Humbitious: The Power of Low-Ego, High-Drive Leadership

Praise for Humbitious

This book makes a compelling case that you don’t need a big ego to do great things. Amer Kaissi demonstrates that humility isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a source of strength for leaders.

Adam Grant #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

How can leaders display humility while remaining ambitious? Amer Kaissi reveals the fascinating answers in this entertaining and evidence-based book.

Dr. Tasha Eurich organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of Insight and Bankable Leadership.

"Too often, we underestimate the enormous strength it takes to practice skills like kindness and humility. With Humbitious, Amer Kaissi has exposed humility not just as a virtue worth striving for, but also as a valuable tool for success. I highly recommend this book for readers at any stage of their leadership journey."

Daniel Lubetzky founder of KIND Snacks

An entertaining and brilliantly compelling argument for humble honesty. In an era when brash celebrity is often marketed as leadership, Amer Kaissi deftly weaves research and the experiences of leaders—some impressive and some not—into a convincing case that humility unlocks our potential.

gen. Stanley McChrystal U.S. Army (Ret.), Joint Special Operations Command

In a world where leadership models are changing, Amer Kaissi’s book clarifies the notion that effective leaders succeed the most when they relate and connect to the people around them. Kaissi shatters the myths about what humility really means, and shows us that it is not weakness, but actually requires inner confidence and a strength of character many don’t possess. He demonstrates that arrogance and dictatorship may help in the very short term, but rarely lead to sustainable, impactful success. Read this book to ask yourself the tough questions and get inspired to adopt a new model of leadership success.

Maria Ross brand strategist, speaker, and author of The Empathy Edge

"In masterful fashion, Kaissi brings humility to life. Through inspiring stories and clear summaries of academic research, Humbitious illuminates why humility is a vital strength for anyone wanting to make a positive impact. A must-read for anyone who wants to elevate their leadership potential and effectiveness."

Dr. Brad Owens associate professor, Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, and one of the world’s foremost experts on humble leadership

"For those who often hear the buzzword ‘humility’ but wonder what it really means and whether it works, Amer Kaissi’s Humbitious is a must-read. Not just another person’s opinion or preaching of humility, his book is based on decades of cumulative scientific evidence on the effectiveness of humility in improving individual performance and relationships with others, and in transforming teams and organizations."

Dr. Amy Ou associate professor, humility researcher, Department of Management and Marketing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Copyright © 2021 by Amer Kaissi

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Cataloguing in publication information is available from Library and Archives Canada.

978-1-77458-073-8 (paperback)

978-1-77458-074-5 (ebook)

Page Two

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Edited by James Harbeck

Copyedited by Melissa Edwards

Cover design by Jennifer Lum and Setareh Ashrafologhalai

Interior design by Setareh Ashrafologhalai

Interior illustrations by Setareh Ashrafologhalai

Ebook by Bright Wing Media

Printed in Canada

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amerkaissi.com

Dedicated to my wife, Wafaa, and children, Maria and Adam

To my parents, Nahida and Anis

And especially to my late grandmother, Durriya (Teta Imm Anis)

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

one

An Overview of Humility and Ambition in Leadership

1

What Is Humble Leadership?

2

The Benefits of Humble Leadership

3

Determinants and Moderators of Humble Leadership

two

Humble Leadership in Relation to the Self

4

Self-Awareness

5

Self-Reflection

6

Vulnerability

three

Humble Leadership in Relation to Others

7

Open-Mindedness

8

Appreciation

9

Generosity

four

Humble Leadership in Relation to the Universe

10

Transcendence

Acknowledgments

Notes

Landmarks

Cover

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Body Matter

Foreword

Daniela was a rising star at a capital management firm. Everyone in the company agreed she would be a senior leader one day... if she could learn to play nice with others in the sandbox.

Her 360-degree feedback report was full of phrases like, Daniela is brilliant but she has sharp elbows, and She has to get better with people if she wants to advance. I was brought in as her executive coach to help build her people skills.

