Humility is not a word we typically associate with alpha business leaders. Yet one survey published in the Journal of Management found that humble leaders had higher performing teams, better collaboration and more flexibility. When we come back, today’s guest explains how humility is not a weakness, but rather the most important quality of outstanding leaders.

 

This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues, hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.

 

Welcome to Business Confidential Now. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I’ve got a great guest for you today. His name is Warren Rustand. I’m just delighted to welcome him to the show today.

 

Warren is an entrepreneur, a corporate leader, and the Forbes book author of The Leader Within Us: Mindset, Principles and Tools for a Life by Design. Besides being a former all-American basketball player at the University of Arizona and CEO of six companies, and board member of more than 50 companies over the years, he’s also currently the Dean of Learning for Entrepreneurs Organization, Global Leadership Academy. What a treat to have him on the show today. Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Warren.

 

Hanna, thank you so much for the invitation. I’m honored to be on your show and I look forward to our discussion about a really important topic.

 

Important, it definitely is. I mentioned at the top of the show that humility is not something we typically associate with business leaders. After all, they didn’t get to be where they are by being wallflowers. How do you address this perception that showing humility is a sign of weakness that some people believe and that it’s a strength?

 

ADDRESSING THE PERCEPTION OF HUMILITY AS A SIGN OF WEAKNESS

 

Well, I think, first of all, it’s sort of a counterculture. We live in a, particularly because of social media, I think, Hanna, we live in a, “I, me, my” society; where we’re always promoting ourselves. We’re always putting ourselves out there. We’re building a brand. We’re doing all these things that promote ourselves. When, actually, I believe the world that we would choose to live in, and the world that is a better world is “we, us and ours”. It’s about the collective. It’s about all of us working together. It’s about being a part of humanity.

 

And so I think that leaders who can project the notion that they have their ego under control, and that they’re more interested in others than they are themselves, reflect what’s called servant leadership. In 1903, a guy named Robert Greenleaf wrote a book called The Servant. And in it, he first described, for anybody who was observing leadership, this notion of servant leadership.

 

And so it’s this idea that the more we subordinate our interests to the interests of others, that we actually get better results, and I think the business study that you talked about during the introduction is a classic example of that. That people who regulate their ego and are more humble, have higher performing teams, higher performing companies. And I think it’s a hallmark of a great leader to be humble.

 

I couldn’t agree more with you, but as you mentioned, it’s very much a “me, me, me” society, especially with social media and, you know, people sharing pictures of their coffee, their toothbrush, their – you know, you name it. And you sometimes question like, why is this important? But for people that get caught up into it, and I understand that they do, and I’m not passing judgment, but if they then want to become more humble, how do they get there?

 

HOW TO BECOME MORE HUMBLE AS A LEADER

 

I think you have to look deeply inside yourself, and I think you have to understand what your real purpose. I think purpose-driven people tend to be more humble, and I think many people haven’t figured out their purpose yet. And so they go with the flow, right? They go with the herd. They do what everyone else is doing.

 

The really strong leaders with whom I’ve been associated over many years, and they’re generals, and politicians, and athletes, and celebrities, and corporate leaders, and a whole bunch of interesting people. The ones who manage to be humble are those who have a defined purpose and are moving toward that purpose every day. The purpose almost always involves other people and the good for other people, or the building of a company, or building a value for someone else.

 

And so I think those kinds of people in the end are the people we most like to associate with. I think most of us fatigue of associating with big egos. We fatigue of associating with people who are only interested in themselves, and I just think it’s boring, but I think the people who are interesting are the ones who are yet to be discovered, who don’t talk about themselves very much, who do promote others, who when things go wrong, they step to the front and take accountability.

 

And when things go right, they push other people forward to get credit. I think there’s a big difference between those who are truly humble, and those who pretend to be humble, and who are just managing it for the circumstance.

 

That is a great explanation. So, when we talk about humility in business leadership, how do you see that impacting the culture? How does it have a ripple effect?

 

HOW LEADERSHIP HUMILITY IMPACT ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

 

Yes, I think being humble gets all of the distractions out of the way, right? It gets power, it gets title, it gets ownership, it gets captaincy, it gets all those notions and just throws them aside. And then you can be the real person you want to be with your colleagues. And we have found in running several companies, and also acquiring other companies, that the best cultures are those that, when you walk in the office, you really can’t tell who the boss is, or who the CEO is.

