Humble Leadership, Second Edition: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust

Humble Leadership

THE HUMBLE LEADERSHIP SERIES

Humble Leadership

Humble Consulting

Humble Inquiry

Helping

Humble Leadership, Second Edition

Copyright © 2018 and 2023 by Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein

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Second Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schein, Edgar H., author. | Schein, Peter A., author.

Title: Humble leadership, second edition : the power of relationships, openness, and trust / Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein.

Description: Second Edition. | Oakland, CA : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, [2023] | Revised edition of the authors’ Humble leadership, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023003574 (print) | LCCN 2023003575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781523005529 (paperback) | ISBN 9781523005512 (pdf) | ISBN 9781523005529 (epub) | ISBN 9781523005536 (audio)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Organizational behavior. | Trust.

Classification: LCC HD57.7 .S3428 2023 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/092—dc23/eng/20230130

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003574

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003575

2023-1

Book production: BookMatters

Cover design: Susan Malikowski, DesignLeaf Studio

To future generations.

The stakes are even higher now. When we wrote the first edition, we knew enough to be very concerned about what was happening to planet Earth because of global warming. We have since seen so much more to be worried about. Leaders who view the existential challenge of protecting our delicate climate from catastrophic events deserve our dedication in the hope that Humble Leadership can help in their collective pursuit of a healthy planet for our grandchildren and their children.

Contents

Preface

PART ONE

What Is the Essence of Humble Leadership?

1   A New Approach to Leadership

2   Building More Personal Relationships

PART TWO

Examples of Humble Leadership in Different Contexts

3   Humble Leadership in Creating and Building Organizations

4   Humble Leadership in Transforming Organizations

5   Group Dynamics in Humble Leadership

PART THREE

Culture and the Future of Humble Leadership

6   Culture Dynamics in Humble Leadership

7   Anticipating the Future of Humble Leadership

8   Humble Leadership Messages: An Allegory

PART FOUR

Experiential Learning for Humble Leaders

9   Adopting the Humble Leadership Attitude

10 Behaviors and Group Skills for Humble Leadership

References

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Authors

Preface

Do you find yourself mired in individualistic, combative management chaos in which great leadership is typically reduced to the story of a superstar doing something extraordinary and heroic? Would it help to think of leadership not as the 7 Steps you must take to lead, but as the energy that is shared among members of a group determined to accomplish something new and better?

This book proposes a relational view of leadership, framing it as a process of learning, sharing, and directing new and better action within the dynamic interpersonal processes that increasingly characterize today’s organizations. Such leadership processes can occur at any level, in any team or workgroup, in any meeting, in tight or open networks, in co-located or widely dispersed work units, and across all kinds of cultural boundaries. Leadership can come from group members as often as from a designated or appointed leader. It can rotate unpredictably as the task of the group responds to rapid changes in markets and societies.

In our view, leadership is always a relationship, and truly successful leadership thrives in a substrate of high openness and high trust. While this book focuses on a new model of leadership, it is equally a book about culture and group dynamics.

About This Edition

This second edition builds on the central premise of the original 2018 version, which is that innovation and growth depend on Level 2 relationships (see Chapter 2). The concept we call Humble Leadership nurtures relationships that are characterized by openness and trust, and it succeeds when these relationships ensure optimal exchange of information and ideas, from which new and better solutions can be set in motion. We broaden our notion of humility by highlighting the ways in which situational humility is critical to making the right decisions and avoiding errors. And we expand on the integral relationship between leadership and culture with a specific vocabulary so that humble leaders can move beyond culture problems by following specific change principles and implementing targeted change initiatives.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for all managers and leaders who have the motivation, the scope, and the flexibility to create change in their organizations. And while Humble Leadership is greatly needed in our corporations, it is equally relevant to other sectors of society, such as medicine, the arts, political institutions, not-for-profits, sports teams, local community organizations, and so on. In fact, we often already see archetypes of our model of Humble Leadership in some of these contexts.

This model is for leaders, but it is not just for those in leading roles. We assume leadership exists in all corners and levels of all organizations. We see leadership as a complex mosaic of relationships, not as a two-dimensional, top-down status in a hierarchy, nor as a set of unusual gifts or talents of high-potential individuals. Similarly, it should become clear that the image of an organization we present is that of an adaptive organism propelled by a cooperative nervous system, rather than an entity built on retrograde notions of the organization as a well-oiled machine. Suffice it to say, we wonder now, even more than when we wrote the first edition, why the machine was ever the right metaphor for a human system!

Humble Leadership is more than a characterization of a role. It describes a collaborative relationship directed at doing something new and better, and its principles should be relevant not just to human resources and organization development leaders but equally to product managers, finance and operations leads, CFOs, board members, investors, doctors, lawyers, and others in the so-called helping professions. We hope to find readers from all personal and professional pursuits who can see the impact of designing optimal open, trusting, information-sharing relationships that improve outcomes by improving the way groups reanimate and re-energize static role-based organizational designs and by inspiring the participants in these groups to give their best ensemble performances.