Daniela knew she was impatient. She told me she had never suffered fools gladly and didn’t mind if people read her that way.

During our coaching, she determinedly experimented with new behaviors and new thoughts that strengthened her awareness of her impact on others. More than once she reported back to me that her biggest take-away was this: in order to consider others more often, she would need to think of herself as being of service. Intellectually she understood that, were she able to consider others more, she would most likely achieve her ambitions sooner. But in practice it was hard.

A quite different leader was Anish.

Anish was a division president for a national homebuilder. His coaching was triggered because people wanted him to move faster. His feedback report was full of phrases like, He’s the most democratic leader I’ve ever worked for. Great, but please, a little less democracy and a little more action, and He’s got plenty of good will in the bank. He should trade on that and get stuff done.

He was grateful for the coaching. He had foreseen that, to be successful as a president, he would need to gain mastery over his reliance on humility and gain more skills in achievement. This was not completely new in his life. He told me his friends and family joked that he was like Minnesota nice on steroids.

During his coaching, Anish found he was actually quite good at getting stuff done. When exerting that part of himself, he found that it didn’t cause conflict; rather, people were appreciative. They liked him as much as ever. He began to inhabit the role of president in a way that felt integrated and authentic.

It has now been more than a decade since I coached Daniela and Anish. I’ve stayed in contact with them and have watched their stories evolve. They’re both quite happy.

Anish continued his success as a division president. He learned to draw as often on his reservoir of achievement skills as he did on his natural humility. Then new owners took over. He discovered, sadly, that the new owners did not value humility. In less than a year, Anish left the company and found a new position where he was happier.

Daniela built team after team at her company. All delivered high performance. Her teams swelled into a department, then into a division. To this day, that division is hers to run. Go to the company’s website and you’ll see her pictured as one of the senior leaders. She loves her career.

Daniela is often invited to speak on panels. She talks openly about herself, admitting she’d never have achieved her goals if she hadn’t toned down her ambition and learned some humility. Remembering the woman who didn’t suffer fools gladly, she laughs, saying, Now I’m just one of the fools!

She and Anish consciously chose to develop and balance two facets of themselves that are within us all: humility and ambition. The balance has made them each stand out. They both have devoted followers.

When I first read Humbitious, I was struck by two thoughts.

First, I thought of Daniela and Anish. I wished I’d had the book when I was coaching them. Amer shares compelling research, making a clear case that leaders who are able to balance humility and ambition achieve higher results. Had Daniela and Anish been able to read Humbitious, it would’ve accelerated their paths to success.

Second, I thought of you, the current and rising leaders who search for your own balance between humility and ambition. Amer’s stories and research will awaken a path in you that will guide you towards self-awareness, open-mindedness, and appreciation. Without the first, leaders cannot experience growth. Without the second, they cannot gain wisdom. Without the third, they cannot generate devotion. Humbitious will help you develop all three.

This is a path of many riches. Enjoy the journey.

Tom Henschel

Tom Henschel is one of America’s leading executive coaches. He runs the development firm Essential Communications. For more than a decade he has hosted The Look & Sound of Leadership podcast, rated in the top 1 percent of all 2 million podcasts globally.

Introduction

This book is for leaders at all stages who want to improve their performance and who are struggling with their ego but may not realize that both humility and ambition are vital for effective leadership. By the time you finish reading this book, I hope, you will have changed your mindset about humility and learned new behaviors and habits for high-performing leadership.

One of the most common myths about leadership is that arrogant, overconfident, and even narcissistic individuals are better leaders. Let me shatter this myth right off the bat: tons of research that I will share throughout this book unequivocally shows that such leaders are not effective or successful over time. It’s very clear: self-centered leaders do not achieve success in the long term. But our current CEO is an arrogant jerk! you might say. Yes, arrogant jerks are often chosen for leadership positions, but the evidence is very clear that they are not effective in the long term, because they tend to be cold, hostile managers and lousy team players. The successful narcissists that you either know or are working for right now are the exception to the rule. It is humility that leads to higher performance.

