Pathways to Greatness Beyond Level 5

Level 5 leadership is necessary for taking an organisation from good to great. It is not the only thing required. Collins identified five other drivers that, combined with Level 5, produce greatness. Each translates usefully to school leadership.

First Who, then What

Good-to-great leaders start with people first and then deal with vision and strategy second. They get the right people on the bus, move the wrong people off, usher the right people to the right seats, and determine where to drive it.

The dominant assumption in business school had been: figure out where you are going, then hire the people to take you there. Collins found the opposite. Great leaders started by assembling the right team, then worked out the destination together.

What “First Who” means in a school

1. Hiring matters more than strategy. A school with the right teachers can adapt to many strategies. A school with the wrong teachers cannot execute the best strategy.
2. Removing wrong people matters too. A long-serving teacher who is in the wrong role does damage. The honest exit conversation is part of First Who.
3. Right people in the right seats. A strong English teacher may be a weak head of department. Putting people where they fit is as important as having them at all.
4. Vision develops with the team. A vision developed in isolation, before the team is in place, may not be the right vision. Better to build the team first.

The implication: a new school principal’s first year is mostly about people, not about strategy. Get the team right, then figure out the destination together.

The Stockdale Paradox

The Stockdale Paradox is the most quoted idea from Collins’s work.

Named after Admiral James Stockdale, winner of the Medal of Honour, who survived for 7 years in a North Vietnamese prison camp by holding on to two contradictory beliefs. His life could not be worse at the moment, and his life would someday be better than ever. Good-to-great leaders confront the most brutal facts of their current reality, with absolute faith that they will prevail in the end. They hold both disciplines, facts and faith, at the same time, all the time.

Stockdale, asked which prisoners did not survive the camp, gave an unexpected answer. The optimists. The ones who said “we will be out by Christmas”. Christmas came; they were still in the camp. They said “we will be out by Easter”. Easter came; they were still in the camp. The disappointments broke them.

Stockdale survived by holding both: brutal honesty about the present and absolute faith about the future.

The Stockdale Paradox in a school

A school principal taking over a struggling school faces the same challenge. Two failure modes are common.

1. Brutal facts without faith. The principal accepts the school is failing, sees no path out, and lets the school continue to decline.
2. Faith without brutal facts. The principal makes inspiring speeches about turnaround but does not face the actual problems. The school does not improve.

The Stockdale Paradox combines both. The principal looks honestly at what is wrong, names it, and acts on it. At the same time, she holds an absolute conviction that the school will become great. The two together produce the work.

A useful check: in any week, did the principal both name a hard truth (a brutal fact) and reinforce a vision (faith in the outcome)? Both, every week, are what Stockdale-paradox leadership looks like.

The Flywheel

The third pathway describes how change actually happens.

Good-to-great transformations do not happen in one big leap or overnight. Rather, it starts one movement at a time, gradually building up momentum, until there is a breakthrough. Mediocre organisations never sustain the breakthrough momentum. Instead, they lurch back and forth with radical change programmes, reactionary moves, and restructuring.

The image is a heavy flywheel. The first push is hard and produces almost no movement. The second push, on the same wheel, produces slightly more. After many pushes, the wheel is spinning. After many more, the wheel has enormous momentum and is hard to stop.

What the flywheel means in a school

1. Patient, consistent work matters more than spectacular launches. A reading programme that runs steadily for three years produces results. A series of one-year initiatives produces nothing.
2. Early wins are small. A new principal who expects dramatic improvement in her first six months is likely to be disappointed. The flywheel is still starting.
3. Compound returns kick in late. After three or four years of consistent work, results start moving fast. The earlier work was building the wheel; the breakthrough comes later.
4. Reactivity destroys flywheels. A school that changes strategy every year is constantly stopping the wheel and starting again.

A school head who internalises the flywheel idea works differently. She picks her priorities carefully because she knows she will be working on them for years. She does not panic in the slow early phase. She does not expect spectacle.

The Hedgehog Concept

The fourth pathway is the most distinctive of Collins’s contributions.

The fox knows a little about many things. A fox is complex. A hedgehog knows only one big thing very well. The hedgehog is simple. And the hedgehog wins.

When an organisation has identified its Hedgehog Concept, its leaders should devote all their energy and resources to pursuing the one thing it does best. Collins argues that when the going gets tough, it is the organisations that focus on what they are good at, rather than searching for alternative strategies, that survive and thrive.

The Hedgehog Concept is the answer to three questions, all of which must be yes for the activity to be the school’s hedgehog:

1. What can you be the best in your area at? Not just good; not just average; the best, in some defensible niche.
2. What are you deeply passionate about? The hedgehog is sustainable only if the leaders care.
3. What drives your economic engine? The activity must produce the resources the school needs to keep going.

Applying the Hedgehog Concept to schools

A school’s hedgehog is the one thing it does better than any other school in its area. A school that tries to be the best at everything ends up being the best at nothing.

Examples of school hedgehogs in different contexts:

1. Best at early literacy in interior Sindh. A school that has built deep expertise in teaching reading to first-generation literate children.
2. Best at preparing students for international universities. A Karachi school that has cracked the Cambridge or IB curriculum and produces consistent admissions.
3. Best at integrating children with learning differences. A school that has developed structured support for diverse learners.

A school that knows its hedgehog and focuses on it produces deep, distinctive results. A school that scatters across many priorities produces shallow results across all of them.

The Hedgehog Concept is uncomfortable. It requires saying no to attractive opportunities that do not serve the core. Many school heads cannot bring themselves to do this. They want the school to be best at everything. The result is mediocrity across the board.

A Culture of Discipline

The fifth pathway is the culture that supports all the others.

Disciplined people doing disciplined work.

A school with a culture of discipline does not need to be tightly controlled. The discipline is internal. Staff hold themselves to high standards. They do the work consistently. They do not need constant supervision because they have absorbed the school’s standards.

A culture of discipline is hard to build and easy to lose. It takes years of consistent leadership to develop. It can be damaged by one bad hire, one tolerated lapse, one principal’s drift.

For a school head, building a culture of discipline involves:

1. Hiring for discipline. First Who: get people who are already disciplined.
2. Removing the undisciplined. Hard but necessary. Tolerated indiscipline destroys the culture of the disciplined staff.
3. Modelling discipline. The principal’s own discipline sets the standard.
4. Embedding discipline in systems. Habits supported by structures last longer than habits dependent on willpower.

How the five fit together

The five pathways are not a list to pick from. They reinforce each other.

A school that has all five, combined with a Level 5 leader, becomes great. A school missing any one of them stays good at best.

Flashcard

What are the five pathways to greatness beyond Level 5 leadership?

Tap to reveal

Answer

First Who, Stockdale Paradox, Flywheel, Hedgehog Concept, Culture of Discipline.

1. First Who. Get the right people on the bus, then decide where to go.
2. Stockdale Paradox. Confront brutal facts while keeping absolute faith.
3. Flywheel. Greatness is built one push at a time, gradually.
4. Hedgehog Concept. Focus on the one thing you can be best at.
5. Culture of Discipline. Disciplined people doing disciplined work.

Combined with Level 5 leadership, the five pathways produce great institutions. Missing any one keeps the institution at good. The five reinforce each other; they are not a menu to choose from.