I have been studying the subject of greatness for a long time.

I would like to share the Five-C model of greatness with you. Whether you are a parent, teacher, athlete, artiste, banker, engineer, architect or leader, this model applies to you.

The Five-C model is a model of great leadership, comprising five critical components: Centredness, calling, competency, character and community.

Centredness

One core aspect of greatness is to be be Value-Centred. Values keep you in balance and guide your decision-making. The Who comes before the What.

In other words, Being comes before Doing and your Doing results from your Being.

The values you hold determine the way you lead.

At the core of this value is to be Other-Centred. From this springs respect, honour and honesty, gratitude and generosity. If you want to be great, you have to love people. The great heart is one that cares for others.

We have the highest respect for people who are selfless. We admire teachers who care and spend that extra time to help us through our mathematics examination.

We remember the manager who coaches us, develops us and pushes us to greater heights in our career.

We value parents who work long hours to eke out a living so that they can pay your school fees.

Calling

Calling creates passion. Author and educator Stephen Covey calls it “finding our own voice”.

It is finding purpose, meaning and fulfillment in your life. It means understanding yourself, your passion and your destiny.

Calling is your God-given ability to do the job and your God-given enjoyment in doing it.

Michael Novak, in his bestselling book, Business as a Calling, describes four characteristics of a calling:

• A calling is unique to you. You find yourself. It is self-knowledge, self- identity and self-fulfillment.
• A calling requires talent. According to Logan Pearsall Smith, “the test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves”.
• A calling reveals its presence by the enjoyment and renewed energy we get when we practise our craft.
• A calling is not easy to uncover. But when you find it, it drives you and your desire to achieve greatness.

Competency

Competency is the accumulation of knowledge and skills. It comprises both professional competency and leadership competency. It involves both hard and soft skills.

Hard skills have to do with the professional or technical aspect of the business. If you are in the banking industry, you need banking competency, like financial analysis and business accounting. If you are in retail, you need skills like selling, negotiation and product knowledge.

But technical or professional knowledge itself is incomplete and insufficient. We need leadership competency, which is the softer aspect of the work, which may include a combination of influencing, coaching, team leadership and people management skills.

Character

Character describes a person’s integrity and morality.

The word “character” comes from the Greek word “kharakter”, a stamping tool. It describes a person’s quality, a distinguishing mark, feature or trait of a person.

Two aspects, integrity and morality, are often the missing pieces in greatness.

Most people associate greatness with power and wealth. If you make these two aspects the stamping tool of your life, you will be defined by them. You become what you worship.

That is why, I believe, there is so much derailment and fall-out. It makes you lose perspective and bearing. It makes you short-sighted.

The other aspect of character is integrity. Integrity is wholeness. It is being real and authentic. What you see is what you get.

Community

To be in community is to have friends – true friends who will stand with you while others fall away. Having a community of friends will keep you real and accountable.

To last the long haul and be truly great, you have to cultivate true friendship. It starts with you. You have to be a friend first.

Unfortunately, in our fast-paced, time-is-money world, friendship is in short supply.

Each of these five features of greatness is important.

If you have competence without calling, character and community you become a technocrat – a functional expert bereft of emotional intelligence.

If you only have character without calling, competence and community, you become a moralist – dispensing spiritual advice and moral platitudes to your followers with little credibility, because you lack passion and competence.

If you have calling and competence without character and community, you become a destructive achiever. I am sure you can cull examples of this kind of person. The wheeler-dealer investment bankers during the financial crisis of 2008 are fine examples.

They are extremely passionate in what they do and they excel in what they do but they lack character (integrity and morality). Hence, they become destructive to the organisation, to others and to themselves.

If you have community without centredness, calling, competence and character, you are just a hanger-on, a friendly but useless bum.

If you have character and competence without calling and community, you become a demotivated under-achiever.

If you have character and calling without competence and community, you become a charismatic eager beaver unable to contribute to people and organisations.

If you have centredness, calling, competence and character without community, you become a lonely solo performer and have no one to share your success or failure with, which is not sustainable in the long run.

Centredness, calling, competence, character and community. These five features are not techniques or strategies but a frame and perspective that govern your way of life to achieve greatness.

The real power of greatness lies in the holistic integration of all these five aspects of life.

You must also remember that greatness is a choice and a journey. You must remain focused on that journey to greatness. There is no short cut. At different times, you may lose focus and fail, but you must not give in and give up. It’s a long, arduous journey worth pursuing and persevering.

You might say I am asking you to bite off more than you can chew. I have this to say: I would rather choke on greatness than nibble on mediocrity.