Beyond Good to Great:
What Leadership Now Demands

Strong individual leaders are no longer enough.
Aligned leadership teams are the real differentiator in today’s businesses. 

Great leadership looks different today

For a long time, “great leadership” has been pictured as a single extraordinary individual whose dedication, judgement, and drive carry an organization through defining moments.

That image remains persuasive as many companies still look for that singular individual. But it is increasingly out of step with the reality most organizations operate in today. Instead, what we find is that struggling companies are separated from resilient, high-performing ones by the way the leadership team shows up together.

The older model centered on exceptional individuals

When Jim Collins introduced Level 5 leadership in Good to Great, he elevated a compelling model of individual leadership: leaders who combined humility with fierce professional will.

Recognizing that intersection  was an important contribution to how we think about leadership. But it promoted a model of individual leadership. The central question was who sat at the top and how that person chose to lead.

Today, that is no longer enough. Strong leaders are necessary, but insufficient.

Two forces changed the leadership equation

What has changed is not the importance of determined, capable leaders. What has changed is the context.

In my work with executives across industries, two forces stand out to me:

Together, these forces have shifted leadership toward a team-based model where alignment and enterprise (horizontal) thinking are no longer optional but required.

Speed in business generally refers to two things, the pace of change that impacts the business model (forces like AI, cybersecurity, customer expectations, supply chain disruptions, and so on), and the pace of decision making to respond to those changes. Leaders need to respond quickly to a wide array of changes that are impacting their part of the business. When individual leaders attempt to make fast decisions for their area without aligning at an enterprise level, they wind up creating unintended consequences.

In the Good to Great era, things happened fast and in different areas, but it was still possible for leaders to operate fairly independently.  Organizations today are deeply interconnected. A decision in one area can create immediate consequences across operations, talent, brand, customer trust, and risk. The business realities of shared platforms, real-time data, hyper-connected stakeholders, and intense scrutiny mean that leaders across the business need to move together to deal with challenges and take advantage of opportunities.

Speed and interconnectivity magnify both the cost of poor leadership and the value of aligned leadership. At Karrikins Group, we see how quickly leaders revert to individual styles when they are up against the complexity caused by these two forces. It takes time and discipline to align across the enterprise and coordinate with other peers who are also managing their own needs to respond quickly to changing dynamics. Teams need to learn how to move quickly while also staying connected to each other and putting decisions in the context of the whole enterprise.

Individual brilliance is no longer sufficient

Very few of today’s most important challenges sit neatly within one executive’s span of control or capacity to solve. Growth, transformation, innovation, culture, risk, and technology all cut across most areas of business.

No single leader, no matter how capable, can hold the full system. In smaller, less complex organizations, the individual leader may be able to “muscle” through, but if there is misalignment amongst the core set of leaders the cracks in the system will still show.

That is why so many organizations struggle even when they have talented leaders at the top. Their executives may be individually smart, experienced, and committed, but they are not truly aligned as a team.

THE RESULT IS FAMILIAR:

• Strong leaders, weak collective execution
• Agreement in the room, inconsistent action outside it
• Strategies that look compelling on paper but stall in practice

The shift from individual excellence to collective achievement requires a deliberate move from polite agreement to aligned action. This is where leadership becomes less about individual style or individual preference and more about shared discipline.

In today’s environment, those questions are no longer optional. They are central to performance.

Civility without candor destroys value

In many organizations, senior teams have learned to operate with civility but not candor. Difficult topics are softened. Tensions are acknowledged but not worked through. Decisions are made but not fully owned.

In contrast, high-performing leadership teams operate differently. They surface real tensions, clarify trade-offs, and commit to shared action. They build enough trust to challenge one another honestly and enough discipline to move together once decisions are made. They take the time to have the quality conversations needed to co-create how they will lead together across the enterprise. Through this process, teams create shared meaning, real alignment, and coordinated action.

Leadership teams who are consistent with having quality conversations are able to respond strongly together as a team to challenges and opportunities that come at them fast.

Alignment is what allows teams to move fast and far.

In our work with thousands of leaders across hundreds of organizations, the teams that align well are the ones that consistently outperform because they move with both speed and interconnection. 

A different picture of great leadership

The Good to Great premise of what made companies great was right for its time, but it is no longer sufficient for today. A truly great company now depends on a leadership team that can think, decide, and lead as a coherent whole. Not a lone, heroic figure at the center, but a team of leaders capable of confronting reality, staying aligned under pressure, and adapting together in a fast, interconnected world.

When a leadership team does this exceptionally well, it is not just keeping up, it is building the conditions for sustained greatness. When it does not, even strong individual leaders will struggle to deliver consistent results.

Take a hard look at your assumptions about what great leadership looks like and how those assumptions are shaping performance in your organization.

Are you building a leadership team that can truly operate as one or are you still relying on individual excellence to carry collective performance?