Level 5 leadership is personal humility paired with fierce professional will. The humility is easy to like. The will is what makes you deal with the people problem you have been postponing, even when you can give yourself respectable reasons not to.
I should have got rid of the wrong people sooner.
That’s one of the things I would change about how I ran businesses. I tried to handle those decisions with dignity, and the Christmas cards and wedding invitations I’ve received since suggest I often managed that part reasonably well.
But I could have been quicker.
I mention this because it’s easy to read Jim Collins’ description of a Level 5 leader and be attracted to the humility. Give other people credit. Listen. Don’t make everything about you. These are qualities we’d like to believe we possess.
The other half is less comfortable.
Collins pairs personal humility with fierce professional will. You need both. Without the will, you can be considerate, approachable and well liked while allowing a problem to continue long after you should have dealt with it.
And you can give yourself some quite respectable reasons for doing so.
When being considerate becomes an excuse
Suppose someone in a senior role is struggling.
They’ve been with you for years. They worked hard when the business was smaller. You like them, and you remember what they helped you build. Now the role has changed, and you’re becoming less convinced they can do it.
You don’t want to rush. Fair enough. You owe them a clear explanation of what’s required, support and a reasonable opportunity to improve.
But at some point you have to ask whether you’re still helping them succeed or postponing a conversation you don’t want to have.
From your side of the desk, another three months can look generous. From elsewhere in the company, it may look rather different. Someone is covering the gaps. Someone is waiting for a decision. Someone is wondering why the standard you talk about doesn’t seem to apply here.
This is where humility becomes more demanding than simply being a decent person.
You may have to admit that you put someone in the wrong role. Or that you let their responsibilities grow without helping them grow. Or that you’ve known for a while and hoped it would sort itself out.
None of those admissions makes the decision pleasant. They do make it more honest.
The lesson I take from my own experience isn’t that I should have cared less about people. It’s that caring about how you handle a decision doesn’t remove the need to make it.
What Collins meant by Level 5
In Good to Great, Collins describes leaders whose ambition is directed towards the company rather than their own importance. If you want the rest of that framework, start with these seven important lessons from Jim Collins’ Good to Great.
They are determined to build something exceptional. The humility doesn’t dilute that ambition. It changes what the ambition is for.
That’s a useful distinction for a founder, because you and the business can become difficult to separate.
“I describe my ideal clients as humble CEOs with great ambition. The ambition gets them in the room. The humility is what lets us work on their part in getting where they want to go.”
Dominic Monkhouse, founder of Monkhouse & Company. Scaled Rackspace UK and Peer 1 Hosting as Managing Director. Coached more than 200 founder-CEOs through scaling.
You had the idea. You took the risk. You found the customers and made the decisions. For a long time, being personally involved in everything may have been necessary.
Then you hire capable people and ask them to take responsibility.
So far, so good. Until they want to do something differently.
Now you have a choice that is harder than it appears. You can give them the job while keeping control of how it’s done. Or you can accept that building a capable team means occasionally watching someone take an approach you wouldn’t have chosen.
Of course, their approach might be wrong. Giving people responsibility doesn’t mean abandoning judgement.
But neither does being the founder make your preference the right answer.
Level 5 is useful here because it asks you to separate two things that can feel identical: what is good for the company and what makes you feel comfortable running it.
Can someone actually change your mind?
It always amuses me when someone tells me they’re a Level 5 leader. There’s something rather odd about announcing how humble you are.
But the more useful question isn’t whether you claim the label. It’s what happens when somebody disagrees with you.
Imagine asking your team for their views on a plan. One person raises a concern. You explain why you’ve already considered it. Another suggests a different approach. You explain why yours will work better.
Perhaps you’re right on both counts.
The difficulty is that, from your perspective, you’ve invited challenge and answered it. From theirs, they may have watched two attempts to influence the decision go nowhere.
If that happens repeatedly, it shouldn’t be surprising when people have less to say.
The answer isn’t to agree with every objection. That would be exhausting and a poor way to run a company. It’s to remain genuinely interested in the possibility that somebody else has seen something you haven’t.
A simple question can help: what have I changed my mind about because of something my team told me?
You don’t need an impressive answer. You need a real one.
