From the University of Buffalo NewsCenter comes a story about humility in leadership. According to a recent study by Bradley Owens of the University of Buffalo School of Management, “humble leaders are more effective and better liked.”
“Leaders of all ranks view admitting mistakes, spotlighting follower strengths and modeling teachability as being at the core of humble leadership,” says Owens, adding that “these three behaviors as being powerful predictors of their own as well as the organization’s growth.” It’s a theme that is probably particularly true of renewable energy and cleantech, where the exact path forward isn’t obvious.
The study sounds straightforward: “Owens and co-author David Hekman, assistant professor of management at the Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, asked 16 CEOs, 20 mid-level leaders and 19 front-line leaders to describe in detail how humble leaders operate in the workplace and how a humble leader behaves differently than a non-humble leader.”
The leaders were from various sectors, including manufacturing, health care, financial services, retailing and religious, and yet they had a common ground: “[T]hey all agreed that the essence of leader humility involves modeling to followers how to grow.”
“Growing and learning often involves failure and can be embarrassing,” says Owens. “But leaders who can overcome their fears and broadcast their feelings as they work through the messy internal growth process will be viewed more favorably by their followers. They also will legitimize their followers’ own growth journeys and will have higher-performing organizations.”
The researchers found that such leaders model how to be effectively human rather than superhuman and legitimize “becoming” rather than “pretending.”
…Owens and Hekman offer straightforward advice to leaders. You can’t fake humility. You either genuinely want to grow and develop, or you don’t, and followers pick up on this. Leaders who want to grow signal to followers that learning, growth, mistakes, uncertainty and false starts are normal and expected in the workplace, and this produces followers and entire organizations that constantly keep growing and improving…
These findings may seem counterintuitive, if you believe in the heroic, larger-than-life view of leaders. But in cleantech as in other industries, leaders are humans, too.
A 2002 photo of a woman rapelling down the side of a bridge in Veracruz, Mexico, shot by Gengiskanhg, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
