Humble Leadership

With the birth of the internet, and the ever-expanding fountain of knowledge, it is becoming more and more difficult for leaders to know all the answers. In this day and age everyone cannot just know everything, especially in the software development industry where there are new frameworks and ways of doing things almost every week. At the end of the day, leaders need to be vulnerable and admit that they don't know everything because the reality of the situation is that they don’t.

What Is Humility?

Like I mentioned above, everyone cannot know everything. Leaders are increasingly finding themselves without enough knowledge and information to produce an answer just because that is what is expected of them. It is a this point that leaders need to be more humble and admit that they don't know all the answers with regards to the problems that they are trying to solve. For me, humility can be defined as follows:

The ability to ask your peers and team members for help when we don't have sufficient knowledge.

I have seen instances before where leaders don't know enough about a technology and make bad decisions just because they are afraid to ask for help. The see this as a sign of weakness as they should know, right?

But Isn't Vulnerability Bad?

Many people are also scared about being vulnerable, as their organisation doesn't handle it well, or it is seen as flaw in the leader. When you look at the word, it does have some negative connotations associated with it and most people see it as a loss of power. However, we need to pivot this thinking to not be about power but information, as the things that you don't know can hurt you. We need to acknowledge that as humans we will have areas of ignorance and need to rely on our fellow peers for information.

Embrace the vulnerability

At the end of the day, we need to accept that we will never know everything and that it is okay to ask for help. It's not a sign of weakness, but a sign of maturity.

Until next time...keep learning!