“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
–Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”(1818)
One of the best leaders I know is a college president with a remarkable talent: the ability to listen, without ego, to a problem or a proposal and weigh its causes or merits and logically arrive at a course of action that does the greatest good for the greatest number of people—and not care who gets the credit for it.
Another phenomenal leader in my life is the founder and CEO of an insurance company with a national reputation for quality, customer service, sales and business savvy who quietly, without fanfare, spends much of her time volunteering for non-profit organizations with educational missions while making every person she meets feel heard, seen, and valued.
While plenty of people may still believe in the “Great Man” theory of leadership, that some fortunate few among us were born with superior qualities that make them destined to lead, charismatically and loudly, and that world history is the result of their spectacular individual deeds, the reality is quite different.
The best leaders among us, the ones driving success in organizations and communities large and small, may come from modest beginnings and follow winding paths to their leadership roles, shaped by their environments and those who help them along the way. They are imperfect and self-aware, but striving, persistently, to do good, with a moral compass honed by experience and results that have lifted others up.
They are, in a word, humble, about themselves and their accomplishments.
And through their humility, they are powerfully effective.
Their approach to leadership is a model for us all at a time when some of our most visible leaders are more remarkable for their boastfulness and bombast than for their thoughtfulness and ability to improve the organizations they lead and the lives of others.
The Humble Leader
What does leadership shaped by humility look like?
In Good to Great, Jim Collins describes what he calls “Level 5 Leaders,” individuals who typically avoid the spotlight, are modest about their accomplishments, and deflect credit to others, all while relentlessly pursuing important, shared organizational goals, maintaining high standards, and making difficult but crucial decisions. The formula for success for Level 5 Leaders is: Humility + Willpower = Enduring Success.
Leadership shaped by humility:
Builds trust. Trust is the foundation for every relationship and relationships are how important work happens. Humble leaders build trust by actively listening, sharing credit, admitting mistakes, and growing other leaders.
Improves the quality of decisions. Humble leaders admit what they don’t know, seek input from experts with diverse experience and opinions, and change direction based on new evidence. Together, these behaviors reduce blind spots and groupthink and create organizations that are more resilient and able to adapt to change because it is safer to share dissenting ideas.
Creates resilient, enduring organizations. No leader leads forever. By focusing on organizational needs instead of personal needs, developing leaders and building strong teams, humble leaders ensure that the organizations—the communities of people with purpose—that they lead will outlast them and continue fulfilling their purpose.
Leaders with humility say things like, “What am I missing?” “What do you think?” “Who will be affected by this?” and “How can I help?”
Asking questions like these is not a form of self-doubt. Quite the opposite.
As Jacob Brown and his colleagues at the National Center for Principled Leadership & Research Ethics urge, “Let’s be clear: Humility is not incompatible with a healthy self-confidence and a good understanding of one’s strengths as well as shortcomings. Indeed, it is often the confident, accomplished person who finds it easiest to be humble, because they do not see it as a threat to their authority and respect in the eyes of others. Conversely, someone who has to keep reminding people how important they are may actually be signaling insecurity.”
Which brings us to…
The Egotistical Leader
What does ego-driven leadership look like?
Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Ideal Team Player warns that, “Ego is the ultimate killer on a team.” An outsized ego precludes vulnerability. Without vulnerability, teams can’t develop trust; and without trust there is no shared commitment and accountability for results. The best team players, Lencioni suggests, have three essential qualities that egotistical leaders lack: They are humble, hungry and smart.
Instead, ego-driven leadership:
Erodes trust. Ego-driven leaders participate in unethical behaviors, take all the credit for successes and shift the blame for failures quickly losing their team’s respect and trust.
Creates bad decisions. Ego-driven leaders are often poor listeners who monopolize conversations. They believe they have all the right answers and dismiss others’ contributions, creating environments of fear, confusion and inefficiency where people don’t share new ideas, leading to stagnant growth, missed opportunities, and poor choices.
Creates siloed, dependent organizations. Sometimes, through force-of-personality, ego-driven leaders can accomplish what appear to be impressive short-term “wins” for the organizations they lead. However, when they fail to learn from mistakes, ignore feedback, demoralize their teams, and don’t build up other leaders around them, overall organizational effectiveness and reputation suffers, and when the leader is eventually gone, the organization is not prepared to continue fulfilling its purpose.
Egotistical leaders do not ask many questions, but instead make statements like, “I alone can fix this.” “If you disagree, you’re wrong.” “We don’t need more input.” and “I deserve more respect.”
Because they can appear quickly decisive and in command, some people may defer to ego-driven leaders, but as Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking reminds, “There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”
Instead, Cain suggests, “The most effective leaders are not motivated by a desire to control events or to be in the spotlight. They are motivated by the desire to advance ideas and new ways of looking at the world, or to improve the situation of a group of people.”
Pride Before a Fall
In ancient Greek myths and tragedies, the hero’s downfall was often caused by his “hubris,” an excess of pride that blinded him to his faults and led to his destruction.
Icarus, exhilarated by youthful ambition, ignored his father’s warnings, flew too close to the sun with his waxed wings, and fell to his death in the Aegean Sea. Oedipus believed he could outwit the gods and their prophecies but instead walked directly toward his fate and ended up killing his father and wedding his own mother.
Similarly, the leader today who lacks humility and feels that only they know what is best and can accomplish the most important tasks without support from others may earn short-term victories, but in the long run is actually failing themself and the organization, community, or people they seek to lead.
They are not growing the abilities of other leaders and building the resiliency, capacity, and innovative capability of the organization for the future.
Contrary to what they may believe, they are also not creating a legacy that will outlast their leadership.
Two centuries ago, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about such a leader and his fate in the short poem, “Ozymandias”:
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
History will not reflect kindly on the leader who was more focused on building monuments to their glory than to doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people and earning their monumental place in the hearts and minds of the generations that follow.