 

It looks like a group of equals working together. And we think that’s the sign of a great culture, is the notion that it’s egalitarian, right? That it’s – we’re all in this. We’re a team. We’re working together. We have different duties and responsibilities, and while I may have the title of CEO, I just got different stuff to do. That’s all. We’re all doing stuff to make us successful. So it’s team-based, it’s individual-based in the sense of the worth of the individual, and it’s the value of the team and the team’s accomplishments. And that all speaks to lowering the ego and increasing the humility.

 

Well, for a leader who maybe has demonstrated some ego to get where they are, because that’s what the organizational culture has rewarded. Just hypothetically, how do they then start to convince their team that they are in the process of becoming more humble? And how do they how do they show that?

 

BRIDGING THE CREDIBILITY GAP WHEN STRIVING FOR MORE HUMILITY

 

That’s a good question. I think sometimes you have to do the things that no one else wants to do. If nobody wants to clean the urinals, if no one wants to mop the floors, volunteer and step up and do it yourself. It’s this notion of working shoulder to shoulder with others. I can give you a personal example.

 

When I was a junior or senior in high school, I had received some honors for basketball and student government and leadership and all that stuff, and I was feeling pretty good about myself, and I was acting out through my ego, and I was letting people know that I was pretty special. And this goes to this notion of sometimes we have to have difficult conversations with people to bring them back to Earth.

 

And my wrestling coach, or a wrestling coach, a man I much admired, Clint South at our high school, called me aside one day after class and he said, “Warren, I just have to tell you that you’re a jerk and you’re acting like a jerk. And if you keep acting like this, you’re never going to have friends and you’re never going to accomplish anything. You need to get your ego under control.” For a teacher to tell an 18-year-old superstar that he was a jerk; boy, that was humbling for me.

 

Holy cow. Did that take me down a peg? And I think sometimes we have to have difficult conversations with people who can’t seem to control the “I” button and need to push the “we” button. And I think that happened to me personally, and it really changed who I was. That was a that was a process I had to go through to subordinate my ego, and it took me a while to do that, but it was a very important lesson for me.

 

That’s a great example. There’s a question I have, though, about how somebody can do that inside an organization. I mean, in your example, there was a coach, someone that you looked up to who was guiding you and mentoring you in your sport, but when you’re an employee in an organization and let’s say you see the CEO acting like a jerk, very entitled, not demonstrating any humility, quite the opposite, you know. Do you know who I know? Do you know who I am? Do you know what my title is? That type of thing. How does that person get told the things that your coach told you?

 

HOW TO SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER ABOUT THEIR LACK OF HUMILITY

 

Yes, that’s more difficult. I think there are a couple of ways of doing it. I think really good CEOs need to have feedback loops so that we’re getting constant feedback from people who report to them and others about how they’re performing. So what we do in our organizations, we have a 360-degree feedback and we do it anonymously. So, you can have those honest discussions with your CEO because you’re going to be one of 10 or 12, or 15 people chosen to fill out this pretty elaborate form about how they’re performing and how they’re acting.

 

And so that CEO then gets very direct feedback, although he does know who’s providing that feedback, gets very direct feedback about who he is as a leader, who she is as a leader, and they can then act on that. And we recently did that with someone in our organization who was struggling with this very issue that you and I are talking about.

 

And she just needed to understand herself better and the impact she was having on other people. And when she got that, it was a real it was a real shocking awareness for her. But she really has changed significantly, and she’s changed her relationship with people around her. I would tell you generally that women – we hire a lot of women executives, and females generally don’t have the problem with ego that men do; are much better team players, are much more nurturing, and tend to have higher results in the organization than men do, generally.

 

That’s an interesting observation. I’m curious, though, about defensiveness because it’s hard to hear the truth, and that’s assuming that everything is truly confidential, because I can tell you in my experience with some 360 feedback, senior management is has been, in some cases, adamant and determined to find out who’s the person that gave them the negative feedback?

 

And even if they can’t find out, they assume, which then leads to retaliation and another types of negative circumstances. But, putting that aside for a second, it’s hard for people to accept difficult feedback, especially if they don’t trust the source. So, how do you recommend people deal with the defensiveness that’s involved?

 

HOW TO DEAL WITH DEFENSIVENESS WHEN DELIVERING DIFFICULT FEEDBACK

 

I think that’s really a great question, and I think it’s a hard question. I think number one is I had to learn to deal with it because my wife’s a very strong woman and she frequently coaches me on these things, and makes sure that I keep a proper perspective. So, we need people close to us that we trust who are willing to tell us the truth. And sometimes we have our sphere of people around us, our entourage, and they’re yes-people.

