Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Award He Gave Away
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Award He Gave Away. Here we go. Dominic got an email on a Tuesday morning that most founders dream about. A national business magazine wanted to profile him. The headline the head the editor pitched was The Visionary Who Built Harbor View from Three People to 300. All Dominic had to say was yes. He almost did immediately. Nineteen years of work had led to the exact kind of moment people in his industry wait for. His face on the cover, his name attached to the growth. A story that made him look exactly as capable as he actually was. Then he thought about who would actually read that story inside his own company. The three practice leads who had closed the biggest accounts of the year. The ops director, who had quietly fixed a staffing crisis nobody outside the building ever heard about. None of them in the photo. All of them in the version of the story the magazine wanted to tell, invisible. Jim Collins spent years researching exactly this moment in company after company, and he named the pattern plainly. He wrote, Level five leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. Collins didn't set out looking for humility. His research team wanted to know one thing: what separates companies that leap from good to great and keep getting better from companies that never do? The answer kept pointing somewhere uncomfortable for anyone who loves a single founder story. The leaders running the companies that actually lasted were rarely chasing the spotlight. They were building something sturdy enough to survive without them standing in it. Dominic called the magazine back two days later. He said yes to the profile on one condition. He wanted his three practice leads featured by name, with their own photos, describing the accounts they had actually won. The editor pushed back once, mentioned that readers respond to a single founder narrative, then agreed. This is the part people usually get wrong when they first hear Collins' line, they hear. Channel their ego away and picture someone meek, someone who shrinks from hard decisions, avoids conflict, and waits to be told what to do. That is not what the research found, and it would not describe Dominic either. He still makes hard calls. He still fires the people he needs to fire. He still argues for the strategy he believes is correct, even when a different one is more popular in the room. The real distinction is not how much ego someone has, it's where that ego is pointed. Dominic's drive did not disappear once Harborview grew past 50 people. It got redirected. Redirected away from being seen as the reason the firm works, and toward making sure the firm works whether anyone is watching or not. That is a harder thing to do than sounding humble in an interview. It shows up in which name goes in the press release, who gets the client introduction, and whose growth gets protected when budgets get tight. This distinction is worth sitting with now. Software can write Dominic a glowing founder narrative in about four seconds. It's confident, well structured, and built entirely around him as the face of the company. An AI tool has no ego of its own to redirect. So it will cheerfully hand you the version where you're the hero every single time you ask. Collins' actual insight was never about the writing. It's about who gets to stand at the center of the story. A flattering version of yourself is only a prompt away now. Deciding to step out of that frame and point the credit somewhere else is still a call only the person making it can make. So take a look at the next moment where credit is up for grabs, a client email, a company update, a piece of press. Notice the easy version, the one where you are the whole story. Then ask who else actually built the result you're able to take credit for. Find one specific way to put their name next to yours, not behind it. Carry this forward past today. The test of a level five leader was never whether they could sound humble on command. It was whether what they built could still stand, still serve, still work on the day they were no longer the ones standing in front of it. Dominic's profile ran six weeks later with four names in it instead of one. Two of his practice leads got recruiting calls off the strength of that single article. He let both take the calls. Neither one left. Harborview signed its biggest client of the year the following spring. The introduction came not from Dominic, but from the ops director whose name had never been in a magazine before that morning.