Preface

What This Book Is About

Do you find yourself mired in an individualistic competitive culture of management in which leadership is always about a “superstar” doing something extraordinary and heroic? Would it help to think of leadership not as the “seven steps” you must take to lead, but as the energy that is shared in a group that is accomplishing something new and better? This book proposes a relational view of leadership as a process of learning, sharing, and directing new and better things to do in the dynamic interpersonal and group processes that increasingly characterize today’s organizations. Such leadership processes can occur at any level, in any team or workgroup, in any meeting, in tight or open networks, in co-located or widely dispersed work units, and across all kinds of cultural boundaries. Leadership can come from group members as often as from designated or appointed leaders. It will rotate unpredictably as the tasks of the groups change in the volatile markets that are changing at an exponential rate.

In our view, leadership is always a relationship, and truly successful leadership thrives in a group culture of high openness and high trust. Leadership and culture can be seen as two sides of the same coin, and culture is quintessentially a group phenomenon. Though this book focuses on a new model of leadership, it is equally a book about culture and group dynamics.

The traditional twentieth-century culture of management can be described as a transactional set of relationships among designated roles that unwittingly creates conditions of low openness and low trust and can, therefore, make truly effective leadership difficult. We will refer to these transactional relationships as “Level 1,” referring to the concept of “levels of relationships” that was first introduced in 2016 in the book Humble Consulting. We propose “Humble Leadership” as a model that is intimately tied to a more personal, trusting, and open culture built on more personal intragroup and intergroup relationships. We will refer to this as “Level 2.”

We emphasize that the process of leadership can be conceived of as distinct from traditional vertical hierarchy and individual “heroic” performance. Leading in business and in the military, directing in the arts, convening and organizing social and political groups, coaching professional sports teams, and founding new organizations all have in common that such leadership occurs in groups and hinges on open and trusting relationships within those groups. Only Level 2 relationships within those groups enable all members to be inspired to work at their best.

This book is about reasserting that the core of organizational longevity is in the interaction of social, emotional, and cooperative whole human beings in various kinds of personal relationships to each other. Humble leadership can be anything from convening groups to becoming a catalyst that enables them and then disappears until needed again. This model does not displace other models such as servant, or transformative, or inclusive leadership but is, in a sense, the process, the dynamic element that has to be present in any of those models for them to succeed—Humble Leadership concerns itself with creating the culture that makes purposeful forward movement sustainable as the world of work evolves.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for all managers and leaders who have the motivation, the scope, and the flexibility to create change in their organizations. Humble Leadership is most needed in our corporations but is equally relevant to the other sectors of society, such as medicine, the arts, our political institutions, not-for-profits, sports teams, local community organizations, and so on. In fact, we often see archetypes of our model of Humble Leadership in such community organizations, in sports, and in the theater and performance arts.

This model is for leaders, but it is not just for those in leading roles. We assume leadership exists in all corners and levels of all organizations. We see leadership as a complex mosaic of relationships, not as a two-dimensional (top-down) status in a hierarchy, nor as a set of unusual gifts or talents of “high-potential” individuals. This view of leadership should be especially relevant to readers who are in human resources and organization development, because we emphasize that Humble Leadership is as much about the “soft skills” as it is about technology, strategy, authority, discipline, and so on.

We conceive of leadership as more than a role, as a collaborative relationship directed at doing something different, new and better, and it should therefore be relevant to product managers, finance and operations leads, CFOs, board members, investors, doctors, lawyers, and others in the “helping” professions. We hope to find readers at any point in a value chain who can see the impact of designing optimal information-sharing, open, and trusting relationships that improve outcomes by improving the way groups reanimate and reenergize static, role-based organizational designs, and inspire the participants in these groups to give their best ensemble performances.

