What Makes a Humble Team

Humble teams innovate more predictably and sustain performance longer. Teams that don’t share gratitude, may perform well in the short term, but these teams often become dysfunctional and unsupportable in the long run. I believe this phenomenon can be explained mathematically by looking at the relationship between shared gratitude and authentic, earned team confidence.

Toxic High Performers

It has long been debated what to do about toxic, high performers. The issue isn’t with the performance, It is with the behaviors of those who perform well. When they don’t play well with the team, it comes off as hubris and when they don’t grow the people around them, it is a disaster. High performers often want to do right by the organization and they want the people around them to grow and thrive, but it is often the culture that gets in the way of that. If you truly have those toxic, high performers on your team, you have to address that problem without haste. I agree with Reed Hastings of Netflix fame on this point, who calls these folks “Brilliant Jerks.”

“You get what you tolerate.” - Tony Robbins

A Culture of Humility

When leaders model rewarding individuals and acting like a hero themselves, it propagates toxicity. When humility, however, is woven into the culture and celebrated, innovation happens more commonly, and the entire ecosystem grows and learns as a result. Let’s look at how to assess the culture of our organization so that we can figure out where to start.

Low Humility Environments

If we were to plot on a graph, the demonstrated and experienced gratitude of a team on the Y-axis and The earned confidence of that team as perceived by the leadership on the X-axis, some patterns would emerge to give us some clues.

The Apathetic Culture

In cultures where little or no gratitude is present and little or no confidence is evident, we inherently derive apathy from our teams. This is represented on the chart by the lower left-hand quadrant. This is an ugly place for any group of people to stay very long, and likely leads to high turnover and “quiet quitting.” Dr. Milton Mattox talks about how teams and organizations get to a state of apathy and the relationship between recognition and gratitude in his book, The 5 Phases of Workplace Apathy. Teams that consistently don’t perform and have little sense of gratitude for the work and for their colleagues, uniformly demonstrate apathy.

The Hero Culture

Cultures that celebrate genius and heroic effort without distributing gratitude and credit, I call Heroic cultures. This is represented in the lower-right hand section of the chart. These cultures are sometimes built around a lynchpin savant and can be based on the fear they might lose this person. The premise here is that losing the lynchpin will lead to a catastrophic decline of the organization and its ability to succeed. Unfortunately, these cultures are often self-fulfilling, leading to more hubris and more protectionism. These cultures restrict innovation by reducing diversity of thought, pandering, and siloing. In the worst cases, it may lead to deeply ingrained biases. Leaders who model the distribution of knowledge, celebrate learning, and reward the sharing of knowledge perform better in the long run. A great leader will inspire great performers to become even more impactful through the sharing of both gratitude, and by building more confidence in the team through knowledge sharing and team growth.

“The price of greatness is responsibility.” - Sir Winson Churchill

The Patronizing Culture

Another distortion that I have observed is the high gratitude, patronizing culture. In this case, there may be authentic gratitude for the environment, the work, the team, and for each other, but there is not enough performance to warrant earned confidence. I use the word “earned” to represent the confidence being recognized and even celebrated by others, outside the organization. This is represented by the upper-left corner of the diagram.?

The Innovation and Growth Zone

When I run my workshops with CEOs I ask them (and keep track of their answers) whom they consider great leaders. A common answer that I get is John Wooden, argued by many to be the greatest sports coach ever. In researching him and his accomplishments, I came across this amazing quote, which supports the argument here about credit, and by extension, gratitude.?

“It is amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit.” - John Wooden

There is always a price to be paid when we are trying to do something new and different in the world. The greater the value to be created, the greater the sacrifice in most cases. Someone has to step out, learn something new, put their neck on the line and try. It is often those with the most competence in the given domain, as they tend to have the most experience.?

People need to get appropriate credit for their contributions and they need to celebrate successes. It is, however, always better for teams to share the credit and to distribute gratitude widely when they get it. No one accomplishes anything of great value today without the infrastructure the organization provides and the safety nets that are brought about by having teams to rely on. The most successful and sustainable teams I’ve seen are those who demonstrate immense gratitude, at a minimum for the opportunity to work on challenging problems with people who share the same goals.?

No one wins alone in business unless they are cheating.

The most complex problems require learning, in the wild, in order to achieve a modicum of success. The book, Teaming, by Amy Edmonson, Ph.D., clarifies this relationship between the ability to learn and the open, authentic sharing of learning in high-performing teams. When teams are confident in each other and know they have each other’s backs, they perform best. Amy refers to this ability to speak in full candor in conjunction with accountability for learning as psychological safety. For teams to be resilient and successful in the long run, both knowledge and talent need to be distributed and shared as widely as economically possible.?

In summary, innovative teams demonstrate humility at scale. They share gratitude widely and they earn confidence by growing together. Humility is a key factor in long-term team performance. Without it, toxicity ensures lowering morale and restricting innovation.

If you like this, interact with the content, share it widely, and let me know what you learn.

REFERENCES:

Stop Rewarding Toxic Rock Stars, HBS (2022)

No Rules Rules, by Reed Hastings (2020)

Unshakeable, by Tony Robbins (2017) {Note: I could not find this quote in his books. A decade ago, I worked with Tony and his organization Business Breakthroughs International. Tony used this phrase frequently on-stage at his events.}

Humility and Innovation, by Sean Flaherty (2022)

The 5 Phases of Workplace Apathy, by Milton Mattox, Ph.D. (2022)

The Splendid and the Vile, a Saga of Churchill, by Erik Larson (2020)

The Essential Wooden, by John Wooden (2018)