Essentials – Building Great Teams Part 4: Humility

In my?last article, I wrote about the third essential element to building great teams – Ambition. We’ve also covered?integrity?and?passion, and now we’re going to round out the list with what I believe to be the “glue” that holds all the essentials together: Humility.

To be honest, humility is a relatively recent addition to this list. For years, I lived and taught the essentials as only having the first three elements. I believed that humility was a natural outflow of having integrity, and while there’s certainly a kernel of truth to that idea, integrity itself doesn’t full capture the essence of what humility really is. Integrity is about being trustworthy, being true, and?it truly is the summation of transparency, self-awareness, consistency, clarity, confidence, honesty, and accountability.

All of those are good, healthy characteristics, but humility is different. Humility is about service. It’s about willingly presenting yourself second. But it’s also not self-deprecation, being a pushover, absolving credit or allowing others to take it from you. At the same time, it?is?about crediting those around you (your teams) more than you credit yourself. It’s a strange dichotomy. As I mentioned in the first article in this series, the success of a leader is determined and judged by the success of their teams. So how do we balance between remaining humble and yet still leading well?

C.S Lewis famously said, “humility is not thinking less of ourselves, it is thinking of ourselves less.” That’s the ethic of service. When you are a leader, you are?serving?your team. Everything you do should be about leading from a place of servanthood. Your service to them will elevate their service to your organization, your customers, and your communities. Interestingly, success (as well the credit, notoriety, and reward that follows it) is often born out of humility. This presents an interesting paradox, because the benefits resulting from being humble can detract from the desire to continue being humble. This is where leadership comes in.

The question, as a leader, is “who do you want to be”. There are scores of leaders historical and current that did not or do not exude humility. They may have had humble beginnings – Steve Jobs started Apple in a garage, and Meta was born in a dorm room – but success, especially repeated success, has a way of diminishing humility’s importance, and there are plenty of urban legends to that effect about working for those respective leaders. As leaders who want to build great teams, we must have a continual, recurring focus on remaining humble. Servanthood demands it, and our teams will be enhanced because of it. If you are committed to making your team better, making your culture better, and making your results better, remaining humble will ensure that the focus stays on the result, not on the leader.

Which leads us to this inevitable question: What does a humble leader look like? I think there’s a clue in the word itself. You see, “humble” shares the same Latin root word as “human”. The word is?humus?and it means “earth”. Literally, then, one of the defining traits of a humble leader is to be “down to earth” – to be human. There’s more behind this idea too –?according to a 2019 study, performance, team morale, and culture all improve when leaders lead with humility. That’s borderline antithetical to the pervading beliefs. Conventional wisdom would declare that results matter more than culture, but the data disagrees. Given that, I believe humble leaders exude these five characteristics:

1. Servant leadership – humble leaders believe they work for their team, not the other way around. They don’t brandish their title or expertise as a weapon, they use it as a foundation.
2. Open-mindedness – humble leaders listen to those around them. They do not insist on their own way and expect their ideas to be challenged.?They're open to feedback and dialogue.
3. Intentionally personal – humble leaders treat each person on their teams with respect and deference, and truly seek to know them, not just work with them.
4. Lack of ego – humble leaders do not seek to elevate themselves above the team. They are first to give credit and the first to take blame.
5. Confidence without arrogance – humble leaders are quietly confident in themselves, their experience, and their wisdom, but they don’t need to remind everyone they’re in charge.

So when we think of humility, it’s really about demonstrating these five attributes. That said, there’s one pervasive enemy to all of them, one that derails even the most well-intentioned efforts: Insecurity.?

Insecurity comes in many forms, but as a leader it will absolutely destroy the ethos of teambuilding. It will manifest as the polar opposite of the five characteristics above. Instead of servant leadership, there will be self-focus. Instead of open-mindedness, you will see people demanding their own way. Instead of being intentionally personal, you’ll see people being intentionally avoidant or pretending to be personal while scheming, backstabbing, and gossiping. Instead of a lack of ego, there will be blustering and inflated importance, denigration of others and drama. Instead of confidence, there will be arrogance and focus on positions and titles as opposed to results. And even worse, insecurity will transfer to your team like a disease. It will infect them. You’ll see paralysis in decision making, second guessing, and flip-flopping. Attention to results will be replaced by jockeying for position. These aren’t the marks of a leader leading a great team; they’re the marks of a leader trying to make someone happy.

Being a humble leader is about recognizing these pitfalls – no one is 100% secure in everything, always. It just can’t be true. That means that we all have a propensity for a misstep at some point. Insecurity, is, after all, a byproduct of fear, and fear always overplays its hand. Humility is what guards us against that reality. Mistakes will happen, with both projects and people. That is a given, but humility is what prevents humiliation.

That’s why humility is so important, and why it’s the binding agent for the other essentials. Building great teams is about all of them – integrity, passion, and ambition – but they are held together for the long term by humility. What kind of leader do you want to be?

The Essentials really are just that – essential. Building mediocre, even good teams is possible missing any one of them, but sustained greatness only comes from all four, working together to reinforce each other.?