Cultivating Humility
Image by sasint from Pixabay
Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle is a 1970’s book dealing with a simple concept. People who do good work in any given job role tend to be promoted. That means any given individual rises until they get to a level at which they are at least somewhat incompetent, at which point the promotions cease and they remain at a job level that, unlike all the levels preceding it, they don’t excel at. Peter emphasized that this means that barring direct intervention to keep this from happening, eventually most positions within a company will be filled with workers who are bad at that particular job. Since the book was written, a lot of effort has gone into devising models for promotion that avoid these kinds of downsides; nobody wants a company where every seat is filled by someone unqualified to actually do the work.
There’s another implication to the Peter Principle, though, one that rarely if ever gets talked about. Imagine a person who is climbing the ladder - at every level before they hit their personal “incompetence” level, they are going to be noticed and promoted. That means in the kind of environment the Peter Principle is talking about, the person is likely going to be the cream of the crop in any job position we find them in, if not the best then one of the best at their level. And this would be true right up until they hit their own personal limits; right up until that point, they would be the biggest fish in a series of bigger and bigger ponds.
Put more clearly, this means that for a lot of us it’s really easy to start thinking of ourselves as the smartest people in the room. The scenario described is one where you would expect a person to just get used to being generally better than the people they work with at the jobs they do; if it wasn’t so, why are they people who always get promoted? And it’s probably even a little bit true; most people who get rewarded really did earn it in some way, maybe by working harder, working smarter, or having some special quality that made them a little more effective than their peers.
It’s not necessarily wrong to acknowledge this; sometimes knowing how good you are is a valuable source of confidence. That can be the kind of thing that enables you to jump in and do your best work; if there’s a healthy definition of pride, that’s probably pretty close to being it. But at Clipboard Health we try to emphasize the value of humility, something we think is the opposite of an unhealthy kind of pride that can stand in the way of personal achievement and team function in the same way healthy pride can enhance it.
The Slowness of Pride
One aspect of our description of The Peter Principle above that might have stood out to you is the way it describes a person moving forward in the world primarily as a result of promotions. The book treats that as very normal, and in 1970 it mostly was. People tended to work at a particular company longer, sometimes their entire careers. Today, that’s a lot less common and it’s just as likely for someone to move forward in their careers by moving to a new company. Since not all companies are created equal in terms of hiring standards, this means that sometimes even a lateral move can make a huge difference in terms of the capabilities of the people you work with.
Clipboard Health is very, very careful about who we hire. We not only look for people who would fit very well in terms of our culture and our approach to work, but also for truly exceptional people; one of our guiding principles in hiring is to think long and hard about whether or not a particular candidate is someone we might want as our boss a few years down the road. Our hiring managers make sure a new person is better than them at three things (at minimum) and that they could learn something from the potential hire. We often spend more time filling a particular job opening than other companies might, but because of this we often end up with “stacked” teams where each member brings something truly exceptional to the table, some area of expertise or depth of knowledge that legitimately impressed us during the interview process.
If you go around the company talking to employees, one story that pops up, again and again, is one where the person telling the tale was used to being the most competent person in their company but had to get used to that not being the case here. I went through that myself; I remember getting some of my first feedback on a project and being shocked. This is usable, I thought. This is actually going to make my project better than I could have made it myself. I was so used to getting feedback of the kind you end up tactfully ignoring that getting real, actual feedback from someone more experienced who had put real effort into actually producing something helpful that I almost cried.
Being dropped into an environment like that allows for unbelievable efficiencies. If you can tap the shoulder of any of a dozen people who are just as good or better than you and get real help, the kind of turbocharging that can do to your work is shocking. But it’s possible to be blinded to this, to be so used to being a big fish in a small pond that you can’t recognize that you are now surrounded by equals. Most people adjust, but in some cases pride gets in the way; it feels good to be the best in the room. Not acknowledging the expertise and skill of teammates lets someone delay letting go of that good feeling, but not without negative consequences. By not admitting that other people are just as good, you potentially cut yourself off from all those benefits and synergies that equally-matched teams offer.
