Unraveled Idea Mill

Read and Respond: Humility as a Leadership Trait

Reading Source: HarvardBusiness.org

Summary:
John Baldoni’s article is centered around his thoughts on a David Brooks column he read.  His basic thoughts are that leaders who want to inspire their workers can effectively use humility to show our humanity and empower a successful team.

Thoughts:

• I have continually stated that leadership and management are two separate things and that most people in leadership positions tend to merely manage.  I think this article does a good job of summarizing one of the biggest differences I find between leadership and management. Leaders understand the strengths of their team and help each member perform to their utmost ability whereas managers most often dictate tasks and ignore individual differences and strengths.

• Too often “leaders” are not humble, think they know better, and stifle growth of their subordinates. One statement from the article makes this point abundantly clear: “Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman note in their seminal text, First, Break All the Rules, that a characteristic of successful managers is their ability to promote others, sometimes to positions higher than their own.” Without humility you cannot recognize that someone is better than yourself at something. Leaders need to realize the end goal is not to control everything, rather organize resources to achieve goals.
• In an information age with rapid change talented team members are more important than ever. During my time running the operations of a company I quickly realized I did not have time to overview every thing that happened. Not only did I not have time, but I was not the most knowledgable on many of the situations.  It took my understanding that I had a knowledge gap on certain topics (my becoming humble) and empowering my team to make decisions in areas of their core competency that allowed for effective decision making and growth.  One of the biggest changes in business is the speed with which change happens.  It is more important now than ever before that leaders allow their talent to thrive.
• Being humble is fun. Power is stressing. As much as I initially hated losing control of certain things I ultimately realized:
  • I couldn’t effectively control everything anyway
  • I hadn’t really lost control.  If someone made decisions detrimental to the success of the company I could always replace them.

The results were something great.  Employees felt more respect, more pride in their work, and productivity went up.  Lines of communication open up when people feel respected in their areas of expertise.  As personal humility, respect, and communication increased so did pride in the company and the goals we were trying to achieve.

Not sure about you, but I would much rather give up some personal pride and replace it with pride in accomplishments of a team.  When you become a humble leader, one who leads with respect and actions, I believe success will come more often and you’ll have a great team to enjoy it with.