Level 5s combine tremendous personal will—the determination to do what it takes to achieve success for the organization—with public humility—the willingness to accept responsibility for failure and to pass along the credit for success to his or her team.

Thinking at first that these Level 5 leaders were lucky flukes, Collins discovered that many organizations abound in them. “The key step,” says Collins, “is to look inside the organization where extraordinary results have been produced, but where there is no person standing forth to take excessive credit for those results.”

In his bestselling book Leading Quietly, Harvard professor Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. took the idea to the next step by identifying the key guidelines or behaviors that successful quiet leaders seem to follow. He distilled these into seven recommendations, among them:

• Don’t kid yourself. Be realistic about what you know—and don’t know—of the situation you face. Accept that you may have to act with uncertain knowledge.
• Trust mixed motives. People bring a blend of motivations to their jobs—public-spirited and self-interested in various degrees in various situations. Getting results means recognizing that mix of motivation in everyone—including yourself—and working with it instead of fighting it.
• Bend the rules. While we are highly sensitized to corporate leaders breaking the rules for their own enrichment, Badaracco points out that most situations are a lot more ambiguous. Whose interest is at stake and when the rules apply are often murky, and the quiet leader must accept that sometimes bending a rule is in everyone’s best interest—and be willing to take the risk.

A richer understanding of where quiet leadership fits into the spectrum of leadership styles is explained in Daniel Goleman’s recent book, Primal Leadership, which describes six emotional leadership styles.

Among these, the Pacesetter and Commanding leaders are most like the traditional model, while at the other end of the spectrum, the Visionary, Affiliative, and Democratic leadership styles all have qualities that overlap “quiet leadership.” But it is Goleman’s Coaching style that may best describe the rarest—and most essential—qualities of the quiet leader.

“The coaching style is the least-used tool in the leader's toolkit,” says Goleman, “probably because it doesn't look like leadership.” The coaching style involves getting to know each member of your team well enough to be able to craft their work assignments to best suit where they are and where they’re going, he explains. When it works, it “creates immense loyalty and commitment to the leader and the team,” he says. When it doesn’t, it looks like micromanagement.

If all this makes quiet leadership sounds like another term for coaching…well, maybe it is. Like a coach, a quiet leader can achieve breakthroughs by asking guided questions rather than giving orders or advice.

Yet it’s clear that quiet leadership is not so much about any particular management style as it is an attitude toward work and people—and life. Keeping your ego in check certainly seems to be a prerequisite, as is giving up your ambitions for being on the cover of Fortune. As Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management studies at McGill University, commented in a recent article on quiet leadership, “Maybe really good management is boring.”