The Essence of Leadership: Humility & Empathy
Article by Steven K. Haught, MBA
If you know everything there is to know, then you can take a pass on this article and move on to something more to your liking. Or… maybe your curiosity will get the best of you and you will stick around and read. After that, who knows what might happen to you.
Let's talk about the underlying attributes of genuine effective leadership. What causes a company to experience success? Is it the leader's brilliance, or the leader's impact on the people that surround him or her? Impact can of course be interrupted many ways.
Quite often startup cultures, particularly tech companies, gets caught up in the bravado of “crushing”, “disrupting”, “paradigm-shifting”, or “becoming the next unicorn.” Success is a heady business. Anyone who has experienced this kind of adrenaline knows what I am talking about.
Very quickly and almost without awareness on the part of the leaders, especially the founder, the company quickly rises to mythical status and its key executives are viewed as having the “gift or touch” that everything they do or create better than any other companies product or service.
What happens to the founder, the CEO, the key executives as they breath in their success and the rare air of being a market disruptor?
Many are completely self-absorbed in their accomplishment and live large from the money that quickly comes. Day-to-day, they hesitate to delegate, they often have poor listening skills, hearing only themselves, very sure that they are always right, they tend to make unilateral decisions about the future of the company, often without understanding what’s really going on in the market.
Self-centered leaders tend to make decisions without listening to the team that helped create the company's success. All to easily, founder confidence morphs into founder arrogance.
Unfortunately, we all know stories about founders who let their egos get the best of them. Most recently, the top executive at Wirecard would be one of these guys.
Some of these egos can last for years as the business they founded plateaus, grows slowly or stagnates. All because the “founder-top-leader” thought he or she knew everything, more than anyone else and didn’t need counsel or input from colleagues.
What went wrong? It’s not for lack of market potential, operating capital or the talented people a creative founder can surround themselves with. So what causes great success to slide off track and maybe crash and burn?
Humility… the lack thereof. Empathy… [not] caring how others feel.
Visionary, courageous, charismatic – these are the qualities most of us associate with great leaders. The idea of a humble, self-empathetic, effacing leader often doesn’t resonate in the hard charging, often bruising business world.
While it might seem counterintuitive, the most important aspect of developing a team, who in turn help a founder/ceo bring a great enterprise to market dominance, is spending time focusing on yourself. You must first understand who you are, the core of your personality and what drives you to work hard.
Great leadership is about humility and serving, not ego and directing. It's much harder to practice humility, as it means you must also practice vulnerability.
Staying humble means being aware of, and admitting, what you don't know. It means being ok making mistakes and asking for help.
When you are humble you open yourself up to the potential of continuous growth and learning, and you prime yourself to handle the highs and inevitable lows of starting a successful company with grace and dignity.
Those that are well-versed at practicing humility tend to see their position of leadership differently.
Servant leadership is a form of leadership, or a philosophy, in which CEOs view themselves in service to those below them. Instead of viewing their perch as power or a way to control people and outcomes, servant leaders views their position as an opportunity to serve and grow their employees and organization.
The questioning of self and of the company helps one to remain humble. It opens the door to possibility and steers clear of ego, which can get in the way of true problem-solving.
Instead of ego, founders should be intentional about cultivating and displaying the other “e” word: empathy. Defined as the ability to understand how others feel, empathy can be a powerful tool in not only getting people motivated, but helping employees to attack challenges and strive for excellence. If others know that you can see the world from their perspective, it fosters a feeling of trust and support.
Empathy is one of the 18 elements of emotional intelligence. It is also is a key component in people-oriented, servant leadership.
So, the more you can work on your EQ skills, the closer you become to being the best leader you can be. Start now by asking yourself the following:
Do I lead with humility or ego?
Am I leading in service of my team?
Am I an empathetic leader?
What three things could I start doing this week to be in service of my employees?
A number of research studies have concluded that humble leaders listen more effectively, inspire great teamwork and focus everyone (including themselves) on organizational goals better than leaders who don’t score high on humility.
At a managerial level, traits associated with humility–such as soliciting feedback and focusing employee needs–generated higher levels of engagement and job performance from their direct reports,
Humble leaders understand that they are not the smartest person in every room. Nor do they need to be. They encourage people to speak up, respect differences of opinion and champion the best ideas, regardless of whether they originate from a top executive or a production-line employee.
When a leader works to harness input from everyone, it carries through the organization. As other executives and line managers emulate the leader’s approach, a culture of getting the best from every team and every individual takes root.
In short, leaders know how to get the most from people. When things go wrong, humble leaders admit to their mistakes and take responsibility. When things go right, they shine the spotlight on others.
I suspect that humility gets a bad rap because it is sometimes linked with subservience or weakness and introversion.
Psychological research actually indicates the opposite. Humility is most closely associated with a cluster of highly positive qualities including sincerity, modesty, fairness, truthfulness, unpretentiousness and authenticity.
And there’s nothing about humility that makes it incompatible with strength and courage. Quite the opposite. Authentic leadership is far less about style than it is about execution.
Some leaders are screamers while others are quiet and introverted. Some are intuitive geniuses and others are total pragmatists.
But regardless of their approach, at the end of the day, leaders must inspire trust, cooperation and commitment among the workforce. The fast track to that goal is the path of humility.
