Humility Is The Secret Sauce Of Great Leadership

The Problem Of Pride

Pride is a big problem in leadership.

It can be disheartening when capable and accomplished leaders focus more on their abilities and achievements than their team’s needs.

Even with their qualifications and intelligence, they may not fully realise that authentic leadership goes beyond personal accomplishments—it lies in understanding and supporting the people they lead.

There are many leaders worldwide who are overqualified, smart, intelligent but have not been able to rise above a certain level in their leadership journeys because of the weight of pride.

Meanwhile, some leaders may not be very smart or qualified, but because they have been able to put the weight of pride behind them to pick the wings of humility, they fly higher than leaders who are more intelligent and smart but are weighed down by pride.

Pride is an isolator.

It separates you as a person, not to mention a leader.

People who have pride are sadly helpless because their pride will not allow them to seek help or come down to ask someone smaller than them for assistance or help.

Leaders soaked with pride will fail and fall alone.

Pride is like a neck or ankle chain bell. It announces you everywhere you go.

You can’t hide a spirit full of pride.

People see it in you within seconds, and instead of attracting, it repels people from you.

No great leader became powerful wearing the coat of pride—none!

Pride is the hidden disease of most leaders.

They can’t bend.

They are stiffened by pride.

They think they know it all, have it all and don’t need the input of others.

Followers see this attitude, and it smells like a putrifying odour that chases them away.

If they had the power to get rid of you, they would gladly do it, like throwing away old garbage in the kitchen that has spoiled the air for days.

Pride is awful—disgusting and annoying.

Even the one who exudes pride, if he sees another like him, would be disgusted by their outshow of pride.

There’s nothing attractive about pride—nothing at all.

So, if you’re a leader who has gained wisdom and managed to drop the spirit of pride and wear humility, you’ve won a very big battle because success in leadership is anchored to how humble you are to learn.

Learning means bending down, looking up, side, left, and right where the wisdom you need is domiciled, and going hungrily after it! You don’t mind who is the custodian, provided it’s moral to do so.

Humble Leadership Is Servant Leadership

There’s a kind of power humility bestows upon a leader who understands that despite their intelligence, experience, expertise, and qualifications, they are still very open to learning, interacting, listening to others, making corrections, changing, accepting their mistakes and shortcomings, and improving.

The humble leader packs more power than a proud one.

The proud leader thinks he has it all, so his pride shuts the door to learning and growth.

As a leader, you can’t have it all.

Last week, we discussed servant leadership and why it separates great leaders from the rest.

Servant leadership is a style in which the leader’s primary goal is to serve their team rather than the other way around.

Humility defines a servant leader, as it takes humility for a leader who knows his strength and position to still bend to listen, serve, and sacrifice.

Humility is the essence of servant leadership.

You can’t bend down to serve those you’re following if you’re not humble.

It takes humility for a leader who knows his strength and position to bend to listen, serve and sacrifice.

To be a great leader, you must lead from the heart, and humility is the only way to lead from the heart.

There’s no other principle.

Learn Always To Look Inward

The leaders’ journey should be one of improvement and getting better, wiser, and stronger.

Serious leaders who want to keep growing know that they need to regularly do retrospective studies on their lives because we can get caught up in life.

As we journey through, we unintentionally and unconsciously pick weights along the way that we are not even aware of.

These weights can reveal themselves subtly when we live and as leaders when we lead.

So, leaders must pause, retreat, and study themselves to see if they have picked any bad or ugly qualities.

They can take more thorough steps by asking for feedback from loved ones, those around them, those they lead, their subordinates, and their superiors or mentors.

It’s a deliberate and conscious effort of growth because sometimes pride can creep in unaware, especially when we begin to climb higher and higher, become more important, and have more money, influence, and connections.

Pride just starts to grow like small weeds, and if you don’t deal with it, that’s when it becomes a problem.

Leaders who have been overcome and unfortunately destroyed by pride didn’t take the time to do profound, thorough, sometimes painful retrospective studies on themselves to discover pride in its early stages and immediately eliminate it!

Sometimes, You Need To Be Rejected And Isolated To Learn Humility

There are great leaders who became great because they were isolated or even rejected by their teams.

It can take a big bang to the skull for some of us to come to our senses, especially if pride has eaten too deep and has become second nature, so we don’t even know it’s there.

Some leaders don’t even know they are proud. They don’t. This makes it more difficult because how can you deal with a problem you don’t even know exists?

So, grace seems to single some leaders out and cause them to hit rocks of disappointment, isolation, and rejection so they can come to their senses and realise how deep they have gone in the quicksand of pride.

Most will realise their sorry state, learn from it, and return better. In contrast, some very stubborn ones may refuse to change and, unfortunately, get destroyed or become obsolete or never be able to break through a certain ceiling or limitation caused by their inability to be humble and learn.

Know Your Limitations

You are not omniscient.

You don’t know it all.

If you were omniscient, maybe you wouldn’t need a team of people.

Just go do everything yourself.

Everything!

Understanding your limitations is not a sign of weakness but a mark of self-awareness.

It’s a reminder that we all have room to grow and learn from others.

Human beings were created to grow and breathe like organisms—together.

That’s why any system that isolates human beings ends up destroying them.

Great leaders understand this natural, biological truth, and so they are very open to the ideas and contributions of others when they operate.

The answers to some of your organisation’s biggest problems might just be lurking somewhere in the mind of a team member who feels locked away and unimportant because of the way you’re treating them.

Humility is the ultimate key to the treasures buried in the hearts of those you lead because when your followers see your level of humility, they will be inspired to open up and share what they have.

But if you sit on the throne of pride and think you know it all, everybody will leave you alone to yourself since you know it all.

Be The Leader That Inspires

In any leadership position you find yourself in, whether you’re leading one person, ten people, a hundred, a thousand, or more, always have it in your heart to inspire those you lead to become leaders.

Herein lies the goal of authentic leadership: to make great leaders.

Let it be that your followers watch you closely, and they themselves go to their various units in life and copy your leadership style.

The reason why the world is the way it is is because of bad leadership. People are watching bad leadership and doing what the leaders do.

Corruption.

Racism.

Lies.

You name it. We are learning these bad and ugly stuff from the people around and up there.

But you can be different.

You don’t have to conform to the abnormality you see around you. The moment you become conscious enough to want to break out from the illness around you, your journey to greatness begins.

Leaving A Legacy Behind

Finally, we all want to leave a legacy behind. It doesn’t matter whether you leave a legacy physically big like Nelson Mandela or Abraham Lincoln; what matters is that you are able to inspire people to greatness, one person or a million—and one person is a million people.

What do you want people to remember you for?

From where you are, you can be the legacy-leaving leader.

Your career as a healthcare professional, lawyer, engineer, dad, mum, or sportsperson doesn’t matter; what matters is who you are inside and what you desire to leave behind.

I have enjoyed writing about humility in leadership. I love this topic because it teaches us to be servants willing to learn from the people around us.

If you’ve been following our leadership series, you can do more by sharing these articles with your close friends, colleagues, and network. This helps spread the pure message of leadership to many more people.

We will finish this series in April and make it into a small book (alongside our articles on emotional intelligence). The mini-book versions will be expanded to include resources and more leadership thoughts.  

We will send it exclusively to our community.

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Catch you next week, and have a wonderful, beautiful, productive week ahead.

Your friend in the school of leadership, innovation and learning.