Humility can put you into the top 1/3 of leaders

Ahoy,

Last week I ran a bit of an experiment.

I wanted to see how you would respond to a newsletter targeted more at beginner leaders as opposed to the more experienced leaders among you. And firstly, thank you to everyone that did get involved!

And for the sake of full transparency I want to start today by sharing the results of that with you.

So there were two polls:

1. Do you want more beginner leadership content?

2. How did you like today’s content?

The results of the first poll can be seen below.

A perfect split between “can you keep it mixed…” and “Yes please that’s exactly what I need!”. With a slightly lower response for “No. Focus on more experienced leadership advise”.

From this it looks like we are leaning slightly to the side of more beginner leadership content, however, we can’t ignore the matching majority wanting it kept mixed.

This is supported further by the second poll:

Here we can see a completely even split between people that enjoyed the beginner aimed content and those that didn’t!

So here’s what we’re going to do:

I’m going to keep it mixed. I’m going to start injecting some content specifically for beginners, some content specifically for the more senior leaders and some content that will be suitable for both.

A lot of leadership advice is actually going to be suitable for both audiences.

If you’re an experienced leader, you still can’t disregard the basics.

For example, last week we looked at getting your first leadership role. While that may not be directly aimed at you, there’s certainly benefit for you in there.

Can you use that information to support your team? Absolutely.

I’m sure some members of your team will want to be leaders one day. You can use that information to support them.

And those of you that aren’t yet leaders, you can do the same.

Another newsletter on culture? You might not be the leader, but you can still impact the culture.

So don’t disregard the information as irrelevant when there is always something you can take away.

So thank you again for everyone that engaged in the polls last week. I really appreciate the feedback. It helps me ensure that I’m delivering the content you want to see!

Now I’m going to touch on a topic that continues on from what I was just talking about.

I’ll keep it short this week, I know you’ve been here a while already!

But I just want to introduce the idea of humility.

A topic vital for new leaders and equally as important for the experienced leader.

An interesting note; one study reports that “humble” leaders operated within the top third of effective leaders (source).

But what is humility really?

For me, in the context of leadership it’s: The understanding that you are not “better” than other people because of you position or standing.

Essentially, it’s taking a step back from your own ego.

As a new leader, it can be really tempting to start throwing your weight around and testing your new authority.

Don’t.

This is a really effective way to be labelled as a bad leader, really fast!

That is going to eat away at your leadership capital immediately. And your life as a leader will be significantly harder!

The higher up the food chain you go, the easier it can become to create the “us” and “them” divide between the work floor and management.

This divide can become very toxic and is often build on a foundation of a lack of humility.

Remember, people are where they are because they made “different” decisions, or have “different” backgrounds.

Not because they made the “wrong” decision or come from the “wrong” background.

Their “different” isn’t bad. Therefore, your “different” isn’t better.

Have respect for your team at any level of leadership and I promise you, you will have an easier time as a leader and more likely than not, you’ll enjoy the process more as well.

So that’s all for today. I’m going to explore this topic in a bit more detail soon.

I’ve got some great stories around humility (some of which are not so appropriate for this newsletter)!

As always, have a great day.

Reece