Reaching your Prime

One day not that long ago I decided I was going to go from being good at being healthy to being great. Although I maintained a fairly healthy diet and had a consistent exercise regime, I knew that I wasn’t reaching my full heath potential at 22 years. The decision to look at my unhealthy habits head on and make active changes to put them behind me took honesty and determination. I had to carefully assess my behavior in a wide variety of contexts including behaviors triggered from stressful, social and habitual environments. Once I defined my strategy to combat the behavior keeping me from reaching my fullest health potential, I consistently enforced new behavior until I met my goal.

Jim Collins explores the idea of Level Five Leadership as a change in behavior that results from a need to produce sustained results. Level five leaders are resolved to do what ever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or small the decision is. In order to make these decisions, leaders need to be able to fully identify who makes up the company, where it is now, and where it needs to be in order to transition from good to great. In other words, the leader needs to be informed of the followers, the task at hand, and how they can use there leadership skills to produce sustained results.

Without asking the hard questions in why and when I act on unhealthy habits, I would not be able to identify the real change I needed to reach my goal. Level five leaders understand that all issues are a result of the leader, follower and task at hand. To create strong improvements, they need to create customized solutions to produce real results that will take a company from good to great.