Humility: The Foundation Value of Innovation Leadership

“If you kNOw, there’s NO curiosity, there’s NO learning, there’s NO listening, there’s NO innovation!”

In a previous Pulse article , we laid out a set of required values for leaders of sustained innovation. These are the key values necessary for being a leader — no matter where you sit on the organizational chart — of innovation.

Pop quiz: the six key values are…

To review, the key values for innovation leadership are:

• Passion — Aligning your (and others) work with what creates meaning.
• Integrity — Doing what you say you’ll do.
• Tenacity — Persistently and doggedly pursuing an option or solution until it succeeds and/or others see the brilliance of it.
• Courage — Being brave about pursuing options that are risky, novel, or untried.
• Curiosity — Being interested in new ways of doing things, unusual approaches, or things that are outside of your area of expertise. Constantly learning.
• Humility — Recognizing that ideas can come from other people, a willingness to change your mind, being able to admit mistakes when you make them, and being willing to learn from the mistakes of others, rather than punishing them.

 Of these six values, we list Humility at the bottom for two reasons: 1) it’s the foundation of and energizes the other five, and 2) it spells out a catchy acronym. Remember the acronym the next time you find yourself pitching (or listening to a pitch) to get better performance and innovation from your organization, then start with the foundation — be humble. Like a building, you need a strong base on which to build, which brings us to the first value of innovation leadership.

How to work together more effectively to generate new value

If you do research to find out what productive people and teams do when they’re

working together, you’d discover a list that we call “Suggestions for working together.” Several of these guidelines require significant humility, things like “Be coachable,” “Listen generously,” “Look for what’s possible,” “Commit to learn,” and “Be a know-it-all.” Okay, the last one isn’t really on the list; it’s just a check to see if you’re paying attention. Further, when you research the most effective ways to generate valuable new ideas, you discover that key principles like “defer judgment,” “tolerate ambiguity,” and “consider novelty” are also powered by a need to not be a know-it-all. Yes, supported once again by humility

Spreading innovation…and germs

Two interesting articles came across our desktops a few years ago that are perfect illustrations of how humility drives the leadership of innovation. The first was a story written by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the co-authors of the current best-seller, Freakonomics. In this New York Times article (dated 9/24/06), the authors share that “44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year because of hospital errors — more deaths than from either motor-vehicle crashes or breast cancer -- and that one of the leading errors was the spread of bacterial infections.” With statistics like that, you’d think that healthcare professionals would be incredibly diligent about washing their hands. Yet “studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should. And doctors are the worst offenders, more lax than either nurses or aides.”

There are many reasons for not hand-washing on the part of doctors: inconvenient or obstructed sinks and busy schedules. Yet conveniently located dispensers of anti-bacterial disinfectants don’t solve the problem either. According to a doctor at Cedars-Sinai hospital, the two psychological reasons they don’t do it are 1) they don’t actually wash their hands as much as they think they do and 2) arrogance, or a lack of humility. “The ego can kick in after you have been in practice a while,” says Dr. Paul Silka, the hospital’s chief of staff. “You say, Hey, I couldn’t be carrying the bad bugs. It’s the other hospital personnel.”

Serious problem. How do you fix it?

In order to increase the rate of hand-washing to the rate of 90% required for hospital certification, the hospital tried a communication campaign involving e-mail, faxes, and posters. Then they tried handing out bottles of Purell hand sanitizer as doctors came in the building from the parking lot. Next they tried a “Hand Hygiene Safety Posse,” that handed out $10 Starbucks gift cards to doctors who they saw washing up (and if you don’t think doctors will snap up $10 gift cards, think again!). Compliance rates rose to 80% from 65%, but it still wasn’t enough. Finally, at the close of a lunch meeting with doctors, Rekha Murthy, the hospital’s epidemiologist took a culture of the doctors’ hands. The photos of the cultures, according to the epidemiologist “were disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.” Yum, how’s that lunch sitting now? One of the resultant photos was made into a screen saver that “haunted every computer in Cedars-Sinai. Whatever reasons the doctors may have had for not complying in the past, they vanished in the face of such vivid evidence.” Even doctors who’d been in practice — and had established habits — for 40 years changed their behavior very rapidly.