 

They’re going to tell us how good we are, and they’re going to tell us how remarkable we are, right? Instead of telling us, look at – “You’re weak in this area or you need to prove in this area, or like my coach told me, you’re being a jerk.” The other thing I think we have to remember in corporate America is that people are recruited to culture, but they leave because of leadership.

 

So, if you are losing good people in your organization regularly, you have to look carefully at who the leaders are and what kind of behavior they’re exhibiting that would drive people out of your organization. Very frequently it’s ego, or it’s a power trip, or it’s abusive behavior. And so people are attracted to culture, but they leave because of leaders.

 

Well, that’s an interesting distinction. So, how would you define culture?

 

Culture has been, for me, is the normative, acceptable behavior by a group of people who are trying to achieve the same goal. So, it could be a team or it could be a project team within a business, or it could be a collective group of people within a church or a not for profit of some kind, right? That are trying to achieve some particular goal. But in that process, they have some disruptive behavior. So, it’s behavior that’s not normative, not acceptable, not the standard behavior that you should have in that situation. People recognize it, they understand it, and they tend to rebel against it.

 

But, when you’re talking about people rebelling, it’s not necessarily the senior leadership rebelling against an individual lower-level manager, necessarily. When they walk out the door, it’s the lower-level employee who says, I can’t work for this manager anymore. You know, this is done. And the fact that that manager has been engaging in that kind of behavior and not been reprimanded and allowed it to consist, doesn’t that bake that behavior into the culture?

 

No, it does. I think in some – again, Hanna, you’re making really good points. I think that if we’re enlightened leaders, if we really are sensitive to our organization, then we will notice right away if particular members of a team are leaving. For example, for instance, we had a business in Houston, Texas, where nine members of a single team walked out the same day.

 

Wow.

 

You know, you think, “Well, what did that prompt me to do?” Well, it prompted me to do to have a really long discussion with that leader. We did then contacted every one of the nine people and had exit interviews with them to see why they left, and it pointed directly at the leader and the behavior of the leader. And so we had to do some serious coaching and, in fact, make adjustments.

 

And, in fact, that leader is no longer with the organization. So there are telltale signs within an organization, within a culture, if you will, of poor leadership and ego, and we just have to take care of that as soon as possible.

 

Well, I couldn’t agree with you more. And I’ve actually heard some HR professionals proposing actually stay interviews, as opposed to exit interviews, to meet with employees and find out. “Well, Warren, what do you like about your job? What are we doing right? What can we do better?” And it really helps draw people in. So, I’m hoping that that’s going to catch some fire. [Laughter]

 

I hope so, too. I think I think it’s a great idea. We do that in our one-on-one management evaluations, where an employee and a superior will come together. They both fill out a form and have it available for the other to read before they get into the interview, before they get to start talking about responsibilities and accountabilities and so forth, and it starts with wellbeing and health.

 

You know, it doesn’t start with, “How is your performance and what are your metrics?” It starts with health and well-being and then it goes into leadership and followership, and then then it gets down to the very end. We talk about metrics and performance. So we’re very keenly interested in the psyche of our people, and we find that the healthier our people are, the better they perform both mentally and physically.

 

And so we spend a lot of time worrying about them in that way, and we hope that’s helpful. And I hope that comes from a sense of humility, right? That we’re very interested in them.

 

Well, yes. Getting back to the humility factor, do you see that humility is a greater or lesser factor in certain demographics or is it across the board? I mean, we have five different generations that’s heavily skewed in favor of the employees.

 

HOW DIFFERENT GENERATIONS VALUE HUMILITY

 

Skewed particularly to millennials.

 

Yes.

 

Because the Boomers are dying off, right? They were, at one point, almost 79 million people. They’re down now around 60 million people. Boomers represent almost 80 million people today in the workforce, and so that 21 to 35-ish kind of generation is a really important generation. I happen to be really enthusiastic about them. I think they’re going to be phenomenal.

 

I think they can be world changers, but they have a particular view of the world because of when they were raised, the impact of social media, the impact of the world in which they grew up, right? And so they have a particular view. I happen to find it interesting and attractive, and I think they have great attributes and capacities.