The other way this problem tends to manifest is oversensitivity to criticism. I talked a bit about receiving good feedback a bit ago, but “good feedback” necessarily demands some level of change. Really good feedback doesn’t just suggest things you could add to the mix to make a project better but also points out flaws and places where quality might be lacking. If a person is used to being the best person in the room, feedback pointing out real flaws in their work can be a shock, especially if true. Making the changes suggested means admitting you weren’t perfect, but potentially improves the work far beyond where a person could have got by themselves. Pride can get in the way of taking that feedback for what it is and missing those benefits.
Humility is Fast
There’s an old story about Isaac Newton that goes a little like this: In Newton’s day, there were sometimes competitions with cash prizes where competitors would be tasked with solving some difficult problem of physics or mathematics; the first person to work it out would receive both the money and the glory. But it became known that before setting out to solve the problem, it was a good idea to ask Newton about it first, not only for advice but because often he had worked on the problem himself at some earlier date and had already solved it. Where the greatest minds of his day were battling it out to solve a particular problem, there was a good chance Newton had already resolved it for fun in his free time and had forgotten about it. Isaac Newton, in short, was really smart.
But when asked about why he was so smart, Isaac Newton produced one of the most famous and valuable quotes of all time:
“If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Newton acknowledged, first and foremost, that he hadn’t done anything by himself; he had help from everyone who came before him and other people working alongside him. He had more right than any of us to consider himself beyond help, but instead considered help indispensable; he wouldn’t have been able to do any of it alone.
Compared to pride, humility is first and foremost fast. Where pride tells you that you know enough, are good enough, and don’t need any help, humility recognizes where you are limited and can benefit from help. In an environment where everyone is competent in varied ways, this means a constant stream of opportunities to reach out to someone near you who can remove a roadblock in your way. Where pride stands by itself, humility is able to leverage the advantages around it; it’s proactive in asking for help.
The flip side of this as indicated in the pride section is that humility is also able to accept help. A person who really, truly believes they are best-in-class at their jobs is going to have a very hard time accepting criticism or compromising to fit with requested changes to their plans - after all, they are very good at their jobs. A person with humility doesn’t run into the same problems; they are able to acknowledge the skill around them and benefit from the extra eyes on their work.
The Humility of the Bosses
I mentioned that we try to only hire people we could see being our bosses down the road, and part of that is hiring people who ideally are better than anybody we have at something. We look for recruiters who recruit better than anyone we have, designers who are uniquely good at design in a way we can’t match, and so on. If you are hiring those kinds of people and making sure they have the kind of ownership and initiative they should, that means one of the bigger requirements involved in maximizing their productivity is often just getting out of their way.
For a manager or c-level executive, this can be harder than it sounds; often, we are talking about people who never hit their Peter Principle limitations at all. They have perhaps the best justification of anyone in the company to say “I know best” and move forward under that assumption. But if they do, they are giving up the advantages they fought so hard to gain by doing hiring right. They would have people who are true experts in their focus areas who are well prepared to lead reduced to mere followers.
At Clipboard, we cultivate this attitude of humility starting at the top for that reason. Questions are encouraged and pushback is appreciated, but more than that both are expected; people who are completely willing to sit back and wait for their marching orders tend not to do well here. The assumptions that nobody is “the best” and that everyone should be receptive to help and feedback apply to everyone, from the CEO to any given team member in any department.
We’ve seen no end of benefit from this. Our teams are more flexible and work faster. Our culture is better; there’s nobody you can’t help and no help you can’t get if you need it. Our output is never the best one person could do, but instead the best that a team (or teams!) of carefully selected exceptional people are capable of. It’s a huge benefit that’s open to anyone, so long as they put in the work to cultivate a culture of humility.
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