What You Can Gain by Reading This Book

Prescriptive leadership books—and there are many great ones to choose from—offer lists of requisite skills, success formulas, and desirable attributes that help you climb to the top, to invent the next big thing, to change the world. Our concern is that this focus on heroes and disrupters, even those with the right personal values and visions at the time, will go only so far in preparing any one of us for the work upheavals we face today and in the future.

We are proposing again that we must re-frame the personal challenge of improving one’s leadership skills, turning it into a collective challenge of helping to improve our group’s performance. Consider this book as a way to take the pressure off; you do not have to do it all, and you cannot do it alone. Instead of heading into work wondering how you can individually solve some problem, what if you went to work committed to sorting it out with a partner, a group, a large or small work team? It’s not up to you alone to change the world. It is up to you to help create a learning environment in which you and your group can cooperate in identifying problems and then figuring out processes to solve those problems. We hope this book gives you some new ways to ask questions, some new ways to learn, and some stimulating examples of the ways in which Humble Leadership has helped others create change and growth.

How This Book Is Organized

In Chapters 1 and 2 we describe our vision of Humble Leadership and the relationship theory that serves as its foundation. We share some stories in Chapters 3 and 4, while Chapter 5 focuses on group dynamics. Chapter 6 focuses on culture, and here we present vocabulary with which humble leaders might break down and act upon difficult culture problems in their organizations. In Chapter 7 we discuss the role of Humble Leadership in a future in which how we communicate and act globally is evolving before our eyes. In Chapter 8 we pull things together by way of an allegory about organizational growth and the forces of bureaucratization that Humble Leadership must resist. Finally, Chapters 9 and 10 present a series of next steps for readers: exercises to help individuals and groups gain insight and be mindful about how Humble Leadership can help us deal with volatility, complexity, and ambiguity in a very uncertain world.

Peter A. Schein and Edgar H. Schein

Palo Alto, California

Postscript: This work was completed by Ed and Peter in December 2022. Ed passed away at age 94 in late January 2023 after a very productive life of listening, learning, writing, coaching, and helping.

PART ONE

What Is the Essence of Humble Leadership?

In the next two chapters, we define leadership (as contrasted with management and administration), and we explain how Humble Leadership is fundamentally different from and yet complementary to other conceptions of leadership. More specifically, we will discuss why we believe that situational humility and the formation of Level 2 relationships—relationships that acknowledge the whole person—is the essence of Humble Leadership.

ONE

A New Approach to Leadership

Leaders today who hope to create breakthrough innovations and tackle ever more complex global challenges must remain open to new concepts and models of leadership.

It is reasonable and prudent to expect even more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) in the economic, political, and, perhaps most of all, environmental crises that lie ahead. Much of this is the inevitable result of the rapid evolution of technology, the evermore connectedness of all of us around the globe, and the imminent scarcity of the resources that organizations rely on to continue innovating and growing.

Many forms and styles of leadership are necessary to cope in a way that balances opportunity, scarcity, pace, and propriety. We cannot overstate the importance of adaptiveness and resilience. We endeavor to demonstrate in this book that a cornerstone of twenty-first-century leadership is Humble Leadership.

Humble Leadership Is a Practice in All Forms of Leadership

Before we address this bold claim, we should step back and define some terms as we see them. Humility and leadership are refined concepts; sharing a cut diamond’s essence, they are multifaceted and born of pressure and time. As we have noted in previous works, humility is not typically associated with leadership (Schein & Schein, 2018, 2021). Let’s explore why we see a critical link between the two.

We begin with a simple definition of leadership in order to differentiate it from management, administration, stewardship, and various other forms of directing human endeavors.

Leadership Is the Creation and Implementation of Something New and Better

With the above definition in mind, how does Humble Leadership fit in the lexicons of management, administration, governance, and modern refinements of leadership?

Consider Humble Leadership as a fundamental process that underlies and can complement various notions of leadership described as servant leadership or as adaptive, boundary-spanning, learning, inclusive, transactional, transformative, and so on. These descriptions of leadership emphasize different traits of leaders, while Humble Leadership emphasizes the practice of how any of these traits can help drive new and better actions (Ernst & Chrobot-Mason, 2011; Ferdman et al., 2021; Greenleaf, 1977; Heifetz, 1994; Kouzes & Posner, 2016).

The many theories of the personality of the ideal leader and the many arguments for what the ideal leadership style should be are all valid in particular situations and for particular purposes. Whether a person is a servant leader, a real or an adaptive or an inclusive leader, or even a charismatic or iconoclastic leader, the practice of Humble Leadership can help reinforce those ideal traits and move that leader forward toward desired goals.

Leadership in general, when defined as focusing a team on the pursuit of something new and better, is also distinct from the