Leadership within Humility – One Key to Highly Effective Employee Performance

April 20, 2021
Jenny Rawlings

While developing humility personally can be quite rewarding, it can be even more rewarding to make humility a value that everyone in your company strives to meet. In fact, humility is something that can unite your employees towards a unified goal of personal growth.

Why would it be desirable for everyone in your company to be humble and want to grow personally? The results can be absolutely profound. Everyone in your company will step up, take ownership of their actions, and take responsibility for their intentions, actions and beliefs. They will take responsibility for how they show up in your business, with your customers, and with their families and the community at large.

According to a study from the University of Washington Foster School of Business, humble people tend to make the most effective leaders.[1] Since it can be argued that every human can be a leader, everyone in your company should work on developing their humility! People with humility are naturally perceived as more honest, trustworthy and capable. If all of your customers got the impression that every person they interacted with at your company were honest, trustworthy and capable, how would that benefit your business?

The best way to implement this is to first teach the other leaders in your company about humility.  Your goal is to help the other leaders in your business as well as all of your employees to look reflectively at themselves so they can possess an accurate view of themselves. Teach them the techniques and ideas you have learned in the past six weeks as you have gone through the material in this book about humility. As they learn to implement humility throughout the course of the business day with their employees and customers, their behavior will change for the better, and everyone in the company will already be happier at work.

After your leaders have learned and internalized an ability to see themselves and the world around them with a much deeper level of clarity, your company is now ready for the next step: helping all of your employees to develop humility, which you can kick off by having everyone in the company do a workshop on how to be more humble with customers and with each other.

As you work towards humility as a company, it changes the culture of your company to be more transformational so that everyone is seeking to improve themselves and their character. Not everyone in the company will fit into the new culture, but those that do will become a tighter team. Everyone will be more respectful, kind, loving and sharing with each other and you’re your customers. There will also be a ripple effect to their families and communities. Your company will be more successful as well!

[1] Owens, B.P., Johnson, M.D. and Mitchell, T.R. (2013) Expressed Humility in Organizations: Implications for Performance, Teams, and Leadership. Organization Science, 24, 1517-1538. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0795


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