The very best leaders are servants first.

Not so long ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., taught, “If you want to be important—Wonderful! If you want to be recognized—Wonderful! If you want to be great—Wonderful! But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s a new definition of greatness … Everybody can be great because everybody can serve … you only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love and you can be that servant.” By extension, you can then be a leader—a servant leader.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, and his team prove the point. In their research, companies that made the leap from good to great, led by Level 5 leaders described as “self-effacing, quiet, always courteous, gracious, modest and willful, humble and fearless, reserved, even shy,” attained what Collins called “extraordinary results, averaging cumulative stock returns 6.9 times the general market in the fifteen years following their transition point.” “Furthermore,” Collins notes, “if you invested $1 in a mutual fund of the good-to-great companies in 1965, holding each company at the general market rate until the date of transition, and simultaneously invested $1 in a general market stock fund, your $1 in the good-to-great fund taken out on January 1, 2000, would have multiplied 471 times, compared to a 56 fold increase in the market.”

Level 5 leaders—individuals who blend extreme personal humility with intense professional will—were at the helm of every good-to-great company during the transition era. “Those who worked with or wrote about the good-to-great leaders,” Collins points out, “continually used words like quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated, and did not believe his own clippings” to describe them. “Despite their remarkable results,” Collins highlights, “almost no one has ever remarked about them!” How many of these character-based, other-centered, servant leaders—George Cain, Alan Wurtzel, David Maxwell, Colman Mockler, Darwin Smith, Jim Herring, Lyle Everingham, Joe Cullman, Fred Allen, Cork Walgreen, Carl Reichardt—do you know?

You likely know few, if any, of them because, to an individual, these leaders, Collins tells us, “never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.” Such is the essence of servant leadership.

But you don’t have to be an extraordinary executive to be a servant leader. You don’t have to lead a movement to be a servant leader. Remarkable results can be achieved one person at a time. As you watch the video below, some may scratch their head and ask, “What does this have to do with leading a company to greatness?” It’s simple. Nothing changes when these leaders go home.

Every good-to-great leader, as Jim Collins and his team discovered, live humble and simple lives in the board room AND in their private life as well. What they are willing to do for one million people, they are willing to do for one. Let us recall what Dr King said: If we want to be important, recognized, and/or great—Wonderful! But first, we must nurture a servant’s heart.

Did you notice how the street performer—yes, a street performer—connected with the girl, without as much as a single word, in the beginning? He sees in her something she cannot yet comprehend. When she returns years later, he has not forgotten her, or her love of music—her destiny. In the metamorphosis of this girl’s life, we see how the servant leader, like the Level 5 leaders of good-to-great companies, quietly goes about the work necessary to transmogrify the ordinary into the extraordinary, giving fully and completely of himself expecting nothing in return.

Servant leadership is funny that way. Like the man in the arena, perhaps marred by dust and sweat and blood, it spends itself in a worthy cause, an other-centered cause, and it does so with a quiet grace, always embracing those served with love.