A Range of Humble Leadership Examples

These examples are actual cases touching on different levels of organizational life. Some are disguised because the organization or the persons did not want to be identified. The common element in the examples is that a humble leader set out to create what we call Level 2 relationships and used implicit knowledge of group dynamics to deal with hierarchy and/or limit the damage of undesirable competitive individualism.

EXAMPLE 1.1. Creating Group Accountability at the Top

A CEO of a large multinational chemical conglomerate works with an internal board of 11 direct reports and has made them accountable as a group for the performance of the organization. They have gotten to know each other at a personal level through frequent regular meetings in which basic strategy is discussed and decided.

To enable this joint decision making, they have arranged to rotate responsibilities for the different product divisions, international divisions, and functional divisions every 3 years so that each of them will become totally familiar with all aspects of the business and will never seek to be an individual champion for any given product, country, or function.

Their joint accountability creates open dialogues on difficult strategic and operational decisions. They have created a climate in which no one is afraid to speak up, and they have conveyed these values to others, especially their direct reports. Perhaps most important, they have accepted that learning to function as a group is an especially difficult task and have used group-oriented process consultants to learn how to be an effective group. They take time out to review their group process frequently and discover during those review periods how leadership has actually been widely distributed among them. By having each senior executive be familiar with each division, geographical unit, and function, they avoid destructive self-serving arguments by representatives.

The example shows that even a highly divisionalized, multinational organization can create a governance process in which the “silos” cooperate and are jointly accountable, by building open and trusting relationships between the silos.

EXAMPLE 1.2. Personalizing Hierarchical Relationships

Jerry, a recently retired CEO of a major worldwide manufacturing and services conglomerate, described his managerial and leadership behavior as follows (Seelig, 2017):

Early in my career I concluded that the success of an organization was critically dependent on the technical competence and leadership skills of those in charge, whatever their title or responsibility within the organization. During my first few months in a new management job, I spent many hours with each and every manager and supervisor discussing their specific operation, asking many questions both about their past performance as well as what each felt were the future opportunities and challenges of the business or activity for which they were responsible. I asked each manager what he or she would do if they had my job and what recommendations they had for me as the new general manager.

I wanted each supervisor and manager to fully understand, and feel comfortable with, my management style. First, I wanted to be told about any significant problems they encountered, but I also expected them to give me their suggestions for solving the problem. Second, I absolutely wanted to listen to their opinion on any issue we discussed. I not only wanted their opinion, I wanted them to argue with me if we disagreed. Only after fully discussing the alternatives and considering the risks and benefits could we arrive at the most appropriate solution.

What Jerry described was Humble Leadership in that he was building personal “helping relationships” (Schein, 2009) throughout the organization, but especially with direct and indirect reports. He was openly acknowledging that he would need the help of his colleagues and reports in making decisions. He could not understand all the technical work in the different subsidiaries and realized he would have to work in countries with different cultures. He was an executive vice president with absolute formal authority to “run” these units, but how he organized the people below him reflected his recognition that his job was basically to build mutual trust and open communication with managers below him. He illustrated through his own behavior that relationships in a hierarchy did not have to be arbitrary top-down command and control.

EXAMPLE 1.3. Empowering Managers in a Start-Up

The 1950s start-up of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) showed how its founder, as a humble leader, built over 25 years an enormously successful company that was, in size, second only to IBM. This story also illustrates how Level 2 can be lost and how the “organization as a machine” can resurface quickly when size and success create internal conflicts and communication pathologies (Schein, 2003, 2016; Schein & Schein, 2017).

In his role as the cofounder, Ken Olsen hired the best and brightest young computer engineers he could find, built personal Level 2 relationships with them, then drafted them periodically into what he called an “operations committee,” took them to 2-day off-sites, posed the key questions about what kinds of products they should develop, encouraged the unruly debate that invariably resulted, and more or less withdrew to listen rather than compete in the debate. He would often physically withdraw, go sit in the corner of the room, and seem to get lost in his own thoughts. During the many hours of debate, he would only come in sporadically with sharp questions, never a suggestion. Only when the group began to achieve some consensus, favoring one proposal that stood up to the criticisms directed at it, would Ken come back to the table and ask for a collective decision.

