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A New Approach to Leadership

Leaders today who hope to create breakthrough innovations and tackle ever more complex global challenges must remain open to new concepts and models of leadership.

It is reasonable and prudent to expect even more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) in the economic, political, and, perhaps most of all, environmental crises that lie ahead. Much of this is the inevitable result of the rapid evolution of technology, the evermore connectedness of all of us around the globe, and the imminent scarcity of the resources that organizations rely on to continue innovating and growing.

Many forms and styles of leadership are necessary to cope in a way that balances opportunity, scarcity, pace, and propriety. We cannot overstate the importance of adaptiveness and resilience. We endeavor to demonstrate in this book that a cornerstone of twenty-first-century leadership is Humble Leadership.

Humble Leadership Is a Practice in All Forms of Leadership

Before we address this bold claim, we should step back and define some terms as we see them. Humility and leadership are refined concepts; sharing a cut diamond’s essence, they are multifaceted and born of pressure and time. As we have noted in previous works, humility is not typically associated with leadership (Schein & Schein, 2018, 2021). Let’s explore why we see a critical link between the two.

We begin with a simple definition of leadership in order to differentiate it from management, administration, stewardship, and various other forms of directing human endeavors.

Leadership Is the Creation and Implementation of Something New and Better

With the above definition in mind, how does Humble Leadership fit in the lexicons of management, administration, governance, and modern refinements of leadership?

Consider Humble Leadership as a fundamental process that underlies and can complement various notions of leadership described as “servant leadership” or as “adaptive,” “boundary-spanning,” “learning,” “inclusive,” “transactional,” “transformative,” and so on. These descriptions of leadership emphasize different traits of leaders, while Humble Leadership emphasizes the practice of how any of these traits can help drive new and better actions (Ernst & Chrobot-Mason, 2011; Ferdman et al., 2021; Greenleaf, 1977; Heifetz, 1994; Kouzes & Posner, 2016).

The many theories of the personality of the ideal leader and the many arguments for what the ideal leadership style should be are all valid in particular situations and for particular purposes. Whether a person is a “servant leader,” a “real” or an “adaptive” or an “inclusive” leader, or even a “charismatic” or “iconoclastic” leader, the practice of Humble Leadership can help reinforce those ideal traits and move that leader forward toward desired goals.

Leadership in general, when defined as focusing a team on the pursuit of something new and better, is also distinct from the concepts of efficient management or stewardship, both of which are oriented toward maximizing or optimizing the best of the present practice. Good management, stewardship, and governance never cease to be needed, yet Humble Leadership, in seeking something new and better, operates at the horizon beyond operational efficiency and toward change and innovation. Command-and-control or participative management, or even modern quality-improvement schemes (e.g., Six Sigma), are all relevant in some situations and for some purposes, but they are distinct from transformational leadership practices because they are biased toward a more efficient status quo rather than the creation of something new and better.

Efficiency and Effectiveness in a Socio-Technical System

Since at least the middle of last century, organizations have been aptly labeled socio-technical systems. It is a simple truth that organizations balance the technical and the social in the accomplishment of their core tasks, their reasons for existing in the first place. The two cannot be separated in human systems, whether political, social, artistic, religious, nonprofit, or economic, but they are most clearly exemplified in business organizations.

Generally speaking, all managers, from frontline to senior executives, tend to strike a balance in their daily work between the technical and the social, between metrics and meanings, between focusing on the key performance indicators (KPIs) and engaging in open dialogue with colleagues. The critical question is whether we have the balance right. Are we on the best trajectory when we distribute our workload between, on the one hand, technical efforts (such as crunching the numbers, mining big data for new insights, or creating measurable objectives and incentives) and, on the other hand, social and collaborative efforts, which aim to get the context right by fixing the processes in our workgroups regardless of the content of the task? The tendency to lean toward managing the numbers is completely understandable, as information is so readily available from both internal data sources and the vast information stores on the internet writ large. It is also very easy to be seduced by the content of our work and be drawn to the clean and unambiguous tasks that can be managed by metrics.

