Humility’s Role in Organizational Transformation

When we can pair humility with confidence, regardless of our level of positional authority in any given situation, we have the opportunity to create authentic, impactful relationships. Those relationships are the ones where we can expect to see a measurable return on investment through the increased discretionary effort I’ve been referring to here and so much of What’s KILLING Your Profitability?...

Cindy and I are frequently asked for guidance on empowering team members so they take more initiative in their roles and achieve measurable outcomes. As we worked through the role developing others plays as a path to leadership, I shared how the mentorship culture I was privy to in manufacturing for so many years resulted in an entire team of volunteers from various roles throughout the facility having a hand in our location being recognized as one of less than fifty worksites in Virginia worthy of an OSHA Voluntary Protection Program Star flag. That didn’t happen because we demanded that those team members take on extra work in their respective departments, and it wasn’t solely based on me and Kevin working our butts off (although we did work our butts off in the process). Each of them pitched in because they saw what we were willing to do, they knew how much we valued their support, and they understood that we trusted them to make a tremendous impact in the tasks they volunteered to help with.

Following Kevin’s example, that was yet another situation where I worked to display confidence in all that I did while being humble enough to ask for and to allow those team members to carry some of the load. Like I mentioned in quoting Harry Truman earlier, “It is amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit.” The support Kevin and I were blessed with was a direct result of empowering a team of amazing people, people we had earned discretionary effort from by balancing a high level of confidence in the work we were doing with the humility necessary to ask each of them to chip in - then trusting them to follow through. The humility to trust them when the stakes were high was key to each of them taking initiative to get the necessary results. Had we nitpicked and scrutinized their efforts every step of the way, they wouldn’t have felt very empowered and they likely wouldn’t have taken so much initiative!

On a much wider scale, I’ve seen John Maxwell and Mark Cole take a similar approach in leading organizational transformation, both within Maxwell Leadership as well as with large organizations and even entire countries around the world. When that model is followed consistently over time, we’ve got a shot at creating a legacy of humble leadership through everyone we touch so we’ll tie this all together by looking at that next.