Once when Ken was asked why he did not make autocratic decisions, why he let the debate run on and on sometimes, he quickly countered with, “First of all I am not that smart. I also learned once, when I made a decision, and started to walk down the road, I discovered that there was no one behind me.” He realized that making a decision and getting it implemented required the building of mutual helping relationships that depended on complete openness and mutual trust. He made it clear that concealing information from or lying to each other, to him, or even to customers was absolutely unacceptable and would cause instant dismissal.

Having hired the best technical talent, he accepted his vulnerability (of not having all the answers as the founder) but trusted his experts to make the best technical decisions while he created a personal environment of openness and trust. He empowered his key employees and made himself reliant on them. He wanted the market to decide whether the decisions were good ones or not. He humbled himself both to his employees and to the realities of the market.

Generally speaking, in a new organization it is possible to empower lower levels to make strategic and tactical decisions. However, if that organization is successful, grows, and ages, it also begins to experience strong tribalism because the young engineers who are empowered become, with age and success, very powerful, build their own empires, and begin to fight with each other. At DEC, trust eroded very quickly, leading to many of the pathologies mentioned above. In the end Ken was increasingly sidelined by the very people he had empowered.

The DEC board did not have Level 2 relationships with each other or with Ken, which led to a sad but predictable outcome. As the tribes fought, they used up limited resources, leading to three major product releases arriving late to market. The market had also shifted, and when DEC could not pivot, Ken was fired and DEC was sold to Compaq, which eventually was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. DEC had, however, demonstrated in its first 25 years how a founder could build an organization with Humble Leadership.

EXAMPLE 1.4. Honoring Safety Over Productivity

Sarah Smith is the head of electrical operations for a large urban utility. Above her is the vice president of all operations, which includes gas and steam power. This VP is very concerned about coordination and collaboration between his various units and therefore has made group meetings with a facilitator central to his operation. He has mandated that Sarah should build the same kind of “culture of collaboration” among her four regional managers and asks her frequently how this is going. He has urged her to use a group-oriented facilitator to work with her group to ensure that they build a set of norms that will get them and their reports to speak up if they see any kind of safety or maintenance problem anywhere in the system.

Sarah has learned that only if she spends a lot of time with her direct reports can she count on them to make their reports feel safe in bringing up maintenance problems. She reminds them that safety and reliability are more important than maintaining a schedule, and she rewards any employee who raises maintenance- and safety-related concerns. She is acutely aware that the executives above her really mean it when they say that safety is the highest priority, and they expect her to pass that message on to all the levels below her.

Leaders and managers can reinforce deep values like safety and quality by regularly reminding their direct reports that these values must dominate even if it reduces short-run productivity and compromises timeliness. This message is understood and accepted because Level 2 relationships have been built between the levels.

EXAMPLE 1.5. How a Surgeon Works on Building Trust and Openness

David is the senior spine surgeon in a large urban children’s hospital. His complex operations require a team on which he is quite dependent during most of the operation. When asked how he developed a level of trust and openness with his team, he said he first selected people on the basis of their competence and then “took them out to lunch.” He realized that the quickest way to reduce the hierarchical distance in the team was to do something very human and nonhierarchical together. He later learned that his wanting to eat with his team rather than with the other doctors also sent an important signal to the team on how important they were. He knew that the quickest way to get to know them as individuals was over an informal activity such as a meal.

Nevertheless, hospital policies changed and he could no longer have a dedicated team, so after that, at the beginning of the operation he encountered strangers who were rotated in to fit the schedule. He still needed to build trust and openness as quickly as possible, so he evolved a process of using the required pre-op checklist in a cooperative way. Instead of hurrying through it as a mechanical matter of course, he asked the chief OR nurse to go through each item slowly and looked at each team member directly, with body language that showed interest and readiness to hear questions or issues about each item from each person. He made it very clear how important their contributions were and tried to convey the message that they must work together and must totally trust each other. Trust in this context was visually and physically developed in near-real time, by the simple if not symbolic task of the group reviewing the checklist.

This story highlights that if a team clearly shares a common goal, personal relationships can be built very quickly if the leader desires and chooses to build on existing structure and conventions to facilitate a cooperative process.