The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential

by John C. Maxwell

My favorite birthday of all time was February 20, 2003. That was the day I got to meet and have lunch with one of my heroes—not a general or politician or movie star. I got time with a teacher named John Wooden, who happened to be the most successful and well-known college basketball coach in the world. He taught young men at UCLA to play basketball and—more important—how to live a successful life. He was a Level 5 leader through and through.

Throughout his long career, Coach’s relationships with all of his players were special. And after his career as a coach was completed, he maintained his close ties to the men he had once led on the court. Every time I visited him, our conversation was interrupted by a phone call from one of his former players checking to see how he was doing. And every time we rode in a car together, he would ask to stop at the post office so that he could mail letters he’d written in response to people who wrote to him or asked him to autograph something. More than once he told me, “If, as a leader, you listen to them, then they’ll listen to you.” He understood that leaders listen, learn, and then they lead.

I told his family at his private funeral that his greatness lies not in what he did; his greatness lies not in what he taught. His greatness lies in who he was; his character, his values, his convictions, his faith. And although he battled some health issues during the last couple of years of his life, he never once contracted the malignancy of pride. No physician ever diagnosed him as having the syndrome of selfishness. EKG revealed no trace of ego, and no MRI ever showed the slightest taint of prejudice. Morally, he had a clean bill of health. Spiritually, he was a humble man who had put his faith and trust and belief in God and in God’s one and only Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And although Coach was never boisterous about his faith—he was never obnoxious about his faith; he never pushed it on anybody—he simply lived day by day trusting, walking, living, believing in the one who was the Savior and his Lord.