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A leader’s hunger to achieve—to continually be the best—is a major source of strength for any organization. It fuels innovation, productivity, and growth: companies would be lost without it.

But taken to an extreme, the drive to achieve can damage an enterprise. To meet ambitious goals—a revenue aim, a sales target—overachievers command and coerce employees rather than coach and collaborate with them. Many also cut corners, neglect to communicate crucial information, and ignore others’ concerns.

Result? Overachievers stifle others’ drive and development—ultimately eroding organizational performance, demolishing trust, and undermining morale.

How to guard against achievement overdrive? As Spreier, Fontaine, and Malloy suggest, recognize that the best leaders strive to help others succeed. Discern whether your achievement drive is undermining your leadership style. For instance, are you always providing answers rather than inviting others’ input? Do others see you as arrogant and impatient? If so, channel your achievement drive into altruistic achievement: replace coercion with collaboration, balance direction with influence, and focus less on results and more on people.

Though difficult to master, altruistic achievement pays big dividends. After one pharmaceutical executive at AstraZeneca tamed his overbearing achievement drive, his previously frustrated team won recognition for being the first to attain market leadership with three top-selling drugs.

The Idea in Practice

Recognize If You’re an Overachiever
High achievers, the authors explain, relish challenging projects that enable them to accomplish something new. They like to outperform others who embody high standards of excellence. And they’re utilitarian in their communication—often short and to the point.

If you fit this description, watch for signs of an overactive achievement drive. Feedback from others can help.

Example:
Dean McAlister, a senior pharmaceutical sales director with AstraZeneca, was talented, sincere, and hard-working. But he drove his team crazy—flooding employees with early-morning emails and solving problems before his staff could discuss them. Result? He stifled his team’s input and creativity and came across as manipulative, impatient, and arrogant. After his manager alerted him to the problem, McAlister asked his team, peers, and boss for honest feedback on his behavior. Resulting insights—including “I’m always talking”—were painful but valuable.

Consciously Change Your Behavior
Identify and practice new behaviors. One executive who tended to criticize others during meetings began writing reminders to himself to take up issues outside a meeting instead. Another consciously limited her comments on an idea to no more than a couple of minutes.

Example:
McAlister knew he still needed to set sales targets. But instead of continuing to issue directives to his team, he practiced engaging them in discussions about how to achieve the targets. He also strengthened his coaching skills: When a sales rep emailed him about closing an important new contract, an excited McAlister fired back with a list of actions she should immediately take. Catching himself, he immediately sent a second message congratulating the rep and inviting her to develop her own plan.

Create a Culture of Altruistic Achievement
Too many organizations select high achievers for their obvious assets, then ignore the damage they’re causing as long as the numbers are good. To avoid the resulting dangers, balance the emphasis on achievement with attention to helping others succeed.

Example:
In the early 1990s, IBM’s leadership culture emphasized personal heroics. Executives focused on their own departments and divisions—even as that focus hurt other parts of the organization and eroded IBM’s market dominance. But a small group of leaders behaved differently: while still high achievers, they worked through others, provided coaching, and strove to enhance the entire company’s capabilities. IBM incorporated these behaviors into a competency model used to select, develop, and promote leaders. Public praise and stock options rewarded leaders who adopted the new style. By 2004, IBM’s combative, turf-protecting culture had given way to one of collaboration.

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All successful firms must design a compelling offering and manage the workforce to deliver it at an attractive price. But service firms must do even more: deal with the frustrating fact that their customers can wreak havoc on service quality and costs.

For example, a customer dithering at a fast-food counter slows things down for everyone else waiting in line.  An architect’s client struggling to clarify how a new facility will be used drags out the design process.

To tackle this challenge, Frei advises aligning four key elements of your business:

• What your service offering consists of
• How you fund the excellence you want to provide
• How you manage employees to deliver quality service
• What you do to help customers enhance—not erode—service

Get these elements pulling together, and none of them can pull your business apart—as service stars like Wal-Mart, Commerce Bank, and Cleveland Clinic have discovered firsthand.

The Idea in Practice
To consistently deliver service excellence, ensure that each of these four elements reinforces the others:

Service Offering
Determine how customers define “excellence” when it comes to your offering: Convenience? Friendliness? Flexible choices? Price? Identify what you’ll do to deliver that excellence—and what you won’t do.

