If you are humble, nothing can touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. Mother Teresa

We love people who don’t boast, and want to be led by those who put others first, yet we seem to be surrounded by a ‘me-first’ culture played out both on the international stage, and on the phone in our pocket.

We often experience, whether we like it or not, the very natural human tendency to want to grow in significance in the eyes of others. So, when something has gone well, we exaggerate our contribution so that others think well of us. Whereas if things go badly our temptation is to do the opposite, distancing ourselves from disaster lest we become associated with failure.

Yet the leaders I most respect and admire seem to do the opposite. They shower plaudits on others and underplay their own contribution to things going well. They shoulder more of the blame when things go pear-shaped than is probably fair. Leaders who manage this, seemingly without any effort, are deeply attractive to be around because they build energy in others. Because it is less about them. Working in their organisations must be special.

I wish I were more like this. Not just because I hope this trait will make me a better leader, but because I know it will make me a better human being. I’ve spent years working alongside some great leaders, and I’ve learnt that those who wear humility lightly seem to have three practices:

1. They are clear about their strengths and weaknesses
2. They give credit to others
3. They are not trying to be right, they’re trying to get it right

In this post I’ll explore these, and through them try to get under the skin of what it is to cultivate humility, and how this can be good for us.

1/ Be honest about your weaknesses and clear about your strengths
Humility is not weakness. Leaders require an accurate self-assessment of their own strengths and weaknesses. This means being upfront, and acknowledging when others are in a better position to take a lead, and helping others to take full credit for their work.

Humility is not low self-esteem
Being the best possible you matters. Highly accomplished people are clear about their signature strengths, and allocate specific blocks of time to exploit these, so they are both productive and useful. They also honest about where they have weaknesses. It is the confident way that proficient people can articulate this precisely which is remarkable.

The true way to be humble is not to stoop till you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that shall show you what the real smallness of your greatest greatness is.  Philip Brooks

Cultivating humility is not about pretending to have low self-esteem, or ignoring our distinctive gifts. It does not mean that we have to forgo senior roles, or sacrifice our ambition on the altar of false modesty. It simply means having a healthy sense of our abilities, and the grace to encourage others to use theirs and to shine.

In his excellent book, Humilitas, John Dickson suggests that humility is the key to true greatness, that those who prioritise service to others often achieve the greatest long term impact. Servant leadership, or trying to use your role to serve others is not the same as being everybody’s doormat. In Jim Collins’ book ‘Good to Great,’ he focuses on highly successful leaders who exhibit a blend of personal humility and professional will. They are intensely driven to achieve results for their organisations, but do so with a focus on the collective good rather than personal recognition. This combination of humility and will, which he calls level five leadership, enables these leaders to build strong organisations yet draw attention away from themselves.

Sometimes humility is forced upon you
I remember one painful experience where I experienced tough feedback from the headteacher who had interviewed me early in my career, someone I really respected. I’m sure it was hard for him to deliver the message that I’d come across with governors as arrogant, for which pains I am truly grateful. This taught me two things: firstly, how I never wanted to come across in the future – without that difficult-to-share-message I would undoubtedly have made the same mistake over and over again. Secondly, it taught me to never shirk a difficult message, as the momentary pain this causes the giver may change the receiver for life. What are the humbling places where you have grown?

2/ Give credit to others
Choosing roles
The best referees aren’t afraid to make decisions, but they understand that their primary role is to allow a smooth game with few interruptions. They’re the ones you never notice – allowing the game to flow, and attention to be focused on the flair of the players, who supporters have paid to see.

Humility is the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself. John Dickson, Humilitas

The best school leaders use their position to serve. Not to call to attention their own status, or exploit their authority to get the best deal for themselves. In schools they might take on the most difficult groups to protect teaching staff, or shoulder tricky pastoral conversations with challenging parents. And when they are thinking about roles and responsibilities, they’re creative than most in bringing the ‘right’ people to the front, and guiding the ‘wrong’ people to the back. This kind of theatrical re-distribution, is essentially classroom management on an adult scale, and I think is one of the important behind-the-scenes acts of the leader.

In meetings
Humble leaders learn. They approach their CPD with notebooks ready, they reflect openly, admit errors honestly and direct the credit away from themselves. Humble leaders spend a disproportionate amount of time in meetings pointing out the achievements of others, seemingly blind to their ignoble failures while focusing on their stellar moments. Zooming in on the choice cuts of their best work.

Who gets the credit?
Some leaders pay particular attention to the staff who are lowest in the hierarchy. Those who are paid the least, or who may feel the least valued. Who acknowledge the caretakers and cleaners and kitchen staff, and treat well those who can do us no professional good.

