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 The research team that investigated great companies for Jim Collins’ ground-breaking book Good TO Great discovered a certain type of leader at the top of the these successful organizations. They debated what to call this kind of leader but finally decide on the term Level 5 Leader.
A Level 5 Leader combines deep personal humility with unrelenting professional will. He displays a compelling modesty, but with a high level of ambition.
This ambition, however, is directed toward the organization and not himself. Level 5 Leaders want the organization to be even more successful when they are gone, and they work hard to ensure that their successors are set up for success.
It is always interesting to me to see the corollary between successful business practices and biblical principles. The Apostle Paul was the perfect example of a Level 5 Leader. He combined deep personal humility with an unrelenting ambition.
Paul was a deeply humble man. He said about himself, “This is a true saying, and everyone should believe it: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners — and I was the worst of them all. But that is why God had mercy on me, so that Christ Jesus could use me as a prime example of his great patience with even the worst sinners.”
Paul was also an ambitious man – before and after conversion. Before his conversion he was “…more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions” than most of his contemporaries. As a Christian he, “labored even more than all of them.”
The definition of “ambition” is a “strong desire to achieve something.” Jesus appealed to his disciples’ natural ambitions (“whoever desires to be great) in order to properly motivate and direct them in a godly manner (“the great one must be servant of all”). Ambition is necessary – one should strongly desire to achieve something. In contrast, self-ambition is the strong desire to achieve something for one’s own sake.
For example, when James and John wanted to get closer to Jesus, it was commendable ambition. But when they desired to sit closest to Jesus, their focus changed. Rather than looking at Jesus, they were looking over their shoulders at the other disciples, wanting their own spiritual accomplishments to overshadow everyone else’s.
The Level 5 Leadership model is a thoroughly biblical model and one that we should also seek to emulate.
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