Humility as a Counter to Positional Authority

In detailing the role mentors play in helping bridge our leadership gaps, I shared an example Terry provided in dozens of behavior-based safety training sessions explaining that influence, not authority defines leadership. The humility we’ve been looking at here not only has the power to overcome ego, it can counter issues related to traditional chain-of-command in positional authority and help earn authentic influence. That scenario I heard Terry talk about so many times provided me with a clear understanding of the difference between getting results through the force of positional authority and what can be accomplished when a humble leader paints a picture showing why taking a specific approach matters in the big picture.

I first heard Terry tell that story when my son was around six years old. Had I understood his extremely Driven behavioral style then, the decade or so that followed would have been a bit smoother. Even without all I know today about the DISC Model of Human Behavior, I did all I could to apply my own version of Terry’s approach. Rather than constantly shouting about threats of what Matt could expect for not complying with what Cindy and I expected from him, I occasionally found opportunities to weave in examples of the positive outcomes he could earn when he was willing to keep his nose clean. Make no mistake, he still needed plenty of, let’s call it, firm guidance. The biggest difference, though, was that when we were able to connect with him on why doing as we asked yielded a more desirable outcome, there were actually a few times where he stayed in line whether we were watching over his shoulder or not. While those weren’t as frequent as we would have liked, every single one helped - especially as business travel required me to be away from home more.

Around the same time that I was doing everything I could think of to keep Matt from terrorizing every teacher he had or tearing our house down, I was learning the ropes in my first role where I’d need support from the folks around me to achieve the results necessary to keep my job. In that role, and in every role I held in the decade that followed, any success I hoped to achieve depended on getting dozens of other team members involved. In many cases, that involvement conflicted with what their immediate supervisors wanted them to do. I was able to build reasonable working relationships with most of those supervisors by showing that I was as interested in their goals as I was in achieving the tasks assigned to me. Approaching them with humility served as a counter to positional authority, and it’s a good thing because I had none with them. In the cases where I couldn’t reach terms with a supervisor, I did what I could to engage with their team members directly while minimizing any potential disruption in productivity - but that also usually required getting at least some support from that supervisor’s manager. Although that still wasn’t me flexing any positional authority, it never yielded the kind of results we saw from genuine collaboration.

As I moved from implementing a Lean Manufacturing initiative to overseeing our site’s behavior-based safety process and supporting other facilities across North America, exemplifying humility helped me build influence with the team members I interacted with and depended on for support, outshining the fleeting power even perceived positional authority would have offered. Just like I couldn’t enforce rules with Matt while I was in another state, there was no way I could stand over everyone I worked with through that behavior-based safety process, locally or at a distance, to make sure they followed through on the training I provided. And any support I needed from a location’s management team, be that in my home facility or any that I traveled to, was solely based on me being humble enough to ask for it and to have enough confidence in the impact I believed our work could make for them to commit. The confidence-humility balance is tricky so we’ll pick up there next.