Change can come quickly when energized by PASSION

Fortunately for the patients of Cedars-Sinai, the doctors (some of the best in the world that we’ve actually been fortunate enough to have treat us) were humble enough when confronted with the evidence of their failure to recognize that they needed to change their behaviors — right now! -- and they did.

A happy ending to the story, but it could have been happier. What if doctors would have changed their behaviors sooner; how many infections could have been prevented? And what if there hadn’t been a sharp team of people trying to ensure compliance who were constantly humble, curious, courageous, tenacious, and lived in integrity with the Hippocratic oath? What if there was no epidemiologist ready to jump into trying to solve the problem in the face of “I’ve always done it this way before?” What if the person with the infection was one of your loved ones? This writer can name three people who suffered serious infections that they picked up in hospitals. Our thanks to the epidemiologist and the other innovation leaders engaged in solving the problem who provided us with this example of how to get things done against an extremely challenging obstacle: habit!

Arrogance stinks

Important to remember is that humility, like halitosis, is not a permanent condition (a shout out to our friends working in oral care!). Each of us has moments in time where we have more and less humility as we go about our day. Some of us recognize when we are not experts, so we are much more likely to admit that we don’t know all there is to know. And some of us will become even more arrogant in such a situation in order to cover up our ignorance. Our “humility index” (if there were such a thing) is not a constant. It varies according to our state of mind, success, health, biorhythms, horoscope and the amount of alcohol we’ve consumed among other variables. Like an asymptote (a shout out to our friends who paid attention in algebra!), we never reach perfect humility, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive for it. The question is not if we make mistakes, but when. And how we deal with it. Do we cover up or admit it? Bury it or learn from it?

What happens if you Google “arrogance?”

Consider the other example from an interview that aired on Marketplace, a business radio-program produced by Public Radio International. As told by reporter Adam Lashinsky, one of Google's most senior executives, Sheryl Sanberg, a vice president who runs all of the Google automated advertising systems realized that she’d made a multi-million dollar mistake. Did she try to hide the mistake? Nope, she blamed it on one of her subordinates. Not really!! What she truly did was to walk over to Google co-founder Larry Page and tell him about it. So what’d he do, fire her? Nope, he said, “Yeah, we shouldn’t have done that. We’ll know better next time. But, oh, by the way, it’s good that you made this mistake. I’m glad, because we need to be the kind of company that is willing to make mistakes. Because if we’re not making mistakes, then we’re not taking risks. And if we're not taking risks, we won’t get to the next level.”

So what have we learned?

That’s innovation leadership. It’s being humble enough to recognize a mistake and learn from it, and it’s being humble enough to not punish someone for making a well-intentioned mistake. Because you recognize that you could have made the mistake just as easily as the other person. And that there’s a valuable lesson to be taken away from the experience.

Human being, not human doing

Humility is not something you do, it’s a way that you be. It’s an on-going state of mind that requires you to constantly check in with yourself to see if you’re being a know-it-all who does things perfectly. Or better yet, you check in to see if you’re in touch with the fact that we all make mistakes and you choose to learn from your own and the mistakes of others.

At least, that’s what we’ve learned thus far. Is it absolutely the truth? To say so would not reflect our humbleness. So let us know where we got it wrong. That way we can learn from our mistakes too. A quick read looking at all 6 values can be found here: https://www.newandimproved.com/blog.aspx?id=4061

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Bob Eckert is a veteran of 25 years in the Creative Thinking and Innovation fields. A thoughtful, frank and engaging speaker known for thinking in the box, out of the box, under the box and around the box, he is the co-author Demystifying Innovation Culture Efforts: 12 Strategies for Organizational Change Practitioners & Executive Leadership and More Lightning Less Thunder: How to Energize Innovation Teams.