Example:
Commerce Bank decided to serve customers who prized pleasant, face-to-face service and convenience. It offers evening and weekend hours, buildings with high ceilings and natural light, and a fun contraption for redeeming loose change. Despite its relatively unattractive interest rates and narrow product range, its retail customer base has expanded dramatically.

Funding Mechanism
Think about how you’ll pay for the increased cost of the excellence you’re seeking to provide through your service offering. Possibilities include:

Charging the customer. For example, Starbucks customers value lingering in the company’s coffee-house setting. To fund this inviting atmosphere, Starbucks charges a premium for its coffee.

Spending now to save later. For instance, Intuit offers customer support service free of charge. It uses callers’ input to improve future versions of its software, so customers will ultimately need less support.

Having customers do the work. For example, airlines’ self-check-in kiosks not only reduce costs; they also enhance the service offering by liberating travelers from long lines at staffed counters and by providing convenient tools such as seat maps.

Employee Management
Ensure that your workforce management activities (recruiting, selection, training, job design) empower employees to deliver the excellence embodied in your service offerings.

Example:
Commerce Bank competes on extended hours and friendly service, not on low price or product variety. It knows it doesn’t need straight-A students to master its limited product set, so it hires for attitude and trains for service. For instance, it uses simple recruiting criteria, such as “Does this person smile in a resting state?” And it encourages employees to recruit people they see providing great customer service in other industries. 

Customer Management
Articulate which behaviors customers must demonstrate to get the most value from your service. Then design your service specifically to foster those behaviors.

Example:
To get customers using the new self-check-in kiosks, airlines ensured that travelers could complete the transactions with far fewer keystrokes than check-in personnel used to need. By contrast, retail stores that offer self-service checkout machines haven’t made using those machines easy for shoppers. Moreover, the stores expect shoppers to shoulder responsibility for fraud prevention by weighing bags during checkout. Result? Anxious customers avoid the machines. 

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An unknown assailant poisons your company’s top-selling product, killing several consumers. A labor dispute paralyzes your firm. A scandal involving your organization hits the newspapers.

Crises are facts of life in business—often through no fault of executives.

Yet every crisis contains seeds of success. To reap them, start with prevention. But when a crisis strike, accept it, manage it, and focus on the long term. The bottom line? Tell the truth and tell it fast. Don’t make a bad situation worse.

The Idea in Practice

Steps to Crisis Management
1.    Avoid crises. Crisis management starts with prevention. List everything that could attract troubles to your company—for instance, information leaks during sensitive negotiations. Estimate possible consequences and prevention costs. Ensure unavoidable risks are commensurate with expected returns.

2.    Prepare to manage crises. You can’t control everything, but you can respond appropriately. Create detailed crisis-response plans. Install back-up systems and crisis-preparation teams. Practice your responses. By testing their earthquake-response plan in San Francisco, an emergency team skillfully handled a real earthquake six weeks later.

3.    Recognize a crisis. It’s often most challenging to admit you’re even in a crisis. Warnings often go unheeded, so listen for alarms in others’ comments and perceptions. Look especially for public-relations problems, since negative perceptions often become reality.
Example:
When evidence suggested Procter & Gamble’s Rely tampons caused toxic shock syndrome, the company recognized the public-relations crisis it was facing. It <Italic>immediately</Italic> stopped production and pulled Rely from stores. By safeguarding customers’ interests first, it protected its own reputation—and emerged a long-term winner.

4.    Contain the crisis. Disaster has struck; you’re getting conflicting advice; the public demands answers. To contain the damage, act decisively—and quickly. Some reasonable action is better than none. For example:

•    State the facts you know—as well as those you don’t.
•    Immediately dispatch the most senior individual to the scene of the problem—usually the CEO. You’ll demonstrate caring and accountability.
•    Build a “firewall” between the crisis-containment team and the team managing the business. Ensure your crisis team plays devil’s advocate—noting when the emperor’s naked.
•    Identify one person as company spokesperson.
•    Inform key constituencies: customers, owners, employees, suppliers.

5.    Resolve the crisis. Again, speed is essential. Quickly repair damage and secure your firm’s long-term reputation.

Example:
When ABC-TV’s Prime Time Live accused supermarket chain Food Lion of selling spoiled meat, Food Lion’s stock plummeted. The company swiftly offered in-store public tours, expanded employee training, and wooed customers through discounts. Food Lion eventually earned an “excellent” FDA rating, and recovered sales.

