What it means to be humble
I met a couple of friends for drinks recently and we got talking about the human skills and behaviours required of leaders in 2025 and beyond (I know, it sounds like a riot, I bet you wish you could have been there!)
Once we’d come up with a list, we talked about how hard it is for people to truly understand what the behaviours mean in practice. Take the behaviour of being humble whose literal definition is having or showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance.
No member of staff wants a leader in a senior position to boast, go missing for long periods of time or take credit for the work of others; but what else does it mean in practice?
We generated a list and then went around the table and each answered the question ‘What’s the least humble you’ve ever been?’ Mine happened about 8 years ago, not long after I started working for myself.
I spoke at an event and received an award for my speaking. Within 10 minutes of that happening I took a photo of myself with the award and then posted it on LinkedIn - now long deleted! - of how humble I’d been to receive the award.
Nothing screams ‘NOT HUMBLE’ like posting about how humble you are to be promoting yourself! (Or even to be writing and posting about it again 8 years later as a demonstration of how humble you weren’t 😂)
That wasn’t the worst one. My friend took credit for managing a £50m project in a job interview, when he was only the lead Business Analyst. Which then led to an argument about the difference between a lack of humility and outright lying!
Yet - as you can see - it can be hard to understand what behaviours such as humility actually mean in practice, especially when according to research we’re not that self-aware. According to research in the Harvard Business Review, even though most people interviewed believed they were self-aware, only about 10-15% actually were!
In today’s working world we expect our senior leaders to be highly emotionally intelligent. This requires self-awareness and true leadership is then achieved when the behaviours are understood and practiced and are not just lists of traits on a job description or Powerpoint presentation.
Being a leader 24x7 is extremely difficult to do, yet the behaviour change required can be achieved in five steps. It not only requires a willingness to work hard, but also a full understanding of how to be the behaviour you’d like others to see in you.
For the record - and your information - here is the list that we came up with for humility. What is your understanding of what it means to be humble? What would you add? And what’s your humility faux pas?!
* And no, my friends didn’t want any credit for this post for fear that there’d be a backlash if people disagreed with their ideas!
