Humility and Innovation
Humility directly impacts leadership and has a downstream impact on an organization’s innovation. I’ve led software innovation teams for three decades and a recurring pattern I have seen in successful teams is the level of gratitude they have for each other and the humility that they display each and every day in the course of their work. The teams that perform the best over long periods of time are those that have an extremely high level of competence in their work but lack the hubris that often accompanies highly competent teams.
I came out of a celebratory after-hours party with one of the most competent and incredible teams I have ever worked with. They solved complex technology problems over many, many months to bring a product to life. While we took the time to cheer and have some fun together by acknowledging the beauty of what had been created, the tone of the room was all about gratitude. Gratitude for the opportunity to do great things together and gratitude for the honor of continuing on the path to learning more, together. The shared sentiment of the team was that “we were just getting started.” Dr. Timothy R. Clark shares that there is an important relationship between humility and innovation in his book, Leading with Competence and Character. It has to do with shared respect.
“The more we respect each other, the harder you can disagree with each other.”
- Timothy R. Clark Ph.D.
When you have humility about the work that your team is doing, shared respect is obvious. When the alternative is at play, you have what appears to be a collection of superheroes doing heroic work and seeking out individual recognition in ways that undermine collective respect.
Teams of superheroes undermine collective respect. The phrase that comes to mind for me in these situations is “Situational Humility.” I first read it in this article by Jeremiah Genest and it has become a powerful personal mantra for me. It reminds me to model humility and to remind my teams why humility is so important. If you work with people who amaze you every day with their level of expertise and competence, it is important to pay close attention to humility.
Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey, in their book, Extreme Teaming, talk about the importance of humility for highly competent teams as one of the required inputs for sustainable innovation. They studied some of the most highly successful, measurably high-performing teams in the world. Here are some observations from my experience in leadership to help you purposefully build more humility into the teams that you lead with a diagram to help make it stick
Four Inputs to Humility Leading to More Innovation
There are many more things that contribute to and lead to humility than I have listed here. These are four of the strongest techniques that I have seen work to help teams fend off hubris and remain maximally humble.
>> Acknowledge the infinite. What is unknown is always infinitely larger than what we know. There is so much more to learn in every dimension of our organization. When we forget that, hubris sweeps in and we lose the precious opportunity for growth and learning.
>> Focus on growth. When you recognize how much your team had to learn to accomplish something worthwhile, it keeps gratitude for the growth. It also helps you stay humble about how much you didn’t know when you started.
>> Leverage diverse knowledge. The diverse experience of your entire team is profound. When you tap into everyone’s creativity, the result is far superior. When you underestimate others, you get trapped in your own echo chamber.
>> Celebrate curiosity. Even the weird and unexpected ideas, when celebrated in your culture, lead to the next new thing. You never know where innovative ideas will strike and you want to encourage a divergence of thought if you care about innovation.
When you get the innovations you are after from your incredible teams, it is important to review this list and keep the focus on the future. Distribute the gratitude as equally as possible and celebrate powerfully, but stay humble, my friends.
Model situational humility in the face of great accomplishments.
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#Innovation #PsychologicalSafety #Humility #Leadership
REFERENCES:
Leading with Competence and Character (2016), by Timothy R. Clark
Extreme Teaming (2017), by Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey
Building Situational Humility, (2021) by Jeremiah Genest
Unleashing Creativity and Innovation, (2019) by Me
Teams that Grow Together, Flow Together, (2021) by Me
Diversity + Psychological Safety, (2022) by Me
Where are the Innovations, (2021) by Me
Originally Published on LinkedIn 12/10/22
