Dogged Humility

As the old saying goes, “Little dogs bark all the time. Big dogs don’t have to.”

Any leader who spends significant time and energy “barking” their superiority, doesn’t truly believe it. And neither does anyone else around them.

A key to being a highly effective, higher net impact leader is to think and act with humility and avoid thinking you are superior to anyone, especially anyone you lead. Feeling superior limits curiosity and openness to others’ ideas and interpretations, leading to unwarranted assumptions, complacency, myopia, and mistakes. It also creates an ultimately self-limiting sense of separateness and “othering,” among other challenges.

Humility, on the other hand, strengthens connection, curiosity, active listening, and discernment. It is a natural extension of true inner confidence. Neither a false modesty nor a feeling of inferiority, but an honest recognition and appreciation of your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of the people around you, coupled with an eagerness to enable the best insights and decisions to emerge, regardless of their sources.

Humble confidence, confident humility. If you find yourself struggling to lead with humility, work on your confidence. Like all other inner leadership skills, humility is both an orientation and an active daily practice.

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The Messy Paradoxes of Leadership

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Where does all the time go? Some surprising math.