Human social interactions, by contrast, are more complicated and can seem messy compared to the job of fine-tuning a technical system for technical efficiency. One potential pitfall, however, is that too much time spent on fine-tuning for technical efficiency, even if it is fixing what is known to need fixing, may leave insufficient time for tapping into issues that may not be known to the person in charge but may well be known by others “in the room.” Leaders can miss vital process information by paying too much attention to technical fixes rather than looking and listening for social context signals that are outside of the scope of the technical fix.

The question is whether anything is missed by not investing in the collaborative process—a process that inevitably introduces new ideas, some of which may be inconsistent with certain tasks and may suggest improvements for how technical tasks could be handled in the future. Does a manager have time to think about what is next when the demands of current objectives are more than enough to fill the day or even the fiscal year? A more thorough exploration of this trade-off has been described as “the innovator’s dilemma” (Christensen, 1997). For our purposes, we generally need to consider what can be sacrificed in the long run when too much emphasis is placed on the known tasks and managing the technical “dials” needed to hit only near-term goals.

That said, Humble Leadership does not mean diminished emphasis on technical efficiency. It does, however, suggest a re-balancing of intentions—moving beyond singular concern for “hitting the numbers”—particularly when colleagues and stakeholders are aware that other driving factors are at play that may not be captured in the metrics. Such factors may include shifts in demand and supply that render certain metrics no longer as relevant; data from “rearview mirror” metrics; and divisiveness and deception between team members competing for scarce resources in day-to-day operations.

Humble Leadership’s emphasis on finding new and better solutions and processes opens the door to forward thinking, allowing for fast adaptations and innovations. Resetting norms around the benefits of sharing insights, speculations, other perspectives, even wild ideas, to stimulate new and better thinking will help small groups, large teams, and entire companies increase their growth. Humble Leadership can help teams see, feel, and conceptualize opportunities that are outside of the defined metrics, moving us beyond known knowns and toward unknown unknowns. One rule of thumb is to consider allocating 20 to 25 percent of work effort away from managing metrics and toward collaborative information sharing focused on co-creating “new and better” using information shared across levels in an organization. Humble Leadership is foundational to getting the most out of this 20 to 25 percent of innovation-oriented work effort.

Humble Leadership is also about “open systems” thinking. Suppose those shifts in demand and supply are triggered by a merger that alters the supply chain, or maybe a customer is forced to reduce operating expenses by 50 percent. Or suppose “quiet quitting” (a term for lowered productivity and/or attrition coined during the COVID-19 pandemic) completely changes the composition of teams that are critical to completing a business plan. These kinds of dramatic and chaotic shifts demand open systems thinking. If management of closed systems means adjusting the “dials” on the management dashboard, Humble Leadership based on open systems advocates looking for new dials, new workflows, new people, new tools and partners—whatever creative ideas may be needed to address both existing and unforeseen challenges.

Humility in Practice: Situational Humility

A very specific sense of the word humility is at the core of Humble Leadership.

Situational humility is a developed skill characterized by the openness to see and understand all the elements of a situation by:

1. accepting uncertainty, while remaining curious to find out what is really going on,

2. being open, intentionally and mindfully, to what others may know or observe, and

3. recognizing when unconscious biases can distort perceptions and trigger emotional responses.

Today’s leadership challenges require that we observe, absorb, and decipher a dramatically expanded amount of information, and that we accept that we cannot do this alone. Some of the information required to make the best decisions is in the minds of direct reports, colleagues, or other people in related departments, for whom there may be no endowed authority or responsibility. Humble leaders must be open to them and their ideas.

