The Paradox of Leadership: Confident Humility

As a leader, navigating the complexities of your role can be challenging. You likely want to exude confidence so that people will follow your lead, and yet the path forward is increasingly complex and unpredictable. 

Along both sides of your leadership path lie perils that can sap your strength and limit your team’s effectiveness. On one side is the peril of overconfidence, which can lead to blindness, while perilous fear lies on the other side, paralyzing progress. 

In either case, you face significant risks: loss of trust, dissatisfied customers, and endangered companies.

Ditch #1: Overconfidence

The ditch along one side of the path is the peril of overconfidence. We can boldly charge into the unknown, ignoring the risks and overestimating our ability to address them. This approach leads to arrogant blindness about reality, a dangerous proposition for a leader and those they are leading!

How would you know if you are being overconfident? Here are some indicators:

• Avoiding feedback, dismissing suggestions, and downplaying criticism
• Resisting new ideas or approaches
• Hiding risks and challenges from team members, customers, and other leaders
• Relying heavily on instincts and ignoring other evidence and factors
• Shifting blaming others when things aren’t as we thought they should be

From an empirical perspective, an overconfident leader is not open to transparently seeing reality, so their inspections and adaptations (decisions) are ineffective.

“You can expect to find the most destructive overconfidence in places that are exceedingly complicated and unpredictable.” - David McRaney

Ditch #2: Fear

The ditch on the other side of the path is the peril of fear. We can overthink and overanalyze every factor, hoping to find a perfect solution before expressing any confidence. This approach leads to paralysis, a dangerous proposition for a leader and those they are leading!

How would you know if you are acting out of fear? Here are some indicators:

• Continually delaying or changing decisions due to doubt or uncertainty
• Setting unrealistic expectations and attempting to avoid all mistakes
• Spending a lot of time thinking about and analyzing every aspect of situations
• Worrying about potential negative outcomes
• Questioning your abilities and worth

Many of us think humility is synonymous with fear or timidity - a humble person wouldn’t speak up or be bold. Nothing could be further from the truth.

From an empirical perspective, a fearful leader can getting stuck in transparency and inspection, avoiding the adaptation necessary for progress…or they can inspect and adapt so often that there is no transparency to the effectiveness of the previous decisions.

“Humility, I have learned, must never be confused with meekness. Humility is being open to the ideas of others.” - Simon Sinek

The Balanced Path: Confident Humility

Confident humility sounds like a paradox…but it’s not. It's about recognizing your strengths while acknowledging your limitations. It's about being confident in your abilities without becoming arrogant and being humble without succumbing to self-doubt. It’s a confidence constrained by humility, and humility unleashed by confidence.

The key is found in the focus of our confidence and humility:

• Confidence: Instead of being overconfident in exactly where your team and product need to go and how to get there, you can choose to be confident about your and your team’s capabilities, ability to learn and improve, and partnership with your customers.
• Humility: Instead of being paralyzed by fear and overanalysis, you can choose to acknowledge you don’t know everything that will happen in the future, areas you and your team can learn and improve, and the potential for emerging, better approaches.

What does it look like? Here are some indicators:

• Seeking and analyzing input relative to the risk and criticality of the decision
• Making timely decisions
• Openly acknowledging the risks and unknowns
• Expressing confidence in your team’s ability to adapt and grow
• Changing course based on new input

Viewing this through the lens of Scrum, you’ll see several Scrum Values at play here, including openness and courage.

Cultivating Confident Humility

Consider these steps to get out of the ditches and into confident humility:

• Which do you tend to fall into - overconfidence or fear? How does that look for you? Review the lists above and ask for input from others to check your self-perception.
• Identify some costs that your team, organization, product, and customers have paid because of your overconfidence or fear.
• What is the next best step you can take out of the ditch and closer to confident humility?
• Partner with someone who can see your ditch. Check in with them regularly to see how they perceive your leadership.

By cultivating confident humility, you can become a more effective and respected leader. Remember, it's not about being perfect; it's about being authentic and striving for continuous improvement.

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Hey, there! Confident Humility is just one of the 7 Agile Leader Superpowers we explored in our weekly Unstuck Agile Newsletter. You can read the rest of the superpowers here, and subscribe to get our future newsletters in your inbox!