If you can name the decision, explain what you’d missed and credit the person who helped you see it, you have something more useful than a claim to humility. You have an example of it affecting how you run the business.
And yes, sometimes I wasn’t very humble. I admit it. But when I was surrounded by a great team, it became much easier. If you’ve got amazingly talented people around you, you can’t help it. People don’t bow and scrape to you. They know you’re not infallible.
That’s the argument for building a strong team rather than a compliant one. It’s also what leadership team coaching is for: making it normal for the people around you to say the difficult thing while the decision can still be changed.
Wanting a better business means being willing to change yourself
“Humble CEOs with great ambition” is how I describe my ideal clients.
The ambition matters. There has to be something they want to build. But the humility is what allows us to work on their part in getting there.
It’s easy to arrive at a coaching session with a list of things your team needs to do better. And you may be right about every one of them. The more interesting conversation is how you might be contributing to the situation you want to change.
Perhaps you want people to take responsibility, but keep taking decisions back. Perhaps you want more challenge, but tend to answer it before you’ve understood it.
Being coachable doesn’t mean agreeing with me. It means being willing to consider that possibility.
Start with your own quarterly priority
When I work through quarterly priorities with an executive team, I ask:
“What will you do next quarter to become better at what you do?”
It’s a straightforward question. It also makes personal development harder to leave as a vague intention.
The answer might be learning to delegate a particular decision properly. It might be getting better at having difficult conversations before frustration builds up. It might be listening to a colleague’s proposal without rewriting it halfway through.
Or it might be learning something new. Curiosity is part of this too, and right now AI is the obvious place to point it. What have you automated? What new tool have you actually played with, rather than read about? If the answer is nothing, that tells you something about how teachable you currently are.
Whatever you choose, it needs to be something you can work on and other people can notice.
Then ask them whether it’s improving.
That last part matters. Otherwise you’re back to assessing your own humility, which is where this gets a little circular.
You don’t need to decide whether you’ve reached Level 5. You can decide to handle one part of your job better, ask for help and see whether anything changes.
For me, looking back, one of those changes would have been making difficult people decisions sooner. I understood the importance of treating people well. I was slower to accept that delaying the decision could carry a cost for them and everyone around them.
That’s the part of Collins’ idea worth sitting with.
Sometimes humility means letting somebody else be right.
Sometimes it means admitting you already know what needs to happen, and getting on with it.
Frequently asked questions about Level 5 leadership
What is Level 5 leadership?
Level 5 leadership is Jim Collins’ term for a leader who combines personal humility with fierce professional will. The ambition is pointed at the company rather than the leader’s own standing, which is what makes both the credit-sharing and the hard decisions possible.
Can you learn to be a Level 5 leader?
You can learn the behaviours: asking for challenge, changing your mind when the evidence changes, giving credit away, and making people decisions when they need making. What nobody can do for you is want to. A coach or a strong team can hold up the mirror, not make you look into it.
What is the difference between Level 4 and Level 5 leadership?
A Level 4 leader sets direction and delivers strong results. A Level 5 leader also builds a company that keeps improving without them at the centre of every decision. The difference is not ability. It is whether the business depends on you being in the room.
What should you do next?
If this post has annoyed you slightly, good. The issue is probably not effort. It is design. The business is asking you to carry decisions, standards and exceptions that should now belong inside the team.
The goal is not to disappear. The goal is to build a company where your best work is not dragged back into every operational tangle.
That is the point. Scaling is not adding more people around the same bottleneck. It is rebuilding the business so the bottleneck is removed.
Four ways to take this further
- Book a call. If growth is now making the company slower, heavier or more dependent on you, I can help you decide whether the constraint is people, strategy, execution, cash or your role as founder. No obligation, no pitch. You will know quickly whether this is the right kind of help.
- Grab the book. F**k Plan B covers these principles in more depth, with the practical founder lessons behind customer obsession, honest communication, hiring, small teams and managers who coach.
- Watch: 5 founder mistakes that kill growth. Five founder bottlenecks that quietly stop growth between 50 and 100 people, and how to clear them.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get direct, practical thinking on scaling, founder bottlenecks, leadership rhythm and building a company that can run without you in every room.
Your move. Open Slack, Teams or your inbox. Find the decision that should not have come to you this week. That is where the scaling work starts.