6.    Profit from the crisis. The preceding steps help you make lemonade from lemons—recouping crisis-related losses and even profiting from disaster.

Example:
When cyanide-tainted Tylenol caused several deaths, Johnson & Johnson quickly ensured consumers’ safety and restored trust in its top-selling product. J&J ran ad campaigns announcing its intentions, pulled 31 million capsules from the market, and redesigned the product’s seal. Within three months, it regained 95% of its pre-crisis market share—and even strengthened its reputation.

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How does IDEO, the celebrated industrial-design firm, ensure that its teams consistently produce the most innovative products under intense deadline and budget pressures? By focusing on its teams’ emotional intelligence—that powerful combination of self-management skills and ability to relate to others.

Many executives realize that EQ (emotional quotient) is as critical as IQ to an individual’s effectiveness. But groups’ emotional intelligence may be even more important, since most work gets done in teams.

A group’s EI isn’t simply the sum of its members’. Instead, it comes from norms that support awareness and regulation of emotions within and outside the team. These norms build trust, group identity, and a sense of group efficacy. Members feel that they work better together than individually.

Group EI norms build the foundation for true collaboration and cooperation-helping otherwise skilled teams fulfill their highest potential.

The Idea at Work
To build a foundation for emotional intelligence, a group must be aware of and constructively regulate the emotions of:
•    individual team members
•    the whole group
•    other key groups with whom it interacts.

How? By establishing EI norms—rules for behavior that are introduced by group leaders, training, or the larger organizational culture. Here are some examples of norms—and what they look like in action—from IDEO:

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Out of 1,435 Fortune 500 companies that renowned management researcher Jim Collins studied, only 11 achieved and sustained greatness—garnering stock returns at least three times the market’s—for 15 years after a major transition period.

What did these 11 companies have in common? Each had a “Level 5” leader at the helm.

Level 5 leaders blend the paradoxical combination of deep personal humility with intense professional will. This rare combination also defies our assumptions about what makes a great leader.

Celebrities like Lee Iacocca may make headlines. But mild-mannered, steely leaders like Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark boost their companies to greatness—and keep them there.

Example:
Darwin Smith—CEO at paper-products maker Kimberly-Clark from 1971 to 1991—epitomizes Level 5 leadership. Shy, awkward, shunning attention, he also showed iron will, determinedly redefining the firm’s core business despite Wall Street’s skepticism. The formerly lackluster Kimberly-Clark became the worldwide leader in its industry, generating stock returns 4.1 times greater than the general market’s.

The Idea in Practice

Humility + Will = Level 5
How do Level 5 leaders manifest humility? They routinely credit others, external factors, and good luck for their companies’ success. But when results are poor, they blame themselves. They also act quietly, calmly, and determinedly—relying on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate.

Inspired standards demonstrate Level 5 leaders’ unwavering will. Utterly intolerant of mediocrity, they are stoic in their resolve to do whatever it takes to produce great results—terminating everything else. And they select superb successors, wanting their companies to become even more successful in the future.

Can You Develop Level 5 Leadership?
Level 5 leaders sit atop a hierarchy of four more common leadership levels—and possess the skills of all four. For example, Level 4 leaders catalyze commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear, compelling vision. Can you move from Level 4 to Level 5? Perhaps, if you have the Level 5 “seed” within you.

Leaders without the seed tend to have monumental egos they can’t subjugate to something larger and more sustaining than themselves, i.e., their companies. But for leaders with the seed, the right conditions—such as self-reflection or a profoundly transformative event, such as a life-threatening illness—can stimulate the seed to sprout.

Growing to Level 5
Grow Level 5 seeds by practicing these good-to-great disciplines of Level 5 leaders:

First who.
Attend to people first, strategy second. Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off—then figure out where to drive it.

Stockdale paradox.
Deal with the brutal facts of your current reality—while maintaining absolute faith that you’ll prevail.

Buildup-breakthrough flywheel.
Keep pushing your organizational “flywheel.” With consistent effort, momentum increases until—bang!—the wheel hits the breakthrough point.

The hedgehog concept.
Think of your company as three intersecting circles: what it can be best at, how its economics work best, and what ignites its people’s passions. Eliminate everything else.

Purchase the full-length Harvard Business Review article.