Humility – Leadership’s Most Important Facet

When you search ‘leadership books’ on Amazon, it returns over 30,000 results.  I won’t even try to quantify the number of blogs, podcasts, newsletters, sermons, and social media posts on the subject.  There must be billions of words on the subject across every language, culture, and people.  Leadership is so important to us because we recognize the value in taking a group of people from here to there in a complex world.  We should know everything about it by now, right? 

Yes and no.  Anyone can grasp leadership’s fundamentals, though interpretations and prioritizations vary.  Things get messy in execution.  Leaders find themselves in an infinite number of circumstances, and no leadership guru can outline even the smallest fraction of them into a convenient checklist.  Instead, people offer catch-all phrases that guide efforts in a variety of situations.  Leaders Eat Last, Extreme Ownership, and Trust and Inspire are some popular examples today. 

But even this wavetop approach can overwhelm a beginner.  Do I eat last first, or do I inspire from the front?  Does my extreme ownership conflict with expressing trust in my people?  Ask ten consultants how to start leading, and you’ll get back eleven answers.  If you approach leadership from a first principles mindset, however, many of these books and articles on leadership teach similar core lessons.  The most important of these?  If you want to lead, learn humility.

You cannot learn to lead if you refuse to learn in the first place.  This goes beyond a willingness to peruse the local self-help section in the library.  First, I’d bet the majority of people who read books on leadership and self-improvement fail to implement anything from what they read.  Behavioral change is hard and we overestimate our own abilities to undertake it.  Second, humility does not thrive in a pick-and-choose mindset.  You cannot effectively learn from a book on leadership if you choose to ignore the feedback around you.  The world already provides the best leadership laboratory you will ever need—itself. 

Whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a night shift manager at a local grocery store, or flying solo, every moment presents opportunities for learning to lead.  Whether or not you take advantage of them comes down to your level of humility.  Recognizing that every one and every thing has something to teach you is the critical first step you must take to becoming a leader worth following.  Once you have that humble mindset, all the wisdom written and spoken across countless forums becomes a treasure for you to inherit, and those you lead will benefit all the more from it.