HUMILITY FOR LEADERS

Phuoc D. Nguyen

“Humility for leaders is the ability to grasp the idea of not knowing, understanding, or having all the answers. For the servant leader, this opens the door to the future, enabling the leader to look for the right questions to ask followers, and enabling the leader to listen to and receive answers that will lead to the best possible insights”. (Patterson, 2003, p. 16). Leaders should think of team members as internal customers; leaders always care, ask, and listen to team members, they ask questions about team members’ needs, aspirations, abilities, problems, difficulties, and challenges they are facing in tasks. Leaders have always implemented internal customer satisfaction surveys. Sousa & van Dierendonck (2015) suggest that “Both the action side and the humble side of the servant leader as advanced before will be positively related to engagement” (p. 16). Humble leaders received positive feedback from team members, the results of this survey help leaders improve the team’s service spirit, and enhance team performance and engagement.

Mao, Chiu, Owens, Brown, and Liao (2019) stated, “Theoretically argue and empirically examine that leader humility encourages self-expansion in followers, strengthens followers’ confidence in performing assigned tasks (i.e., self-efficacy), and demonstrates a positive effect on followers’ work performance” (p. 361). Leader humility impacts positively team members’ engagement, the engagement creates followers’ self-confidence and self-efficacy, these qualities and training programs and coaching develop followers and improve followers’ work performance.

Walters and Diab (2016) proposed, “On an individual level, humility was positively related to team member contributions in group projects and individual performance. Humility also predicted individual performance above and beyond self-efficacy, conscientiousness, and general mental ability” (pp. 9-10). Humility will create a comfortable mentality for team members, it creates a motive to motivate team members to contribute their wisdom and skills, which improves productivity and performance. Owens and Hekman (2012) indicated, “Humble leaders were reported as making outwardly explicit the step-by-step process of personal development” (p. 802). Humble leaders combine human resource management, strategic human resource management, and human resource development to develop the organization and develop people.