What You Will Gain by Reading This Book

Prescriptive leadership books—and there are many great ones to choose from—offer lists of requisite skills, success formulas, and desirable attributes that will help you climb to the top, to invent the next big thing, to change the world. There is little doubt in our minds that great leadership prescriptions have contributed to the explosive growth in innovation, global expansion, and financial success that characterize the 35 years from the early 1980s to now (early 2018). Our concern is that this focus on heroes and “disrupters” with the right personal values and visions will only go so far in preparing any one of us for the work upheavals we will face in the next 35 years.

What if we proposed that you can reframe the personal challenge of improving your leadership skills into a collective challenge of helping to improve how your groups perform? Consider this book as a way to take the pressure off you to do it all. Instead of heading into work wondering how you alone can solve the problem, what if you went to work committed to sorting it out with a partner, a group, a large or small work team? It’s not up to you alone to solve the problem, to lead to greatness, to change the world. It is up to you to create a learning environment in which you and your group can cooperate in identifying and fixing the processes that solve problems, and maybe then change the world. We hope this book gives you some new ways to ask questions, some new ways to learn, in sum, some examples of Humble Leadership that have helped others create change and growth.

Brief Historical Note

We have always been puzzled by this question: “Do leaders create cultures or do cultures create leaders?” We have seen many examples of both and have continued to honor the dichotomy. However, in the last 75 years we have evolved the field of group dynamics and have invented “experiential learning” in group contexts, which has enabled us to observe and manage how group forces (culture) and individual initiative (leading) are in constant interaction. Leaders are constantly shaping cultures, but cultures always limit what defines leadership and what individual change agents will be allowed to get away with. We reaffirmed this point in our fifth edition of Organizational Culture and Leadership (Schein & Schein, 2017).

As socialized humans we cannot step outside our culture, but we can begin to understand our culture and see how leadership as a relational activity is both shaped by and shapes culture. We can also begin to see in which direction managerial culture needs to evolve in order to be relevant to the imminent environmental, social, political, economic, and technological changes. The concept of Humble Leadership derives from this need and highlights the interactive nature of leadership as wanting to do something new and better within the boundaries of what the existing culture will accept and, if those boundaries are too restrictive, to begin to change those cultural dimensions.

As the reader will see, the hardest part of this process will be to change elements of the existing managerial culture, which we believe has become ossified if not obsolete. A new model of cooperative leadership may struggle to find its footing in an individualistic competitive transactional culture. So, the first challenge of the emergent humble leader may well be to begin to change that culture.

Conventional managerial culture has never avoided talking about teams and groups as critical (though perhaps not central). Teams still revolve around individuals, as evidenced by team incentives following individual incentives. We still tend to focus incentives on leaders of teams, and yet important research over the last 75 years strongly indicates how an effective group or team creates the conditions for leadership as much as leaders create effective teams.

Similarly, transparency and employee engagement are generally espoused, but the degree to which management withholds critical economic information from employees strongly suggests that the culture of management subtly but firmly supports the assumption that management still has the “divine right to tell others what to do” (Schein, 1989).

We concede that Humble Leadership defined as an intrinsically relational process that is deeply embedded in effective group processes, does not displace other models built on individual heroic visions or purposes. Transformational and servant leadership models are highly relevant for today’s organizations, but we believe that all these models will require Humble Leadership as a foundational group process. We believe that all modern leadership models can be complemented with a more personal relational emphasis if they are to be relevant to an emerging cohort of modern leaders. To this end we introduce the concept personization to highlight the essence of Level 2 Humble Leadership.

How This Book Is Organized

In Chapters 1 and 2 we will describe our vision of Humble Leadership and the relationship theory that serves as the foundation. We will share some stories in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 that illuminate what we see as Humble Leadership success, as well as cases where Humble Leadership did not develop, was stifled, or did not succeed. We will then look ahead in Chapter 7 to highlight some trends we see forcing and reinforcing here-and-now humility, personization, group sensemaking, and team learning, all the key components of Humble Leadership. In Chapter 8 we will suggest how Humble Leadership and related group dynamics theory may advance our thinking about broader managerial culture, and in Chapter 9 we will propose what you can do by way of further reading, self-analysis, and skill building to enhance your own Humble Leadership proficiency.