I have dedicated the last eight years of my career studying, understanding, coaching, and speaking about humility with thousands of people across the world. But humility has been part of my development since my childhood in Lebanon, a small country in the Middle East. I was born exactly one year after the Lebanese Civil War erupted. While growing up in a violent war that killed thousands and displaced millions is significant enough in and of itself, the most influential experience of my childhood was actually going to work with my mother every day. She was the director for one of the largest faith-based orphanages in the country, and she worked every day till late in the evening, including Saturdays and holidays. Every day after school, on weekends, and especially during summer breaks, I would go with her to work. She would drop me off in the playground, and I would spend the whole time with the children who lived in the orphanage. I played with them, ate with them, and learned to see the world through their eyes.

While my family was middle class, I spent the majority of my childhood playing with kids who didn’t have much, who had lost one or both of their parents in the war, or whose parents had given them up because they were too poor to take care of them. When my eighth birthday approached, my parents offered to invite my classmates from school to the party. But I insisted that I wanted my friends from the orphanage to celebrate my birthday with me. Two dozen orphaned children came to our house to eat cake and play games; for most, this was their first time ever attending a real birthday party outside of the orphanage. These experiences molded me and taught me important lessons about humility. I learned to appreciate the privileges into which I was born and to build relationships and friendships with everyone, regardless of their social or economic status.

Years later, after finishing college in Lebanon, I was fortunate enough to come to the United States to do my graduate studies, which presented me with different lessons in humility. As a twenty-three-year-old, I did one of the worst things you can do at that age: I started a PhD in the doctoral program in health services administration at the University of Minnesota. I was, by far, the youngest student; most others were in their thirties, forties, fifties. They called me the baby of the class. They brought with them extensive experience, while I had never held a full-time job. They discussed previous work situations and told stories about their colleagues and bosses. I barely opened my mouth. I mostly listened and took notes. This significant experience taught me the importance of knowing my limits, acknowledging my ignorance, and learning from others.

Having said that, I believe that I still have a long way to go to reach personal humility. While I have been fortunate to experience situations that taught me some valuable lessons, my natural tendencies are to show off, seek attention, and talk more than I listen. In that sense, I can relate to Benjamin Franklin, who, after working hard on practicing various virtues in his day-to-day behaviors, finally admitted that humility was the hardest one to conquer because it went against his nature. That’s why this book is for me as much as it is for other people. As Franz Kafka once observed, A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. I hope that, by writing this book, I can make further progress on my own journey to gain more humility.

In 2003, I took my first full-time faculty position at Trinity University in San Antonio. As I began teaching graduate students, I wondered whether the lessons I had learned about humility were related to the effectiveness of leaders working in hospitals and other healthcare organizations. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that our educational system and organizational hiring practices are set up to penalize humble people and reward self-promoting egocentrics. I sifted through the research and discovered the negative impact of not recognizing and rewarding humility; the evidence clearly showed that humble leaders outperform non-humble ones in all long-term measures. In 2017, I wrote Intangibles: The Unexpected Traits of High-Performing Healthcare Leaders to uncover—based on research—the traits necessary for high performance in healthcare. I found that humility, compassion, kindness, and generosity, when combined with ambition, competence, strength, and account-ability, enable leaders to achieve high performance for themselves, their teams, and their organizations.

After that book was published, I got invited to give talks to groups and organizations all over the world. At these events, leaders from all levels showed great interest in the concept of humility. Based on what I heard in these talks and in professional social media platforms, I realized that humility is not just a crucial trait for healthcare leaders, it is also paramount for all types of leaders in all industries. So, in this book, I want to share with you what I have learned about humility based on my experiences and on the scientific research that has been published in the last fifteen years.

