atti­tude of supe­ri­or­i­ty and con­tempt for peo­ple or things per­ceived to be infe­ri­or. You know, one of my tests for humil­i­ty, and if some­one is real­ly is how they treat peo­ple with notably less pow­er, I absolute­ly judge peo­ple in nor­mal inter­ac­tions, how they treat wait­ers, servers, sor­ry peo­ple like even the bus peo­ple clear­ing tables, maids, peo­ple, no taxi, cab dri­vers, jan­i­tors, how they treat peo­ple have less pow­er. And one of my most one of my clients who prob­a­bly I learned the most from, and he might not even know it is an incred­i­bly, incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur. And I just remem­ber one day the respect he showed some­one a few might be one of the most pow­er­ful men where he is one of the least pow­er­ful per­son he saw in a sit­u­a­tion that was­n’t right. And he stepped in and did some­thing about it. He did­n’t know this per­son, noth­ing, it had noth­ing to do with any of his busi­ness­es, anoth­er place he and I were going, and he stopped and did some­thing and basi­cal­ly gave this guy a bot­tle of water, who was stand­ing in incred­i­ble heat with­out an umbrel­la, you know, almost 50 degrees. And he stopped, gave got went back to his car, got a bot­tle of water out of his cool­er, because he had a cool­er in his car to keep things cold, and gave it to the guy and say it’s not right that you don’t have an unbe­liev­ing, but that’s me. So humil­i­ty is this, this this, but we’re not just talk­ing humil­i­ty, like I’m think­ing you’re no good. There’s this con­fi­dence that goes with it. But humil­i­ty is, you know, the is there’s a con­fi­dence and the know­ing of your strengths and your weak­ness­es, and then want­i­ng obvi­ous­ly to be bet­ter. And that’s crit­i­cal. So it’s, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s con­fi­dence in there, but it’s qui­et confidence.

Brad Giles 23:15

Yeah. So I’ve always say­ing is, it’s this mix of will like this indomitable this dri­ve and will like, Absolute­ly, no mat­ter what must build a great endur­ing com­pa­ny that is big­ger than myself. And then it’s this hum­ble­ness. It’s this, this oth­er side, which is, it’s, then they’re hum­ble about it. It’s just this great mix between the two. That is,

Kevin Lawrence 23:43

it’s a beau­ti­ful thing to watch. So a cou­ple a cou­ple of key things that you just noticed with them. One, they’ve, they they’ve got, they allow peo­ple in that respect peo­ple around them to tell them to truth. Andy Grove calls them Cas­san­dra’s. They chal­lenge their think­ing. They gen­uine­ly want feed­back in what­ev­er way is com­fort­able for them. Right? They might not bla­tant­ly ask for it. But they’re always look­ing for it in dif­fer­ent ways of how they could be bet­ter. And you notice because when you have ideas, they lis­ten, they might not do it, but they’re there. They’re there. They’re tak­ing it in. They’re absolute­ly learn­ers and Collins found this in his research. They are avid learn­ers. They’re read­ing books, tak­ing cours­es, talk­ing to more expe­ri­enced peo­ple. And even think­ing about how things can be bet­ter like after action reviews in their mind.

Brad Giles 24:40

There’s a sign that not all sor­ry, Kev, there’s a say­ing about that. Not all lead. Not all learn­ers are lead­ers, but all lead­ers are learners.

Kevin Lawrence 24:50

Exact­ly. I love that. And they gen­er­al­ly get coach­ing men­tor­ing even will go and see a psy­chol­o­gist When they need to they they work with oth­er peo­ple to help them be bet­ter than not doing it alone. So let’s basic stuff that we I just share a cou­ple exer­cis­es that I’m that that can help with this with your teams now it’s how do you bring it to life like you can iden­ti­fy it. But, you know, Dean Ritchie, who was the first advi­sor who joined my team, almost sev­en years ago, awe­some, awe­some coach, facil­i­ta­tor, advi­sor, men­tor, he just with our team tonight and our team meet­ing shared an awe­some exer­cise for Lev­el Five lead­er­ship. And he basi­cal­ly, basi­cal­ly is you you look at com­pe­ten­cies and whether you’re assess­ing your­self or some­where else, but you look at spe­cif­ic com­pe­ten­cies, that relat­ed to arro­gance ver­sus humil­i­ty. And with those to try and see­ing get a sense of where you are, some­body is by by eval­u­at­ing as he has a col­umn of dif­fer­ent num­bers that he built out around arro­gance and humil­i­ty. And he has the same one around lazier when he you know, he was unmo­ti­vat­ed and will write or unin­spired or unmo­ti­vat­ed and will so arro­gance, humil­i­ty, unmo­ti­vat­ed will, and just to try and get a sense of where you are, some­one else is on that. It’s a sim­ple, beau­ti­ful way to get deep­er on it, because there’s cer­tain things that are relat­ed to all those fac­tors. The oth­er thing he said is, he cre­ates a lit­tle assess­ment he does with teams, some­times to get them to rate each oth­er on aspects of humil­i­ty, and aspects of wills. So they can see where they stand almost like a lit­tle mini 360 based on us, just sim­ple things, because it’s about the aware­ness and the con­ver­sa­tion, and look­ing for where you can grow the oth­er one. And I’ll just share real quick as I you know, this con­ver­sa­tion with the CEOs in Aus­tralia. We asked them, it was real sim­ple. Like, what are three things you do that make you more of a lev­el five leader and pull you up to lev­el five? And what are the three things that pull you down? And then think about some­one else on your team? And what’s the same for them? So it’s not rock­et, it’s just it’s spend­ing time think­ing about this and acknowl­edg­ing lev­el fives as good as it gets, we all prob­a­bly have things we need to do I know I do to get to that lev­el, and aware­ness of what it looks like so that we can sur­round our­selves with more awe­some peo­ple like that.

Brad Giles 27:27

Like track, like track 450 liters, for 42 of them, par­don me, for it. 450 liters, 42 of them a lev­el five, there’s a lot of work to do. That is just cow I love it. This is gold. What a good chat about lev­el five lead­ers today. If you’re a genius with 1000 helpers, or a lev­el five and lev­el four, there’s some work to do and it is worth the push to get to that lev­el five lev­el. So good chat, Kev. Hope­ful­ly we’ve all learned a bit today got some dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. This has been the growth whis­pers pod­cast. My name is Brad Giles. And my co host here is Kevin Lawrence. You can find Kevin and his inter­est­ing newslet­ter at Lawrence and co​.com. And myself, Brad Giles, evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au. We also have a newslet­ter that we put out each week as well. You can find us on video at YouTube if you pre­fer to see our smil­ing faces. And yeah, obvi­ous­ly we would love to have you join us next week for anoth­er inter­est­ing chat about how to build endur­ing great com­pa­nies. Do have your­self a great week.