Be Humble as a Leader, and You will Succeed
Last week I wrote about the need for leaders to promote candor in the workplace to have an effective and productive team. Candor is one of the basic ingredients of psychological safety in the workplace, the condition that encourages employees to speak up without the fear of negative repercussions on their professional careers (or personal safety in some specific settings). For example, candid feedback during a decision-making process could improve the rate of success of such decision, by divulging the right information at the right time without fear of infuriating anyone. That information could be the difference between a huge financial loss and a profitable endeavor.
This week I wanted to expand on another characteristic needed for leadership excellence — Humility.
In my experience, humility is one of the pillars to good decision making. Why, you may ask? Because humility allows us to ask questions when we don’t know the answer. It allow us to assume the fact that we do not know everything, and we should not be expected to have the answer to everything.
How many of you have ever had a boss that always had an answer to every question? How effective were there? Did that knowledge ever get in the way of doing things a different way or a better way?
I recently heard John Truslow, the director of Ethics and Business Conduct from BAE Systems, speak on the topic of ethics. He mentioned how the main challenge that we face when we are seeking to make the most ethical decision, we can make is to have a clear understanding on what the right problem we are facing is. In other words, are we asking ourselves the right question?
Most organizations have a culture of placing blame first when faced with a challenge or problem. “Whose mistake it was?” Or “who was the responsible party that messed up?” Or “who should we blame?”. If the primary response to a problematic situation is pointing fingers, your organizational culture is probably a “blame-first” type of culture. And in most instances (there are few absolutes in life), the blaming analysis helps very little with the solution. In the blaming analysis, we are not looking for lessons learned on actions or behaviors but for the witch that we want to burn at the stake. It may make some people feel better as people think or say that “At least it was not us that screwed that one up” with a big sigh of relief. But placing blame does very little to move towards a productive discussion that needs to be had. Instead, the blame culture forces a person or group of people into a “guilty” corner, forcing them to defend their past actions.
Now, in an organizational culture that promotes integrity, transparency and accountability, the blaming instinctive effects would be minimized since any party would accept responsibility for the mistake as part of their learning and developmental process to allow the organization to move forward into solution mode. Resilience, in this case, the amount of time that it takes for a team or person to rebound from problem shock into solution mode, will be positively affected.
In a psychological safe environment, we will learn from our mistakes, assuming responsibilities for our own actions, instead of trying to hide them or “pass the hot potato”. In that same environment, a humble leader would ask questions to try to clarify the current situation, gathering information from all parties involved, knowing that we all make mistakes and that the blaming game seldom results in a viable solution.
The humble leader will also accept that we, humans, have preconceived ideas, borne from our past experiences and from our social interactions. Our own tribalism promotes a certain morality and way of thinking that will taint our decisions. As I mentioned in my book, The Shadow of Bias on Leadership, we derive our values and morals from the social groups that raised us. The nurturing part of our early lives predisposed us for a specific morality code.
And we are proud of those values and morals to the point where any questioning about our own values will get us caught into our lizard brain, our amygdala, registering as an attack and activating the most basic brain functioning that we have to survive. Basically, questioning our morals and values will predispose us into a defensive mode, the most basic fight, freeze or flight reaction. Tribal pride will limit our own thinking, tearing down trust and commitment from the relationship.
Humble leaders will spend time analyzing the problem, collecting as much data as possible from as many points of view as possible, what vertical development coaches refer to as “colliding perspectives”. Humble leaders will surround themselves with people that have diverse points of view. People that are not afraid of voicing those points of view, asking the tough questions, or questioning decisions and ask for clarifications. Humble leaders would feel comfortable putting aside their tribal beliefs to hear different perspectives as they collect more information to remain focus on the problem question and the potential solution.
In previous blogs, I mentioned about the power of journaling, active reflection and the power of sleep. Micro-reflections allows us to absorb the learnings of each action, modifying our future behaviors. Meditation, as an example of active reflection, allows us to understand how we are feeling, regulate our emotional state and improve our focus. Sleep permits our brain to sort information, absorb new knowledge, set patterns and promote a clear mind to face new challenges. Sleep is also key to our emotional mood which affects our social interactions.
Before you take a decision, ask yourself if you were trying to insert yourself into the situation, either using a morally packed language, as Truslow referred to it, or by filtering the information through your own tribal and biased beliefs.
And remember that, as CS Lewis said, “humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less”. It is moving from the dance floor to the balcony so that you can detach yourself from the situation. Practicing humility by asking questions, avoiding quick answers and collecting different perspective should not make you look like a weak leader at the eyes of your team — it should make you into a more inclusive and effective leader that your team is happy to call their leader.