The main idea in this book is that humility, when combined with ambition, can significantly improve your performance and the performance of your teams and organization. Since the beginning of humanity, no major achievement has ever been accomplished by one person; humans have always needed to collaborate and help each other, and for that they need to be humble enough to recognize their own limitations and ask for that help. This is even truer now, as the world is becoming more unknowable and unpredictable. New technology, hand-held devices, and accessible platforms pump out new facts and opinions by the second. In the face of this information deluge, humans are predictably irrational and biased. Our decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on logical analysis, which is especially inadequate in the age of mega-information. You can’t know everything or do anything by yourself. You need to rely on others for help, ideas, and advice. And for that, you need to be humble.

Moreover, there is an illusion of knowledge in our society, especially among leaders. They rarely acknowledge gaps in their knowledge, and they believe they know more than they actually do. The historian Yuval Noah Harari recently noted that "some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map." And while narcissism is commonplace in the current political and social climate, a large portion of the population, especially younger people, are turned off by egotistical leaders and would much rather vote for and work for leaders who display empathy and humility.

While humility has always been important, it will be a vital survival skill in the near future. With the rise of artificial intelligence, robots and smart machines are expected to replace human beings in more than half of the current jobs in the economy. The only human skills that will be needed in the new world are team-based ones that machines cannot yet replicate, such as critical contemplation, innovative thinking, and emotional engagement with others. Edward Hess from the University of Virginia notes that the common thread running through these distinctly human skills is humility.

Given all these factors, there is an urgent need for a book on humility in leadership that is both research-based and accessible to a large number of people. Most books on the topic either rely on opinion and personal experience or are too theoretical and out of touch with the world of practice. I believe that the concept of humble leadership has not yet caught on because the prevalent advice and models are not based on evidence. I felt the need to write a book that doesn’t just give the generic advice to be more humble, but also summarizes the data and findings in order to suggest specific evidence-based practices. As W. Edwards Deming once said, Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.

And there is data. There has been a remarkable explosion in the research on humility in the last few years. The problem is that most of that research is in articles published in inaccessible academic journals. I have sifted through this research and translated it into everyday English, combining it with interesting stories and case studies so that it can be put into practice by all leaders in all organizations. Many of the leaders I interact with in my coaching, speaking, and teaching engagements ask me, What are the most effective humble behaviors? What are potential pitfalls of being a humble leader? It is possible to learn how to be humble? I wrote this book to answer these questions. I’ve curated, evaluated, and synthesized all the research published on humility in scientific journals in order to help you make sense of it and put it to use in the right way. To reduce disruptions while you’re reading, I didn’t include references in the text, but you can access the studies and resources for each chapter in the Notes at the end of the book.

An important goal of this book is to help you understand, based on evidence, what humility is and is not. This may seem like a simple question, but there is a common lack of understanding about what true humility is. Humility is not weakness, lack of self-esteem, or low assertiveness. In fact, it is the exact opposite, since it requires strength, courage, and fierce determination. Humility is about having a true understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. If you believe you are good at something based on your expertise and say, I am good at this, but I am not the only one who is good at it, you are not being arrogant; you are actually confidently humble. Disparaging yourself in public and saying, I’m not that good while secretly believing that you are better than everyone else is false humility.

Humility, as you will see in the course of this book, has many aspects. It involves knowing your strengths and weaknesses and reflecting on them, being vulnerable, being open-minded and teachable, being grateful towards others, and acknowledging that you are an infinitely small part of the universe. I believe that there is nothing more important for you as a leader to practice and model than humility and ambition.

one

An Overview

of Humility and

Ambition in

Leadership

— 1 —

What Is Humble Leadership?

Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues: hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.

St. Augustine

Jacinda-mania

Jacinda Ardern was born in Dinsdale, a small working-class town of 8,000 people. Her father was a police officer and her mother worked in the school cafeteria. To help make ends meet, the family owned a little side business selling apples and pears, and little Jacinda would help on the tractor every day after school. One day at school,