The more senior you are in an organisation the more you have to try to compensate. It’s silly and dishonest to deny the title, but I think you have to do all that is in your power to tweak the power dynamic and shift the bias. To change the music.

We might do this with some strategic thinking: like ensuring that support staff have the identical appraisal structure that teaching professionals enjoy. Or it might be simple behaviours and habits: like choosing to sit beside colleagues who are much less senior than you in meetings or at break-time. I also like working with leaders who just quietly go about doing the basic kindnesses – offering coffee and tea, emptying the rubbish, checking the room is clear after a meeting for the next users, welcoming people at the entrance. Tiny touches which show simple respect for others.

Make visible the invisible
When I visit schools, I’m interested in who is acknowledged, and who isn’t. Feeling invisible and nameless are the two bits of painful feedback I hear most from site staff. To personally thank them is not hard, but it does take deliberateness. This might mean interrupting what you are saying in a meeting to greet someone by name as they bring the drinks in and say thanks.

True greatness, says John Dickson, is marked by a thousand small courtesies.

As a headteacher I’d use assemblies to share photos of our site staff to remind pupils who they were and how and why they mattered. These were, after all, the colleagues who provide our hot lunches, who mopped up spills we’d made, who fixed doors we’d broken. I wanted this public recognition to show pupils that these colleagues were an integral part of the staff team, and that they also had names, and roles, and responsibilities, and families. That they mattered.

Last week I was listening to one of our headteachers describing his school’s collective worship, where he tells the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. Armed with a bucket and towels, and to the joy of children and parents, he did his best to model this story of service. Acts of humility are counter-intuitive, we don’t expect those in authority to stoop so low. 

3/ Don’t try to be right, try to get it right (embrace intellectual humility)
While it’s easy to think that intelligence means being right, real intelligence is knowing when you’re right, when you might be wrong, and being willing to change your mind. This, of course, is how we grow.

Socrates, the wisest of men, argued that he was not wise at all. Instead he sought to map the terrain of his ignorance, to plot its mountains and its rivers, to learn to navigate it. Agnes Callard

Listening to others and respecting their viewpoints and ideas (even ones vastly different from ours) is a component of this intellectual growth. Humility is a virtue that involves listening carefully to what others are saying, recognising that they may bring better ideas than us and acknowledging that there are many ways to tackle a problem. It’s being open to and being willing to test our approach against other potentially better ones.

Reach out to your enemies
There is humility in having a conversation with someone that you know you don’t agree with. Especially with someone where there has been some disagreement in the past. This could happen after a meeting, over coffee, when the guardrails are down. It can be a chance to patch up any friction from the past, but also to hear feedback we would rather not hear. I find that when you plan in your diary an extra half an hour to be available for this possibility, then the opportunity somehow emerges. It means you’ve created the time in which to reach even a partial agreement, to reach the next step, which otherwise would not have happened. The opening words can be tricky:

– I was really interested in when you said…
– I don’t really understand X as well as you, would you mind explaining?
– I’d like to know more about why, could you help me with that?

Often, they will experience a double shock. Firstly, because you took the initiative and hurdled the invisible barrier between you both. Secondly, because they can see that you are not trying to score points, but are genuinely seeking to understand their side.

In any large organisation, people are going to have different opinions, and cultivating humility involves more than to simply consider the possibility that we may be wrong and they may be right. One of the key roles as a leader is embrace difference, to seek out diverse people, views and then to to ask more questions than others are comfortable asking. Humble leaders push out more, are prepared to be unorthodox and create the space to imagine why others hold such different opinions.

Soldier or scout?
In A More Beautiful Question, Warren Berger, offers this question (borrowed from Julia Galef) to measure your intellectual humility: Do you think like a soldier or a scout?  A “soldier” always defends their existing beliefs, even in the face of contradictory evidence, whereas a “scout” seeks to understand reality accurately, even if it means revising their views.

The longer we teach, the more we know, deep down, that we’ll never be perfect. We know it will take a lifetime of preparing and practising and trying out new ideas and seeing what works best in the classroom. Cultivating humility as a teacher is bringing everything you have to the job, yet also knowing that however hard we try, however sublime the ‘aha’ moments in our lesson, we know that we are only ever in process. Dylan Wiliam says it best:

If we create a culture where every teacher believes they need to improve, not because they are good enough, but because they can be better, there is no limit to what we can achieve.

We know that embracing humility comes with some risk: we may fear missing out on recognition for our hard work, and we may fear losing the shine on our reputation as we give credit to others. But the benefits are huge. On the one hand, knowing that we are just one cog in a skillful professional community, and that we cannot do it alone, makes us nicer to work with. And on the other hand, we begin to see that our unique contribution is essential, that doing our chosen work diligently, that being the best possible me, really matters.