Leaders come in many guises - but the greatest of them may be the ones we routinely overlook

Leadership, sought by many and found by few, is today's Holy Grail.  Leaders in politics, business, academia or religion are those who lead us to a better future.  Yet despite the thousands of books and articles written on the topic, real leaders are scarce.

Today's heroes are sportsmen and entertainers, people who tend to self-obsess.  Sports people focus on their own performance, their diet and training regime; team players can think past number one to include team-mates, but team inclusion relies on personal performance; and entertainers focus on their image and their own performance to win in the celebrity stakes.  All are self-focused, yet sports people and entertainers dominate the news and the Australian Honours List.

Sportsmen are revered globally.  When they are not playing sport, they are gracing the speaking podium, using their experience in sports as an analogy for business, politics and life. We sit, engrossed, failing to question why we apply their simplistic advice.

In Jim Collins' book Good to Great (Harper Collins), in which he discusses how good companies become best-practice leaders, five leadership levels are identified:

• Level-one leaders are capable individuals people who make a productive contribution through talent, knowledge, skills and good work habits. This could be your average entertainer, tennis player or swimming champion.
• Level-two leaders are those who contribute to the achievement of group objectives by collaborating with others - footballers, hockey players, netballers and, perhaps, politicians.
• Level-three leaders are competent managers -- those who can organise people and resources toward the effective and efficient pursuit of predetermined objectives.  This is the level of a good sports coach and professional business manager.  They are the people we usually call leaders.  They work with what currently is and improve on the status quo.
• Level-four leaders take us into the future.  They catalyse commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision.  They stimulate the group to high-performance standards while blazing paths into the unknown.  This is the level of charismatic leaders, entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and a raft of celebrity CEOs, many of whom are. now famous as leaders of corporate collapses.
• Level-five leaders are those we so desperately seek and rarely find; leaders who epitomise the Chinese proverb: "A great leader is one that, when a job is finished, causes people to say, 'We did it ourselves'."
  

Level-five leaders build enduring greatness with others while demonstrating a paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will.  We rarely hear of level-five leaders since they promote others and the common good above their own image.  They are the quiet achievers operating with respect and dignity while maintaining the highest ethical and professional standards.

As the chair of the Equal Opportunity for Women In The Workplace Agency Employer of Choice Awards a few years ago, I was shocked to notice how easy it was to overlook level-five leaders in favour of those who assert their own presence and personality. Research indicates that boards, the media and the general public habitually overlook those who are making the world a better place in favour of those who maintain the status quo while blowing their own trumpet.

Level-five leaders require intelligence, courage, humility, stamina, vision and the ability to self-sustain and self-motivate through personal satisfaction in what they achieve and the impact they have on others.  If we want more of such people we, too, will need to see past the PR to the quality of the person underneath, and we will have to reward on achievement not image