2015 – Grow Your Company with Transformational Leadership

Want to lead your company, your organization to the next level? What are the key drivers or leadership attributes? Industry knowledge? Financial acumen? Extraordinary charisma?

What differentiates a decent manager apart from a leader of greatness, a person who catapults ordinary companies into legendary entities of destiny?

Surprisingly, every year we intellectually bump right into these qualities around Thanksgiving time. Technically, the whole holiday season actually centers right on these critical, transformational assets.

But with high-glycemic-index carbohydrate meals, football and Black Friday shopping garbling up the mental landscape, we can miss the point. As Winston Churchill once noted, too often people “occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

What then is this truth? What key strategic change agent are we potentially missing, both at Thanksgiving time and other parts of the year?

Following multiple deep dives into research, many management and leadership experts point out that perhaps the single-most important quality of a breakthrough leader – that rare person who people gladly follow and who often lead companies near-vertically straight up in growth – is that of humility.

Humility, you say? A milksop attribute of timidity?

Hardly. In fact, not at all.

People possessing the strategic quality of humility are fearless. They don’t care what others think. They are quietly confident, collaboratively focused, relying on what Jim Collins, author of the best-selling Good to Great, calls “inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate.”

Closely coupled with humility is the leadership dimension of gratitude. Ever been around someone who is truly grateful, who lives in the present, who cheerfully refuses to yield to fear or stress?

Gratitude, like humility, comes by choice. Feelings of same are secondary. We consciously and mindfully chose to be grateful, to embrace qualities of humility.

These represent qualities of breakthrough rare people whom Collins defines as Level Five Leaders, the ones who are essential to move a company or organization from barely “good enough” to renowned greatness. What does Collins say about them? The Level Five Leader “builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will.”

Comparing modern examples to the qualities exhibited by Abraham Lincoln, Collins’ extensive research showed that “Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, shy and fearless.”

And this is decidedly not about fulsome ideology. This is about outlook and performance. Collins and his research team – as well as numerous other research initiatives – found that the stock and revenue performance of companies led by Level Five Leaders was several times greater, and overall growth much faster, than those companies who were not led by individuals exhibiting personal humility plus professional will.

Think that CEOs or other organizational leaders need to be larger-than-life and full of boundless charisma? The research conducted by Collins and others blows that notion right out of the water.

So what qualities should one embrace to exercise this transformation power of humility and gratitude?

Arrogance will likely destroy a team and ultimately a company. Arrogant people focus on self. They build impregnable “not-invented-here” silos while mixing up the organizational Kool-Aid.

Humility looks beyond and listens to new ideas. Humility allows other people to receive well-deserved credit for work well-done.

Leaders who are grateful, living in the present and quietly confident all have the mental and emotional space to lead with purpose, to inspire, to act quietly and calmly, even in times of major crisis.

The professional will side of the equation does not disturb the powerful meekness and humility of a committed leader. The Level Five Leader is highly capable, can work with others in a team setting, possesses organizational ability and understands the power of vision. The professional will demonstrates an unshakable and firm resolve – the capacity to simply do what it takes despite the opposition – set on a foundation of high standards. Level Five Leaders may be a bit on the quiet side, but they never give up. According to Collins, they exhibit rigorous and determined discipline.

Strategic meekness, a confident and viable expression of humility, allows leaders to ask for help without loss of emotional ego. They don’t have to know it all.

This Thanksgiving season we have an open invitation. Setting the stage for powerful growth in 2015, we can reflect on how to advance our companies through the transformational leadership qualities of humility and gratitude.

By Michael Snyder, Managing Principal, The MEK Group

About Michael Snyder and The MEK Group – As the Indianapolis Star stated in 2014 profile coverage, “Michael Snyder knows brands.” Snyder today is managing principal of The MEK Group, an award-winning marketing, branding and PR firm known for creating transformational high-impact outcomes. For more information, please visit www.themekgroup.com