Voices » HBR Voices » HBR Editors' Blog » In Praise of A Level 5 Leader
11:55 AM Thursday July 31, 2008
by Diane Coutu
You may not recognize the name Charles Tilly, but he was one of the world’s most renowned social scientists. An extraordinary scholar, the Columbia University professor wrote 51 books and more than 600 academic articles during his academic career. What I didn’t appreciate until he died on April 29 was that Tilly was what business writer Jim Collins calls a Level 5 Leader - that rare person who can successfully combine drive, intelligence and humility to attract followers and to encourage them to perform to do the best of their abilities.
I never met Tilly. I was scheduled to interview him for Harvard Business Review a couple of years ago, but he was struggling with lymphoma and the interview was indefinitely postponed. In preparation for that interview, however, I started subscribing to Amsoc, Tilly’s electronic newsletter for exchanging ideas, as well as information about conferences and so on. When he died, former students and colleagues flooded the internet with elaborate stories and fond memories of Tilly. I deleted most of the emails, but when they were still coming in more than two months after Tilly’s death (they are still trickling in), I began to read them out of curiosity. Who was this man who had touched so many lives? What had he done that so many people wanted to attest to his character?
Time and again people talked about a Columbia workshop/seminar he ran each year. Their descriptions of it were unlike any workshop (or business meeting) I had ever heard of – there was no topic and it gave no course credits. The size of the group varied from ten people to maybe 50. It attracted faculty members, graduate students and undergraduates. Tilly allotted special time to undergraduates so that others wouldn’t bully them – one of his rules was that participants weren’t allowed to show how smart they were by humiliating other speakers. After the seminar, the group would go off campus to share a meal together, usually at an inexpensive restaurant. By all accounts the experience was intensely intellectual, intimate, humane. Many graduates of it looked on Tilly as their mentor.
At the risk of trivializing him and the concept of Level 5 leadership, let me try to sum up Chuck Tilly in a few bullet points. According to the testimony of his followers:
•He was almost insanely productive. Students and faculty respected Tilly because he could do the job better than anyone else. He wrote books faster than others could read them – sometimes two books a years.
•He cut across academic disciplines in a world that cries out for interdisciplinary approaches to global problems. He made major contributions in three important fields: Sociology, history, and political science and also had the imagination to see the connections between them all.
•He was enormously humble, despite all his recognition. As one e-mailer put it: “He cared deeply for other people and put all his intellect at the service of anyone who asked…With Chuck the subject was always you, not him, and it didn’t matter who you were.”
Any one of these qualities would make someone highly respected and admired. Chuck Tilly had all three, and to my mind he runs as close as anyone I know to Jim Collin’s leadership ideal. People like Tilly are rare and because of their humility are all too easy to miss. Look back on leaders you know. How many of them are what you would call transformational? Do they match the profile I’ve just given for Tilly?
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Comments
A couple years ago, the San Fernando Valley Business Journal (at: http://www.sfvbj.com/default.asp) reported: “Mike Wall has led Northridge Hospital Medical Center to become one of the strongest high-tech hospitals in the San Fernando Valley. He has taken the Catholic Healthcare West facility from a position as a money-losing operation in 2000, to one that netted a $10 million profit in 2004.”
How did Mike accomplish this? I spoke at an offsite for Northridge Hospital in 2006 and was especially interested in discovering the answer to this after I observed Mike receive five spontaneous standing ovations from the heads of the hospital departments who were attending the retreat.
I asked Mike the secret to his success. Like most “Good to Great” (see: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/51/goodtogreat.html) Level 5 leaders, Mike is too busy discovering the “meaning in life” through his actions and deeds to search for “the meaning of life” by endless (and as I have observed, often meaningless) introspection. Like such leaders, he doesn’t focus on himself too much, but on defining a vision, articulating it, and then actualizing it. Therefore, it didn’t surprise me when he smiled shyly (when the spotlight was focused on him) and said with great humility, “I don’t really know or spend much time thinking about that. However two things were clear to me when I arrived at Northridge Hospital: a) it’s lousy to be sick and b) it’s lousy for the families of people who are sick. So one of the first things I did was tell those two observations to everyone who worked at our hospital with these two directives: a) let’s give every patient and every patient’s family the best possible experience when they are sick when they come in contact with Northridge hospital and b) don’t be sending me a lot of emails about stuff that would distract me and that you can handle on your own.”
I don’t think Mike realized it at the time (because he is not needlessly introspective), but that ability to see and articulate an observation about how lousy it is to be sick was something that everyone understood and had experienced. Furthermore, making illness a less lousy experience for patients and their families was a noble vision that everyone in the hospital would want to make happen and be part of.
It was on the heels of that offsite that I coined the phrase “silomastery,” because I had seen first hand what a great “silomaster” Mike Wall was. What is silomastery and who are the silomasters that master it?
As I sat at tables with people from different departments of Northridge hospital I observed how different—or siloed if you will—each of them were. Purchasing was different from housekeeping; housekeeping was different from human resources; human resources was different from nursing; nursing was different from doctoring and the list went on. It was clear to me that these departments would never truly understand what it is to walk in each other’s shoes or understand and empathize with each other’s concerns. In other words, despite all of these different departments trying to cooperate with each other, they would still be siloed because of how specialized each was.
What was also clear to me was that Mike Wall who had a bachelor’s degree in science and a master’s degree in hospital administration, had transcended all of his prior specialized training to become a “dyed in the wool” leader. As such, he was able to sit atop the siloed departments, enspire (see “The Enspirational Leader” at: http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/leadership/goulston/103105.html) and embolden all of them to achieving the vision of “giving ill patients and their families, the best possible experience when they are sick.” So compelling was his vision that siloed departments put aside their own self-interests to be part of something grander, something more satisfying and fulfilling than gratifying their more petty concerns.
Silomastery is not only something that has application within a company or organization, it also plays a vital role in any merger or acquisition forming a “new” company. In those instances, there is a great hazard that the pre-merged and pre-acquired companies will have such entrenched, self-interested silos between and within each company that they will never be able to get in the same canoe (see: The Canoe Theory at: http://www.amazon.com/Canoe-Theory-Business-Strategy-Associates/dp/0595363415/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0646255-1561548?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184955507&sr=8-1) and paddle in the same direction.
In order for the merger or acquisition to succeed, “merger mastery” between companies is every bit as important as “silomastery” within a company. In both instances leaders must do the following: 1) develop and articulate a compelling vision that people from both companies will not merely share, but will passionately want to be a part of; 2) develop a consensus of the most important processes to focus on to get there (one of the best people and best companies I know to do this is Ward Wieman, owner of Management Overload at: http://m-overload.com); 3) identify the strengths and passions of your key people and make sure they align with those processes to getting there (see: Marcus Buckingham’s Go Put Your Strengths to Work at: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780743261678&itm=1); 4) get rid of distractions and of people who will never climb aboard and whose negativity and naysaying will only sap the energy of those who want to make it a success.
- Posted by Mark Goulston
August 1, 2008 11:48 PM