Leadership & The Importance of Humility - Aisling Executive Coaching Ltd.

As a twenty year old I qualified to play in the Long Island Amateur Golf Championship. In my first match I faced off against Gene Francis. Mr. Francis was a legend in amateur golf. In college at Purdue he was named to the first NCAA All American Golf Team. He faced off against another Big Ten Conference player from Ohio State, Jack Nicklaus, and won. He won the prestigious Northeast Amateur. He was invited as an amateur to play in The Masters and qualified to pay in the U.S. Open Golf Championship. No one dominated the Long Island Golf Association Amateur Championship like Gene Francis. Beginning in 1962, Gene won the Amateur seven times, finished second four times and was the medalist on four occasions.

Was I intimidated going head-to-head against this iconic figure in amateur golf? Of course I was!

On the first tee of our match I wasn’t sure whether to shake his hand or ask for his autograph. It turned out to be one of the most memorable days of my amateur golf career. Not because of Gene’s golf resume but because of how humble he was. Aside from his great golf skills, Gene had a tendency to feel and display a deep regard for the dignity of others. I think of him today as a model of humility. He didn’t necessarily strive to be humble. His humility instead seemed to be something that happened when he was busy doing something else (like beating me).

How does a leader earn followers? What often comes to mind are such attributes as accomplished, decisive, visionary, charismatic. But what about humility?

Let’s think about this – what does it mean to feel and display a deep regard for the dignity of others? It offers great value within an organization because supporting others’ dignity is the essential foundation of healthy relationships. Healthy relationships lead to results, because we get work done through others. And results lead to successful organizations.

Clayton M. Christensen was the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. In a piece for Harvard Business Review, How Will You Measure Your Life, Christensen wrote of his experiences teaching a class on humility:

I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. 

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too.

A sense of humility is essential to leadership because it authenticates a person’s humanity. We humans are frail creatures; we have our faults. Recognizing what we do well, as well as what we do not do so well, is vital to self-awareness and paramount to humility.

I lost to Gene on the 16^th hole that day, I won a far more valuable lesson in humility.