Common Sense Leadership: Humility

In response to several requests from clients and other readers, I am beginning a series about Common Sense Leadership: what are the qualities and behaviors that characterize highly effective leaders?

Please, I welcome your feedback. Just email me at john@johnkeysercoach.com.

The theme of Common Sense Leadership is of keen interest to me for two very important reasons:

• To maximize productivity, our organization's and our own, we must bring out the best in our people. As bosses, this is our responsibility—our obligation! People want to do well and we must help them with our encouragement, teaching and coaching. We must treat them as teammates and be sure that they know we care and that we want them to grow and succeed.

• According to surveys, and certainly validated in my conversations, at least half of us who work in business in the U.S. do not feel we have a productive working relationship with our boss. We need to try to fix that. If we are going to advance in our organization, it is highly likely that our boss needs to be our enthusiastic advocate. We're on the same team. Sit down and discuss with our boss what she or he expects, needs and wants from us, and also what good communication between us looks like. We must also be receptive.

I have given a lot of thought as to which particular quality of Common Sense Leadership I will use to begin my series. Certainly there are numerous important qualities and behaviors. One could make a case for “caring about others”, “being about the team”, and surely a compelling case could be made for “being an intentional listener”, or “listening to learn”.

While it may be no more important, as these qualities are all essential, I have decided to begin with humility. To set a foundation of highly effective leadership, we need a solid sense of humility!

Humility affords us the attitude, "I may be good at what I do, and I may be good as a leader, but I know can be even better. I will try to become better every day." Humility allows acceptance of the importance of striving for the continuous improvement of our team members, our organization,and ourselves. We must allow ourselves to be vulnerable to 1) sharing with others that we want to improve and 2) asking for feedback.

My invitation: Let's all start each day this week with the quiet confidence to accept the humility that we can and must strive to become better each day, to allow ourselves to be vulnerable with others, to ask for their help and, as leaders, to help our team members do their best work and succeed.