Humility is a leadership skill
I’m humble! I’m a very humble expert…
When I was an IC (individual contributor), my job was to be an expert at the thing I did. That meant that I didn’t hold back. It was important to share what I knew when we were making decisions because that’s what helped my teams make stronger decisions. (To be clear, that doesn’t mean that I was a jerk and talked over everyone… I practiced strategic listening.)
However, now I’m building leadership skills and there are different considerations. One thing is the need to balance the needs of a project with the needs of the people working on that project.
For example, if I look at my Medium homepage, I understand what the sections in the right navigation bar mean. The UI copy does its job:
However, I can’t turn off my IC brain, so when I compare the different sections, I see a lot of inconsistencies:
Everything makes sense to me as a user, so the UI copy is good enough. But if a product is meant to be worldclass, different parts of the screen should read like they were written by the same person, even if they were not.
Here’s where it gets really tricky as a lead: where do I decide to prioritize holding the line?
- I already said that all the copy is good enough because it’s clear for the user. So perhaps I would approve this to ship.
- However, if I don’t give this note to the CD and team involved, they will lose the lesson of stepping back and assessing their work as part of a larger system. This ability is part of what makes me so valuable as an expert. Am I a good leader if I don’t build that expertise up in others?
- Am I a good leader if I override their decision?
There is a constant back and forth in my mind about how to support my teams in a way that empowers them. If I point out everything I know, it can be overwhelming. After all, if it were easy to transfer all my knowledge to someone else, it wouldn’t really be expertise.
This is why I think a lot about how humility is a leadership skill. I use it as a checkpoint to ask myself if I’m sharing what I know out of:
- Ego (serves me)
- Design need (serves the user)
- Business need (serves the company), or
- Team need (serves growth)
It’s not as cut and dried as it looks on a list, of course. All of these needs overlap and get even harder to assess when we’ve all been working on a project for months and months! But even that realization is humbling because I’m also learning to give myself some grace. I don’t need to get it perfect. I am also getting to grow.
