The cellular structure of any truly great organization is the well-led unit, for this is where great things get done. Great leadership at the top doesn’t amount to very much without exceptional leadership at the unit level. If you want to build a truly great company or social-sector enterprise, you need to cultivate legions of unit leaders who, in turn, create unit cohesion in pursuit of audacious objectives. If you want to scale your culture, if you want to make the journey from great company to enduring great company, you must invest in building a pipeline of the right unit leaders.

Far better to be an uncharismatic leader who gets the right people to confront the brutal facts than to be a magnetic force of personality who leads compliant followers to disaster. If you have charisma, you can still build an enduring great company. But never forget: If your company cannot be great without your personal charisma to inspire, then it is not yet a great company.

In the early phases of an organization, a company’s vision comes directly from its early leaders; it is very much their personal vision. To become great, however, a company must progress past excessive dependence on one or a few key individuals. The vision must become shared as a community, and become identified primarily with the organization, rather than with certain individuals running the organization. The vision must actually transcend the founders.

The essence of Level 5 leadership is a paradoxical combination of personal humility and indomitable will. The humility expressed at Level 5 isn’t a false humbleness; it’s a subjugation of personal ego in service to a cause beyond oneself. This humility is combined with the fierce resolve to do whatever it takes (no matter how difficult) to best serve that cause. Level 5 leaders are incredibly ambitious, but they channel their ambition into building a great team or organization and accomplishing a shared mission that’s ultimately not about them.

Think about this: we have inspirational stories—both real and imaginary—of people who went from extreme poverty to mega wealth, from alarming sickness to obsessive health freaks, and from ignorance to wisdom. However, we don’t even bother making up stories of bosses who went from terrible to amazing. If we did, they would probably be classified as science fiction. In contrast, and as earlier chapters have demonstrated, there is no shortage of real-life examples for leaders who were great until they deteriorated. The pathway from good to bad seems much easier than the one going from bad to good.