Humility in the Workplace
Satya Nadella recently announced the launch of Microsoft Office for iPad in a much less flashy manner than his predecessors. Nadella's actions as a CEO reflect his humble nature, which is one of the things his old classmates remember about him.
Google recently shared a list of five hiring attributes that it deems important for its employees. Interestingly, one of the attributes is intellectual humility. These two examples reveal that humility as a trait is not only valued in successful public figures, but it’s also one of the more desirable values for employees in today’s workplaces.
Explaining why Google doesn't prefer graduates from the top business schools, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google, delves a little bit deeper into intellectual humility:
Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure...What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.
Those who lack intellectual humility may exhibit the following characteristics:
- They find it hard to recognize that others can have better ideas.
- They find it hard to create space for others if their ideas and arguments are going to be challenged.
- They find themselves incredibly defensive when taking the blame.
- They find it very hard to step back from discussions or change stance if someone else has a better argument.
- They may stay quiet if someone else does better and refrain from saying "thank you" and "sorry" wholeheartedly.
In his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future, Daniel H. Pink states that in the last century or so, workplaces have evolved from the mass-production age to the information age and beyond. In the mass-production era, the worker was the central character, and his job was to comply with given specifications. In the information age, computers started gaining prominence, and the Internet started connecting the world.
The workers in this era, unlike the previous era, were more left-brained aligned, meaning they were required to think logically to execute their work. As the intellectual potential in workplaces has increased over time, so has the need for employees to embrace intellectual humility to create better workplaces.
Quoting an excerpt from the book Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, "When you are with Marines gathering to eat, you will notice that the most junior are served first and the most senior are served last. When you witness this act, you will also note that no order is given. Marines just do it."
This explains the essence of humility in the workplace. Humble people, while being successful, are fine with eating last—and more importantly, are happy doing so.
Do you agree?
