HBR Emotional Intelligence Ultimate Boxed Set (14 Books) (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

13

How Humble Leadership Really Works

By Dan Cable

When you’re a leader—no matter how long you’ve been in your role or how hard the journey was to get there—you are merely overhead unless you’re bringing out the best in your employees. Unfortunately, many leaders lose sight of this.

Power, as my colleague Ena Inesi has studied, can cause leaders to become overly obsessed with outcomes and control and, therefore, treat their employees as means to an end. As I’ve discovered in my own research, this ramps up people’s fear—fear of not hitting targets, fear of losing bonuses, fear of failing. As a consequence, people stop feeling positive emotions, and their drive to experiment and learn is stifled.¹

Take, for example, a UK food-delivery service that ...