“As a leader, you need to have a strong ego, but you can’t have a big ego.”
– William M. Lambert, CEO of MSA Safety, Inc. as quoted in a 10/21/15 WSJ feature, “The Case for a Humble C-Suite”
As I was filing some reading material, I came across this WSJ article from October. The article states “companies increasingly prize humble leaders because they listen well, admit mistakes and share the limelight.” Is it that companies have valued those qualities less in the past, or that they’ve been exposed to them so rarely that it never occurred to them to seek out the humble, listening sharer?
In our society, bombast and self-promotion get way too much play. One need only look at the current Republican Presidential landscape to see it playing out before our eyes. Indecisiveness is seen as a weakness. We’re taught that questions are to be answered — in school, at home and especially at work.
What if that’s not the case, though? It may be our learned response, but it’s not necessarily natural. What if our natural response was to probe, go deeper, seek as Covey might say, to understand? “Gee, that is a great question! I’d never thought of this matter in those terms. Tell me, why do you ask? Is this an issue that is affecting you directly? How can I help?” And, even if we’ve come up in a command and control environment, we can learn this method of responding
Quoted in the article, Dale Jones, CEO of Diversified Research (recruiter) says, “The servant leadership model promotes collaboration.”
It does. It also promotes independence and nimbleness. If those we lead learn that we trust them, that their instincts are correct most of the time and that it is ok to a) decide and b) be wrong we exponentially increase the number of decisions we collectively make each day. We’d move forward, faster. We’d make a bigger difference for more people.
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