Teach & Serve III, No. 19 – Humility
December 13, 2017
I want humility to be the heart of my servant leadership. It is the key.
Over the course of the past few weeks, I have had opportunity to consider – deeply – what I believe are the core qualities that make up a good leader, a leader that truly serves others. I have had hours of conversation on the topic, have spent hours in preparation for those discussions and have given hours of reflection following those talks.
As one might imagine, this has been a wonderful pursuit for I truly enjoy discussing educational leadership and I find myself further and more deeply energized the more fully the topic is explored.
At one point in these conversations, I was asked to distill good leadership to one quality – the quality I believe is the most essential in an excellent educational leader.
That was a very good question and one that, perhaps I should have taken more time to answer than I did. The reality was, when I was asked the question, one quality immediately came to my mind and was out of my mouth before I knew it.
Humility.
When I consider my leadership journey and all the experiences – wonderful, terrible and everywhere in between – that journey has afforded me and I reflect on the most salient takeaways I have gained, humility emerges at the top of the list of the most critical qualities of a leader.
It would take much time for me to enumerate the many lessons I had to work through which helped me learn that I want and need to keep humility at the center of my leadership. I could discuss the times I thought I knew better than the wisdom of the room, the times I got ahead of myself and ahead of process, the times I was embarrassed by my lack of knowledge and was afraid to admit that I was not the smartest person in the room and that I did not have all the answers.
I have blogged about many of these experiences in the past. Each and all of them have taught me that the key component of my leadership and the quality I strive to keep foremost in my approach to it is humility.
It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom said Gandhi. If that is true, and I believe that it is, it is wise, then, to embrace the wisdom of others and to do so in humble humility.
I want humility to be the heart of my servant leadership. It is the key.