Any assumptions you make about what is new and better will be incomplete until you can assimilate, from as many sources as possible, as much as you can about the challenge or opportunity at hand. In hospital management, do you consult only with the most senior MD, or might you also consider asking techs and custodial staff? It goes without saying that these staff too have keen observational abilities. You may have already learned to embrace situational humility, recognizing from the outset how critical it is to have the most complete information with which to respond to challenges. If you have not yet learned the hard way what happens when you make decisions based on incomplete information, consider embracing situational humility to be a primary step toward becoming a humble leader.

This situational humility principle applies no matter where you are in a hierarchy or what your job description defines as your areas of responsibility. You may find yourself in the situation of seeing a problem with more clarity than those with more formal authority, if for no other reason than that accepting your situational humility opened your mind to information overlooked by others. Developing the skills to clarify and share your insight, and then assimilating what others know can help you influence change (toward something new and better), and this is the practice of Humble Leadership.

The Role of Culture in Leadership

Culture can mean many different things. One helpful definition is simply “accumulated shared learning.” The culture of any small team, organization, or even a whole society can be thought of as the sum of what that group has learned and that it then shares with newer or younger members of the organization.

When a visionary individual/entrepreneur/founder creates a team to produce something new and better, such as a product or service or a new set of processes or methods, the team learns together how to be productive, and that learning sediments and evolves as integral to their culture. A group builds on a founder’s original ideas and, becoming a team, they co-create new and better practices that become deep elements of their culture.

That said, sometimes the development of a group’s culture can evolve away from openness and innovation and toward restrictive ideas about how things should be done (conventions), including the idea of what a leader should be and do. Every society and every organization that has had a success in the past will have ideas and norms of what leadership should be.

With this is mind, Humble Leadership considers not only how the new and better may fit into the existing culture but how the Humble Leadership style might fit or conflict with existing conventions of what a leader should be and do. As leaders contemplate the new and better, they may find some people who regard the proposed changes positively, while others see the changes as threats that could challenge conventions they are used to and want to perpetuate. Seeing, hearing, and understanding culture—in terms of both structures (conventions) and practices—is an existential concern of Humble Leadership.

Different cultures necessarily create different forms of leadership because they face different opportunities and challenges. Still, it is the basic argument of this book that no leadership styles or personalities will be successful unless a leader, whether in a flat global organization or a deep hierarchical organization, and at whatever stage of corporate evolution, accepts that other team members must be involved in decision-making. A leader alone will not be able to sufficiently define what is new and what could be better in a challenging situation or uncertain cultural context.

Both situational humility and an openness to co-discovery of what will be new and better, and especially how it might be implemented, require the leader to understand not only the culture that exists now but also how that culture might aid or hinder implementing what is deemed new and better.

Any organization of two or more individuals is an amalgamation of cultures (shared accumulated learning), the substrate onto which a leader proposes something new and better. Two important dimensions of culture in practice that we refer to throughout this book are technical culture (strategy, mission, design) and social culture (relationships and communication patterns). To understand these technical and social layers, individuals must look to both the past and the future through the relationships that develop in their teams. A leader who understands these relationships and existing structures will have a better understanding of the impacts that the proposed new and better ideas may have on their work intentions and practices. Relationship building and information gathering (i.e., context and content) require leaders of all types and levels to embrace what they do not know and to find richer understanding through openness and trust of those around them.

Summary

We propose that Humble Leadership is a necessary foundational substrate to all variants or “brands” of leadership in today’s volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous world.

Effective leadership behavior requires situational humility because the information needed to make effective decisions is likely to be widely distributed among members of the team. Humble Leadership will therefore require the creation of personal relationships that will make others feel safe enough to be open and trusting with their leaders and with the other members of the team that is striving to create something new and better.

Discussion Questions

Either individually or in a small group, think about what the word leadership means to you. Identify several individuals whom you consider to be leaders, and think about what they have done that warrants that designation. How does what you have thought about fit with our definition?

Why do you think situational humility is such an important attribute of Humble Leadership?

Why is building relationships essential to effective Humble Leadership?