Humility

What Humility means in leadership

You have arranged the workshop’s delivery route. Before asking the team to follow it, you invite the people who carry the parcels to check it with you. One points to the narrow hatch: your largest package will not fit. You acknowledge the missed constraint and revise the route before assigning the work. The carrier has contributed one measurement. It changes the afternoon for everyone.

The colleague’s knowledge changes the proposal. Humility lets that happen without requiring a ceremony in which you become either the genius or the fool. You still owe the team a direction; recognizing a limit helps you choose one they can actually follow.

Humility gives…

An invitation to correct can reveal information that polite agreement leaves hidden. Its value depends on what happens after the answer: a leader who punishes a correction teaches people to save their observations for later, when repair may be harder.

Finding the balance

A useful invitation makes the plan correctable while leaving responsibility for the decision with you.

In ordinary life

Before a decision

Ask someone who will carry out the work what assumption deserves a check.

After a correction

Name the detail that changed your mind, so the contributor can see that you heard it.

Nearby virtues, different work

Open-Mindedness

Open-Mindedness hears the unfamiliar proposal; Humility recognizes that your own understanding has limits.

Contrition

Contrition acknowledges a wrong you committed; Humility can invite correction before a wrong occurs.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Self-deprecation is a counterfeit of Humility when repeated claims of incompetence require the team to restore your confidence. Humility lets you accept a specific correction and continue contributing.

How to cultivate Humility

• Ask about a particular uncertainty while the decision is still open.
• Thank the person for the information and explain what it changes.
• Keep responsibility for the decision after accepting help.

Try it today

Choose a small plan that is yours to revise. Ask a trusted person who knows the task which assumption you should check. Consider their answer before making the choice.

Questions worth returning to

• What does the person doing the task know that my plan cannot show?
• Have I made correction welcome in practice?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. So, as there is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer; for there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self, and there is no such remedy against flattery of a man’s self, as the liberty of a friend.

   Francis Bacon, Essays
   ESSAYS.; XXVII.—OF FRIENDSHIP.

   Bacon identifies self-flattery as a reason to keep a friend free to speak. Inviting correction makes that freedom practical.

2. And so we advised at the beginning of this discourse, and now advise again, to cut off self-love and too high an opinion of ourselves; for that flatters us first, and makes us more impressionable and prepared for external flatterers.

   Plutarch, Morals: Ethical Essays
   HOW ONE MAY DISCERN A FLATTERER FROM A FRIEND.; section XXV

   Plutarch traces susceptibility to flattery to the favorable story we already tell about ourselves. Inviting a carrier to test the route interrupts that story before other people must live with its error.

3. Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error,—a greater foe to learning than ignorance itself.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter

   Dewey distinguishes not knowing from being settled in a mistaken answer. A check of the plan needs room for the answer to change.

4. But flattery, if its operation be nearly examined, will be found to owe its acceptance, not to our ignorance, but knowledge of our failures, and to delight us rather as it consoles our wants than displays our possessions.

   Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
   The Rambler, No. 155

   Johnson argues that flattery can soothe a failure we already suspect. Asking a colleague to check the plan means making room for correction precisely where reassurance would be welcome.

5. None the less, the advice to discriminate what is observed from what is inferred is sound practical advice.

   John Dewey, How We Think
   CHAPTER SEVEN; SYSTEMATIC INFERENCE: INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION

   An observed obstruction and an inference about a workable route are different kinds of information. Naming that difference helps a plan become correctable.

6. Moreover, there is the ignorance of the ignorant and the ignorance of the wise; there is the wisdom of the wise and the wisdom of the ignorant.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   Part II THE TRADITIONAL DEMOCRACY; XIX THE TRUE DEMOCRACY

   Follett challenges the assumption that recognized experts contain all the knowledge a group needs. The implementer may see the detail the planner missed.

7. Do not lean a hair's breadth against your own feelings, or your judgment of the public service, on the idea of gratifying me.

   Abraham Lincoln, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Volume Six
   To GENERAL G. G. MEADE. (Private.); EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, July 27, 1863.; section I

   Lincoln invites an assessment that does not bend to pleasing him. The letter concerns a military appointment; the retained insight is the freedom needed for honest advice.

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