'Humble leaders seek more opportunities to develop themselves by learning from others,' says Australian academic
New research from the University of South Australia (UniSA) has found that humble leadership can not only elevate the workplace status of employees – by boosting their sense of respect and prominence – but strengthen an employee’s leadership potential as well.
A lot of literature says that employees (or followers) who are supervised by humble leaders will become humble as well, according to senior lecturer Dr Xiao Lin.
However, her study found that followers don’t end up being humble, they are instead motivated to develop their leadership potential.
“Employees who focus on individual development, success and competition respond best to humble leadership behaviours,” Lin said, according to UniSA. “These are people who feel the need to be at the top, stand out and be excellent employees so they have the chance to influence their leaders and become high-status team members.”
On the other hand, followers who don’t have this individualistic orientation will not take this approach.
“They are more likely maybe to be humble or they may have no interest in influencing the leaders or they feel happy keeping their current status as a follower,” Lin told HRD Australia.
So what are the benefits of being a humble leader?
Lin explained the three key characteristics of humble leaders. First, they have an ability to see themselves accurately; in other words, they have self-awareness, they know their strengths and weaknesses.
Next, they acknowledge other people’s contributions or strengths, also called “openness”. And the third characteristic is teachability – they are happy to be taught by others.
“The most important difference for humble leaders and other kinds of leaders is a teachability,” Lin said. “Because humble leaders seek more opportunities to develop themselves by learning from others, so they will give other employees lots of opportunities to teach them.”
Lin highlighted how employers can also recruit employees who can benefit from humble leadership.
“Employers or human resource managers can try to recruit people… who have an individualistic orientation,” she said. “You can identify these kinds of employees based on their values, their orientation, whether they focus on their own development, whether they have ambition, skills for their achievements, or whether they want to be competitive, want to stand out in the team, want to be a better performer than other employees.
If a company sees these kind of employees, they should hire them because they can benefit more from the humble leaders, Lin said.
“They will become informal leaders and you can build a talent pool for future managers. When your current manager retires or they go to another position, you can easily pick up more potential managers or leaders from the team.”
Lin emphasised that humble leadership is a behaviour, not a personality or trait, so you can learn how to become a more humble leader.
Learning to become a humble leader means developing those three key characteristics of self-awareness, openness and teachability.
“Only after you know your strengths and your weakness, you can see other people's strengths,” she said. “Teach managers to use correct ways to confirm or acknowledge other people's contributions and strengths. When you acknowledge their strengths, you also want to learn from them.”
Lin hopes managers and employers pay attention to humble leadership behaviours.
“Most industries do not care much about humility because some people think it is a weakness,” she said. “And other people think ‘It is too risky if I demonstrate my weakness, I will lose face, I’m not very powerful’. But instead, humility is a personal charisma, when you show other people your weakness, it's like building a very inclusive and fair communication environment.”
She added that if leaders want to maintain collective growth or make their best effort to motivate or develop their followers’ potential, they still need to have humble behaviours.
“Because in this current environment – the development of AI, internet – leaders cannot be a superhero. The leader cannot deal with all the problems by themselves, they must rely on a lot of employees’ expertise.”
While Lin acknowledges the benefits that come from displaying humble leadership, she said it doesn’t have to be the only leadership style you use.
“You will not use the same leadership behaviour all your life,” she said. “It's not a fixed leadership behaviour, even humility behaviours are based on the situation. You use these behaviours based on the requirements, maybe this month or this year or this project. It doesn't mean you must be humble until you die.
“It's always changing, it's a dynamic. It's combined with other leadership behaviours, and then you have your own leadership profile and [you can] create your preferred leadership behaviour set.”
