Hiring Leaders: Look for passion, confidence, and quiet humility.
By: Dr. David Martin
Tags: Leadership Skills, Leadership, Business Strategy, Management And Leadership, Leadership And Mentoring

Hiring Leaders: Look for passion, confidence, and quiet humility.

How to hire the best managers and leaders for your organization

When we discuss the importance of leadership, we talk about the importance of vision, communication, delegation, perspective, purpose, empathy, and a host of other essential leadership characteristics. While these are critical elements of leadership success, three other leadership characteristics are vital to selecting good leaders and managers. When looking to hire managers and leaders, it’s important to choose leaders who display passion and confidence yet are genuinely humble in the way they carry themselves and how they treat their fellow humans.

Why hire leaders who are ‘humbly confident’?

In his five-year study of the greatest companies in America, Dr. Jim Collins identified these three traits in the leadership of all the great companies he studied. From Kimberly-Clark to Kroger and Abbot Labs, as well as the other eight companies his team studied, these essential leadership traits emerged over and over again. The leaders in every one of these great companies exhibited the same characteristics. They were absolutely passionate about their mission; they were confident in their abilities to lead their teams, and surprisingly, they were very humble about how they conducted their leadership. Their focus was always on how well their teams were doing and not upon themselves.

We admire the first two characteristics in our potential leadership hires, but often we neglect identifying that third characteristic — humility. It’s part of our upbringing; our western cultures teach us to identify humility with weakness. We’re afraid that someone who is humble will be seen as a ‘doormat’ or a pushover. We often identify humility with shyness, and the last thing anyone wants is a shy leader.

But good leaders require all three traits. A leader has to be passionate about what they are doing. They have to have confidence in their ability to lead teams. However, without that third quality, humility, the real danger is that the prospective manager or leader will turn out to be an arrogant, somewhat pompous ‘know-it-all’ that will cause your organization more harm than good.

I have witnessed this over and over again in my corporate career. The corporate staff will bring in a Program Manager or Director that brims with passion for the mission and has confidence that they can ‘get the job done.’ But because they have no real humility, one they are hired, they come in with ‘guns blazing’ — they just know what needs to be done to improve things.

Their lack of humility, their unwillingness to listen to anyone else on the team will show up early. Employees quickly perceive that the manager can’t be trusted. Employees will become disengaged from their work. Under the most arrogant managers, I have seen employees take steps to counter the poor leadership from psychologically distancing themselves from work to sabotaging the leader. These types of managers are toxic to the organization; it is the responsibility of those making hiring decisions to weed them out — at all costs.

How to identify humility in a potential leadership candidate

There is a straightforward test that many corporate executives of leading companies use when looking for humility in their Directors, Program Managers, or other crucial mid-level personnel. Out of lack of a better term, I’ll call it the ‘stressed out server’ test.

Corporate executives have long been known to take their potential manager hires out to lunch to observe how well the candidate acts in ‘informal’ settings. But the genuinely creative executives will work with the wait staff in advance to create an ‘incident’ where the server ‘accidentally’ comes out with the wrong order, or even spills water or whine on the unsuspecting candidate. This is done to see how the candidate reacts to service personnel under crisis.

The thought process here is that if a candidate reacts badly in this situation, there is a good chance they don’t have that humility or emotional intelligence that is vital to being a good leader. It has often been said, “It’s easy to be a leader when times are good. The true character of a leader, good or bad, will emerge under times of great stress.” I’m not sure who first said this, but over and over, I have seen this emerge in crises of all kinds. The greatest leaders will keep their heads under the toughest of circumstances and will treat everyone around them with respect, no matter what their position is in life.

Many a rising star has failed these types of tests. The hiring executive ends up sparing their organizations a lot of grief by refusing to hire potential candidates that have loads of passion and confidence, but not the humility needed to go along with it. On the other hand, far too many other executives become ‘starstruck’ by too much passion, too much confidence, without the quiet humility that needs to come with it.

Instead of great leaders, they end up hiring managers who become full of their newly found ‘self-importance’. They are good enough at managing time schedules and getting people to accomplish their goals through a combination of manipulation, edicts, mandates, coercion, and even veiled threats of termination. But they don’t inspire anyone, and too often they create an environment where employees become disengaged from work.

Final Thoughts

If you find yourself in the position where you’re looking for the ‘best and brightest’ managers and leaders, please look at this third element — confident humility. Great leaders and managers need to be inspirational. The best qualities of these inspirational leaders are passion, quiet confidence, and genuine humility. Not a humility that is borne out of any kind of weakness, but humility that recognizes that great work is done through great teams and great employees. That requires leaders to display quiet, confident humility to gain the needed trust to inspire people to perform at their best.

Hire leaders who are passionate and confident. But look for this quiet humility as well. It is often a leader’s greatest strength.