True Leadership and Vision Comes from Humility, Just Ask my Mom and Dad

As I begin to close in on 30 years combined of public service, corporate and entrepreneurial experience I look back on many lessons in the areas of leadership and vision as I continue to learn and grow.  One constant trait of effective leaders and especially of  visionaries who can not only articulate a clear vision but develop an effective pathway to achieving it and obtain buy in and collaboration from their teams and partners to implement it successfully - is authentic humility.  We all have egos, and a strong ego will propel us forward, but unless it is accompanied by a clear sense of one's place in the universe and one's obligation to others, we will fail to make the essential connections we must to lead others and we will be unable to remove our egos from our objectives in order to achieve them.

From a very young age I had strong examples of humble leadership - what we call a servant leader; and of empowerment, what we call facilitative leadership - in my parents, and before them, my grandparents.  My father was a brilliant, articulate and extremely engaging man who was naturally gifted in many pursuits.  My mother, who was an intelligent, warm and empathetic soul, used to comment that my father could have done anything he wanted in life - which was very true.  With a wife and an ever growing family, he chose to be an educator and he opened the world up to thousands of young people, his children included, and gave them a very strong sense of purpose and of  their own capabilities.  It was much the same with my mother.   Leaders don't demand to be followed, don't believe you should just follow them because of who they are or where they came from or what they have achieved - they elevate and support others around them even as they forge forward and onward.

Those were basic, often unspoken lessons I observed and absorbed growing up.  My mother could be tentative, self-doubting at times, in part because of her background and the strong gender role stratification of her old country upbringing, but she found herself, her voice, in her partnership with my father.  They had a challenging relationship at times, but if there was good news or important news or if there was something either of them needed to parse out in life, they would rush home at the end of the work day to discuss it with the other.  World events, politics, economics, they charted through it all together, and confidently.  And, although we were a family of just middle class means and many, many children, our home was open at all times to others and my parents were generous of spirit, time and intellectual and financial resources. 

My father taught gymnastics in addition to teaching school, and he coached and refereed interscholastic sports.  He taught us the value of teamwork, and that real achievement arises from collaboration.  He was patient too.  I remember lining up to practice our golf swings with little whiffle practice balls in our large backyard that served as a private driving range and how he'd explain, demonstrate, observe and adapt his teaching to our varying levels of skill and development.  My parents also expected and celebrated achievement, and with individual success they had a way of celebrating the one without obscuring the many.

I also remember an incredible lesson in service to others as a hallmark of leadership when I was a small child staying with my paternal grandparents while recovering from an illness.  I was miserable being separated from my family and was not openly appreciative of the great love, warmth and care my grandmother was devoting to me night and day as I recovered in their well appointed home, and I was overcome with fears in a large, strange house.  They had a great deal of Asian art in their home, as they had only recently returned from living in Saigon, and at one point I made my grandfather remove a large piece of artwork from the wall of their living room (it was a painting on granite and was very heavy) because the image on it frightened me.  They were gracious, patient, engaging.  My grandmother read to me every night so I would fall asleep, and she told me stories about the children she'd come to know and love in Saigon.  She had a book of clippings she let me look through from our local paper and the paper in the town where her older sister lived in West Virginia, that were about their time in Viet Nam.  One of those newspaper stories was about how the ladies of her sister's church had sent two large chests of old clothing to Saigon where "Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge and Mrs. Charles Lewis Boyd" had mended and patched them all, sewing day and night to provide "new and durable" play clothes to over forty children orphaned and displaced by the escalating war there.

In the mid 1960s, when my grandmother was in Saigon, it was still customary to refer to women in society pages not as "Mary" or "Betty", but as Mrs. Whoever Their Husbands Were.  I read that article thinking how nice it was that my grandmother and this other lady had spent so much of their time sewing clothes and baking and cooking for the nearby children (indeed, these were the very things my grandmother did tirelessly for her own grandchildren and anyone who visited her home), and I had no concept that they did this out of the US Embassy or that Henry Cabot Lodge was the ambassador at the time.  And my grandparents never told us why they were in Saigon, nor did either of them ever convey to us that they were 'important' people.  They certainly had many nice things, and my grandmother loved to entertain and to 'get all gussied up' as she sometimes said, but she was most comfortable in her kitchen, wearing an apron, waiting on others.

All of this was embedded in my mind and is the essence of who I am and who I continue to become as I embarked on and continue my own journey in life.  I am not unimpressed with corporate CEOs or Governors or Senators or people with other such titles that I work with frequently, but I am not overly impressed either.  I also don't think anyone should be impressed with me, or that I should begin to enumerate accomplishments or drop the names of people I work with or know to make someone aware of my worth or capabilities or standing.  Quite to the contrary, it is in my deeds and service to others or toward an outcome that any such assessments should be made.  I think about that old newspaper article a lot - how no one even knew my grandmother's actual name - but how certain I was that the children felt comforted and cared for by her and that was the thing that mattered.  

The greatest, most inspiring people I have worked with and worked for probably thought fairly highly of themselves, but that was because they thought very highly of those around them too.  The state legislator I worked for during California's Energy Crisis at the turn of the 21st century was and is brilliant, engaging, persuasive - and accomplished a great deal with many wishing to follow his lead.  The greatest lessons about leadership and vision that I learned from him though were many years later, when he endured an unfair and very public attack that resulted in him having to leave the work he loved.  He held his head high, accepted the very jarring change it brought about, and he kept on moving forward, understanding that he had much still to give.  Humility is not always a quality we wear on our sleeves, visible to all, but is embodied in how we handle a humbling circumstance or period.  I remember parsing a very difficult decision I was on the cusp of making in my own career, and upon seeing this good friend and great leader as he acknowledged he would be resigning and leaving behind something he loved doing and did so well,  I understood what I needed to do.

We have to get out of our own way to develop vision and especially to communicate and implement it. There has to be a clear view to the horizon, which means at times we have to stand back in the shadows for all to be able to see it, especially as the ability to receive and act upon different perspectives on the vision is of significant value.  The confidence to chart and lead the course forward, perhaps many courses forward over time, arises from recognition of capability, experience, the power of collaboration - but most importantly from humility.   An effective and inspiring leader casts a great shadow, which can be daunting to others, but is not about blocking anyone's light.    

We have all read books and work-shopped and implemented and assessed leadership platforms and performance throughout our careers, but a good way to describe how to know whether there is adequate humility in your leadership brand and whether you have successfully implemented true vision is to think of it as a painting you have worked on for some time after much study and collaboration.  You have to be able to leave it unsigned and hang it in a hallway with some very great works and be confident enough to walk away, let it stand on its own.  If you hear it described later by someone else who doesn't know of your attachment to it as a great work, you can exhale and smile - letting the work be exalted and not you.  The reality is we generally get credit and recognition as leaders, and certainly seek it out along the way as part of building our leadership, and there's nothing wrong with that.  Strong, effective and inspiring leaders aren't motivated by that, however, and their greatness is apparent in their calm and graciousness not just in the midst of a great victory but in the depths of moments of apparent defeat.