Humble Enough?

How spicy was your Thanksgiving? Thrown turkey legs, flipped tables, silent sulking??

Kidding. Kind of. With tensions rising across the country, I imagine many Thanksgiving dinners got pretty heated - or avoided topics beyond food, football and foliage altogether. The same is likely happening at work too.?

Josh and I have been talking a lot about language lately. Specifically, how when we take powerful and charged words and apply them to more and more cases/things, they lose their value, and in some cases, their very meaning. Short term it might seem effective. You’re probably garnering a lot of likes + comments on that post. But long term, it’s dangerous. Over use it and you dilute it, erode the meaning to the point that you’re covering very real cases where we need the intended gravity of it.?

This phenomenon is called concept creep. If you’re reading anything on social media, it’s hard not to see it happening. We’re seeing it with words like racism, genocide, and white supremacy at the extreme end of things. Lately it feels like many of the posts I read leave me wondering “wait, what?! They can’t possibly mean that.” And that’s no good. When that happens, we close down conversations, create bubbles, and drive people to extremes.?

Why, you might wonder, should you care? Because your employees are out there writing, reading, and absorbing. And it’s impacting how they work with each other and how they work with leadership.?

Don’t take my word for it. Look at how other Orgs are starting to tackle this challenge. Our most asked for and repeated sessions right now are:

• Navigating Difficult Conversations
• From Polarization to Action: moving forward, united?
• De-escalation + conflict resolution?
• Checking in + leading with empathy?
• Protect Your Mind: Digital Media & Misinformation
• Using Emotional Intelligence to Elevate Wellbeing?
• Tactical Strategies for Critical Conversations

The titles show a workplace in distress. A deep need for better communication. Thankfully, these are skills that can be taught. They’re not, however, skills most of us have been taught before. If you want a high-performing team and organization, you need trust and deep relationships. If you want those, you need to start with communication.?

When you think about your own organizations, what do you see? Are people openly having conversations, are they learning from each other? Do you see intellectual humility in your leadership?

We lost two brilliant minds this week, Charlie Munger and Henry Kissinger. Revere them, fear them, hate them - they were, without debate, both brilliant. I’ve been reading a lot of remembrances of each. I’m still processing the lessons there, but one thing that jumped out at me is their intellectual humility. Humble they were not. But they both had great humility when it came to knowledge. They got there mostly by reading and talking - often, and with everyone.?

Jason Zweig said it beautifully, “More than almost anyone I’ve ever known, Munger also possessed what philosophers call epistemic humility: a profound sense of how little anyone can know and how important it is to open and change your mind.”

How important it is to open and change your mind.?

That’s really hard to do, and few do it well. We talk a lot about the ‘rate of change’ increasing. Rapid change means we have a lot more information available. We’ve also been living in ‘react + respond’ mode, which dulls our ability to open our minds, absorb new information, and change our views. I fear with all that, we lose the ability to stay humble about information.?

Tim Urban illustrated simply and clearly what happens when we leave that humility sweet spot:

If you base it on what you read and hear, it seems like many are edging into the Arrogant Zone. Humility seems to be in short supply. But it’s arguably more critical now than ever.?

We’re entering chaos season. People are exhausted, overwhelmed, and charged. We’re also each more unavoidable. From office gatherings to holiday parties, we’re bumping up against each other virtually and physically a lot for the next few weeks. How will those interactions go? Will people listen to each other or jump to extreme views? Will they use the same language in person they’re so quick to post online??

As we race into year-end, how are you helping people navigate these challenges? Are you giving them tools to have these conversations??

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