The last Strategic Leadership Communication blog entry, “Three Non-Leadership Lessons from the Life of Steve Jobs,” generated more comments than any other entry yet – mostly positive and most sent as personal notes to me. A couple of resulting observations:

First, the adulation showered on Steve Jobs’ after his death would appear to be generating a backlash, particularly among people who read Walter Isaacson’s biography, Steve Jobs. Many of the comments we received had an “it’s about time someone said this” attitude, and were perhaps overly enthusiastic in that regard.

Apparently, people really resent hearing so many positive words about someone who so often treated people so miserably.  The underlying assumption appears to be that we expect those who have been hailed as great leaders to be great people as well.  And it is discomfiting when they’re not.

For better or worse, however, greatness as a leader and greatness as a person are orthogonal characteristics, that is, they vary independently, and are relatively uncorrelated. One doesn’t preclude the other. But neither does one necessitate the other, no matter how much we wish that were the case, or try to twist the facts to make that the case.

In Jobs’ case, the facts of his poor behavior were well-documented and indisputable. Ergo, the resentment toward the adulation Jobs has received, and the enthusiasm toward my somewhat debunking blog entry.

Second, the very need to have written the entry is at least partly necessitated by the strong confusion between correlation and causality often associated with leadership studies.  As I mentioned in a footnote to the entry, ten years ago the leader to emulate was the “Level 5″ leader, who embodied “personal humility.” Not someone who would ever be mistaken for Steve Jobs!

As discovered and described by best-selling business author and professor Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, the Level 5 leader:

• Demonstrates a compelling modesty, shunning public adulation; never boastful.
• Acts with quiet, calm determination; relies principally on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma to motivate.
• Looks in the mirror, not the window, to apportion responsibility for poor results, never blaming other people, external factors, or bad luck.

The idea of the “humble leader” had cultural resonance at the time, coming as it did at the end of the era of the heroic, star CEO, too many of whom had become monomaniacal destruction machines (a la Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling, MCI-WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, etc.).  Collins’ offering brought a breath of fresh air and hope to our view of leadership, and quickly became the new paradigm.

Unfortunately, Collins’ results embodied the correlation/causation confusion.  His method had been to look at the leaders who had led their companies from “good to great,” and search for common characteristics among them. What he found was that those leaders all shared a strong sense of personal humility along with a terrific, disciplined focus.

Yet if those characteristics of leaders were alone enough to insure that companies would move from good to great, how to explain Steve Jobs, who had terrific focus, but little humility, and certainly moved a near-dead Apple to greatness? (Or Jack Welch, for that matter, with GE?) And did those same Level 5 leaders somehow lose their humility and focus as the performance of so many of Collins’ “great” companies declined from great to good, or even to mediocre-to-poor? The cause, then, must lie elsewhere.

The point is that neither modesty nor immodesty, humility or its lack, is any guarantor of quality leadership. And our obsession with seeking out the specific traits correlated with the success of a particular leader or group of leaders, whether Steve Jobs, or Collins’ “Level 5” leaders, and generalizing them as the key ingredient to a company’s success, may make us feel good, but ultimately has very little value in explaining a company’s success – hundreds of useless, semi-readable leadership books notwithstanding.