Responding With Humility in a Dog-Eat-Dog Culture

• In Event: Business NOT as Usual: Unexpected Leadership Responses to Challenges and Threats

Short Description

A financial services executive will discuss her work with a community of several hundred executives who strive to respond with humility to strategic challenges. Members of this trust-based community come together to share their deepest fears and biggest challenges and to ask for help, well-positioning them for current and future challenges.

Detailed Abstract

Leader humility is not a highly sought-after trait in business (Argandona, 2015; Owens & Hekman, 2012) and often flies in the face of the accepted cultural norms for executive leaders (Schein, 2009). As a result, humility is relatively rare in the executive ranks. Senior executives typically rise through the ranks within a single function and are valued for their confidence in action rather than their ability to embrace their shortcomings and seek help from others. When they reach the top, they have few peers within their organizations who know enough about their tasks to offer relevant constructive feedback and little experience in cultivating a community in which they can seek out constructive feedback. It is therefore unsurprising that few leaders humbly admit they need help and actively seek out advice and counsel.

While few leaders possess humility as a personality trait (Owens & Hekman, 2012), those that do are uniquely equipped to effectively meet the challenges that turbulent times bring. Humility is the ability to maintain an accurate perception of one’s skills, abilities, imperfections, and accomplishments while remaining appreciative of the value that other people and perspectives can contribute (Tangney, 2000). Although modesty is a related component of humility, it does not sufficiently capture the appreciation that humble leaders have for the worth of others (Tangney, 2000). It is that value that humble leaders place on the knowledge, experience, and information possessed by others, that allows them to seek out new peers and leverage the supplemental knowledge and capabilities that they possess (Nielsen, Marrone, & Slay, 2010).

Leaders who seek advice outside their own circle of friends and close colleagues consistently outperform those who do (McDonald, Khanna, Westphal, 2008). Despite the clear benefits of seeking the knowledge and perspective of those outside their organizations who might have enlightening points of view (de Bruin, 2013), the vast majority of executives choose not to solicit the opinions of others. The few that do tend to reach out to a small circle of family and close professional colleagues (McDonald, Khanna, Westphal, 2008) who generally hold perspectives similar to their own.

One innovative community of executives has chosen a different path and made humility and asking for help the norm. They actively seek one another’s counsel, often eschewing important meetings for a chance to meet in face to face and discuss their most difficult challenges. These exceptional leaders range from c-suite executives to vice presidents and senior directors, and span roles in nearly every function in the organization including sales and marketing, operations, data sciences, technology, and customer experience.

In an extraordinary departure from executive norms, they humbly admit to their peers the things they do not know and solicit help. Leaders who participate in this community fully embrace the fact that they must approach each gathering with humility, admitting the gaps in their own capabilities and valuing intense the wisdom of their peers. The value they receive in falls into three explicit categories; (1) solving current issues; (2) gaining broader perspectives; and (3) maintaining a more diverse circle of close confidants from whom to seek help in the future.

Leaders attending meetings often come with their most urgent and important business challenges, ready to admit they do not know how best to address them. Once the leader shares the challenge with his peers, the group weighs in with their related experiences, offers advice and suggestions on how the leader should adjust their current course of action, and occasionally offers entirely new perspectives that reframe the problem in a whole new ways. In order to capture the real value from these encounters, these executives must be humble enough to set aside their own biases and truly value the input of divergent perspectives and use new inputs to shape the solutions they eventually execute. The leaders who gather in this diverse community of highly capable executives are by no means dullards, but they choose to expand their professional perspectives and grow significantly by understanding where they have further room to improve. They gain an understanding of challenges in industries outside their own, see into the logic structure used both successfully and unsuccessfully in a wide variety of business situations, and have the opportunity to hear how other companies frame and address issues. They have the opportunity to step out of their own expert points of view and look and back at their businesses with fresh perspective. As a result, each future challenge that they face benefits from a more multi-dimensional perspective and therefore create more thoughtful ways in which to face them. In addition, they develop a circle of trusted colleagues that is much wider and more diverse than their less humble peers. This creates dividends well into the future, as their richer network gives them an ongoing way to ensure that they can tap into a wider experience base in the future.

Simply by adopting a humble attitude and engaging in a community such as this, these social charismatic leaders are better able to access a wide variety of inputs including those gathered from other leaders, and as such are more successful than their less humble peers (Nielsen, Marrone & Slay, 2010). Furthermore, when turbulent times throw new challenges in their paths, they will have a practiced ability to ask for and receive help, a forum in which to ask for it, a multitude of perspectives from which to view these new situations, and a diverse circle of trusted colleagues to advise them.

Participant

• Melissa Norcross, Ontario Systems