The Best Bosses Are Humble Bosses - June 30, 2019

This Sunday we looked at Philippians 2:1-11; the great hymn to the humility of Christ.  This article from the October 9, 2018 Wall Street Journal was passed on to me by Rod Brandsen who was preaching in our Fusion community.  I mentioned it in passing, but it is a fascinating reminder that the world - in this case the business world - really does value and need things that are a fruit of the work of the Spirit in the People of God.

CLICK HERE for the full article.

Several Excerpts:

• Organizations are making a push to hire and promote workers who lead effectively but don’t seek the spotlight
• Humility is a core quality of leaders who inspire close teamwork, rapid learning and high performance in their teams, according to several studies in the past three years. Humble people tend to be aware of their own weaknesses, eager to improve themselves, appreciative of others’ strengths and focused on goals beyond their own self-interest.
• Among employees, it’s linked to lower turnover and absenteeism. These strengths are often overlooked because humble people tend to fly under the radar, making outsiders think it’s their teams doing all the work.
• Humble leaders can also be highly competitive and ambitious. But they tend to avoid the spotlight and give credit to their teams, Dr. Sherman says. They also ask for help and listen to feedback from others, setting an example that causes subordinates to do the same.
• In interviews, he asks applicants to tell him about a time when they experienced a major failure.  “If they say, ‘Wow, let me think about this, because there are a lot of times when I’ve messed things up,’ that says a lot,” he says. “If they have to pick among a lot of humble learning moments, that’s good.”
• (Humility is) marked by a cluster of attributes that appear consistently in some people, including sincerity, modesty, fairness, truthfulness and unpretentiousness. The same people tend to avoid manipulating others, bending the rules or behaving in greedy or hypocritical ways.
• Teams with humble leaders performed better and did higher-quality work than teams whose leaders exhibited less humility, according to lead researcher Bradley P. Owens, an associate professor of business ethics at Brigham Young University.  The performance gains held up independently of how much team leaders exhibited other positive leadership qualities unrelated to humility.
• Companies with humble chief executives are more likely than others to have upper management teams that work smoothly together, help each other and share decision-making, according to a study of 105 computer hardware and software firms published in the Journal of Management.  Such companies also are likely to have smaller pay gaps between the CEO and other senior executives. These factors predict closer collaboration among all senior executives, which in turn leads to greater company wide efficiency, innovation and profitability, researchers found.