When I read the Good to Great book by Jim Collins, I saw there a concept called Level 5 leadership. So there is this idea that there are leaders with different levels of leadership, and it was explained like this:

I learned more about this later when I learned an article that he wrote in his blog:

I started playing around with different things and I had this flash that went through my mind of “It’s a hierarchy. It’s a pyramid of capabilities and you kind of climb up this hierarchy.” It was sort of almost like a Maslow’s Hierarchy, except it was of leadership and there were levels to it. I thought, “This is a hierarchy of levels. Level one would be individual capabilities. That would be at the base of the pyramid, and then you go from individual capabilities to level two, which is you get really good at playing well with others. Good team skills. Level three, you would learn how to manage.

By the way, as an aside, never denigrate great management. Anybody who’s had a poor manager knows how awful that is to work for one and how great it is to work for a great manager. Then above level three becomes level four. You go from managing to learning to lead. Then there was a higher level. That higher level was the Level 5. The Level 5, well you could be a leader as a level four. To be a Level 5 leader you had to go to the next level of the hierarchy and add in this ambition for some things bigger than yourself with humility and with will.

So you have to master each level to be able to get into the next one. You can’t be Contributing Team Member if you’re not a Highly Capable Individual.

– I read a similar example in another book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy:A man I know only as PJ lives on the East Cape of Baja California, about thirty miles north of San Jose del Cabo, on the Sea of Cortez. He is now a surfer and fisherman, but PJ was once a helicopter pilot, first in Vietnam, and then in rescue work. The land in Baja California is unspoiled by shopping malls, industry, paved highways, or fences. Sitting on a hilltop in the warm winter we could see the gray whales jump and hear their tails slap on the water. Making conversation, I offered that “helicopters should be safer than airplanes. If the engine fails, you can autorotate to the ground. It’s like having a parachute.”
– PJ snorted. “If your engine fails you have to pull the collective all the way down, get off the left pedal and hit the right pedal hard to get some torque. You have about one second to do this before you are dropping too fast.” He paused and then added, “You can do it, but you better not have to think about it.”
– “So, everything has to be automatic?” I asked.
– “Not all,” he replied. “When an engine fails you have a lot to work out. You have to concentrate on where you are going to land and on maintaining a smooth sliding path down to the flare. That stuff takes a lot of concentration. But the basic act of controlling the helicopter, yes, that has to be automatic. You can’t concentrate on the crisis if flying isn’t automatic.” PJ opened another Corona and then expanded on his point. “To fly a helicopter you’ve got to constantly coordinate the controls: the collective, the cyclic, and the pedals, not to mention the throttle. It is not easy to learn, but you’ve got to get on top of it. You’ve got to make it automatic if you’re going to do more than just take off and land. After you can fly, then you can learn to fly at night —but not before! After you can fly at night with ease, maybe then you’re ready to learn to fly in formation, and then in combat.”
– As he spoke, PJ spread his fingers, overlapped his thumbs, then swooped this miniature formation around to illustrate his point.
– “Master all that—make it automatic—and you can begin to think about landing on a mountain in high wind in the late evening, or landing on a rolling, pitching deck of a ship at sea.”

And then the author continues:

– To concentrate on an objective—to make it a priority—necessarily assumes that many other important things will be taken care of. PJ was able to concentrate on the coordination between his helicopter and the rescue vessel because he already possessed layer upon layer of competences at flying that had become routine.
– After this discussion, I came to see skills at coordination as if they were rungs on a ladder, with higher rungs in reach only when the lower rungs had been attained. Indeed, PJ’s concept of a layering of skills explains why some organizations can concentrate on issues that others cannot. This understanding has helped shape the advice I offer clients. For example, when I work with a small start-up company, their problems often revolve around coordinating engineering, marketing, and distribution. Asking the CEO of such a firm to concentrate on opening offices in Europe may be pointless, because the company has not yet mastered the basics of “flying” the business. Once the firm stands firmly on that rung, it can move abroad and develop international operations. But, in turn, asking that newly international firm to move knowledge and skills around the world, as does a global veteran such as Procter & Gamble, may also be pointless. It must first master the complexity of operating in various languages and cultures before it can begin to skillfully arbitrage global information.

It is quite a fascinating concept. Whether it is in our personal lives or in our professional lives we think about skills and capabilities as separated by each other and don’t think that they are connected or in many cases built on top of each other. It is likely that social and professional skills have to be built on top of each other, and there are prerequisites of having some skills to learn other skills.