 

Not everyone feels that way, but they do have a particular view of how to work in an organization or not; the kinds of organizations they’re willing to work in or not; their view of how long they’re going to work in an organization, which tends to be much shorter. The average millennial is going to have seven jobs by the time they’re 35, and so they tend to be more mobile and move around.

 

And so I think we have to understand how to lead and manage and guide in the same way that we ask that have to ask for their input, their thoughts, their information so that we can be effective together. And I think some people are willing to criticize them, but not willing to listen to them.

 

That’s fair. That’s very fair. So do you think humility is going to play an even bigger role for that cohort?

 

I think so. I think that millennials generally, as we understand them at least, and we may be wrong. As we understand them, they’re less financially motivated, they’re more humanely motivated. They’re more interested in the environment than they are in their bank account. They tend to view people in a particular way, and that is, can they make a contribution to the world or can’t they?

 

And they tend to associate with people who they think can, and culture is really important to them. They tend not to want to be in a corporate office. They want to work from home, or work from the car, or the beach, or wherever they want to, right? So, technology becomes really important to them.

 

And I think one of the things, Hanna, we have to appreciate that, that maybe you and I are migrants to technology, but millennials are the first generation that are native to technology, and Gen Z even more so. And they have grown up with it and they’ve been involved with technology since they were two years old, and most of us have not been. And so, as a result of that, it is second nature for them to behave and act in a particular way, particularly in regard to technology, which most of us still don’t understand that well.

 

Doesn’t always act in a human centric way – technology. And I think that’s what frustrates a lot of people. I have a feeling that there may be some listeners out there who are saying, “Oh, yes. I hear this. Yes, humility is nice, but we’d all like to hold hands and toast marshmallows and sing Kumbaya. But, we’ve got to be profit focused and being generous with our time and developing people; you know, we got the bottom line to worry about.” So how do you balance that, Warren?

 

2 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MOST PROFITABLE COMPANIES

 

Well, there will always people who feel that way. My observation experience is, and some of the research will show that the most profitable companies, the fastest growing companies, have two interesting characteristics: one, they have more women on their board of directors and more women in management teams in other companies. And two, they have leaders at every level of the organization who they describe with the characteristic of humility. And so there’s some data that would suggest that those kinds of companies tend to be much more successful.

 

If you remember Sam Walton, who headed Walmart. His goal in life was simply to have a general store in all the small towns of America, and he wanted people to call him Sam. I’ve been in his office in Bentonville, Arkansas. It was old-fashioned. It was small. It had wires coming out of the wall, had an old-fashioned phone in wall hangings and stuff like that.

 

And he would just get in his plane and he would show up at a store somewhere, and he would just go in and walk in and introduce himself as Sam, and walk around and see things, and he was a very humble guy. Very humble guy. People love that and they loved him, and people gravitated to him in a way which allowed him to grow and expand one of the great companies in the world.

 

And I think people who just aren’t comfortable being around others, who don’t think so much of themselves, who don’t promote themselves, who aren’t looking around the room to see who else is there? And I just think that’s infinitely more attractive. So, I don’t buy the fact that you have to be a commanding general as a CEO in order to get results. In fact, I think the opposite of that is true. I don’t think that’s any longer valued that much. In fact, I would say that, in the last 20 years, we’ve seen a significant change in how corporate leaders lead because I think they’ve become enlightened as well.

 

Well, I hope that continues. It will certainly serve everybody and help bring out the best of the younger generations because they’re really in the driver’s seat as far as being able to pick and choose their jobs, and so if we want to tap into that talent, we’re going to need to meet them.

 

And, Warren, I thank you and I appreciate your deepening our understanding of the importance of humility in the workplace, and how it really can be a powerful strength in shaping organizational culture, and even employee engagement. And that can open the floodgates to more productivity, innovation, profitable growth and, of course, retention of the best talent.

 

So, if you’re listening and looking to learn more about Warren’s work in the area of leadership, his contact information is going to be in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com, along with the link to his book, The Leader Within Us: Mindset, Principles, and Tools for a Life by Design. So, let’s go design our best lives and our best leadership skills.

 

And if you know somebody who could benefit, maybe that person who’s a little egocentric, [Laughter] who could use a touch of humility, just kind of drop the link or send them the link and leave a review. That would be really helpful to help spread the word on this really important topic about how people communicate and connect with each other. So, thank you so much for listening to Business Confidential now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner. Have a great day and an even better, more humility-driven, tomorrow.