In Praise of a Touch of Humility

I am not a humble person. I don't think that I ever have been. So at first blush it may seem strange that I would be praising humility. In fact, I claim that this is a natural situation: I pride myself on being effective and accurate. In order to be effective and accurate, I need good information and feedback. In order to get good information and feedback, I need to seek it, which requires embracing the fact that I make mistakes and therefore trying to avoid future mistakes and fix past mistakes.

I hasten to point out that I do not think that I suffer from the over-confidence that infects so many leaders in so many workplaces. (I have already ranted about the childish pretence of endless certainty in a previous post but this is a new, slightly different rant.)

As a practical matter, this means that I approach software development in a specific way: I do things more than once. I write "watch dog" programs to monitor processes. I write and use consistency checks. On the plus side, many of my mistakes are caught. On the minus side, many of my mistakes are exposed to public view. However, I sleep better at night knowing that my confidence in my work is based on more than my high self-regard.

As a theoretical matter, consider this interesting Harvard Business Review blog entry: Less-Confident People Are More Successful by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. His thesis is this:

There is no bigger cliché in business psychology than the idea that high self-confidence is key to career success. It is time to debunk this myth. In fact, low self-confidence is more likely to make you successful.

After many years of researching and consulting on talent, I've come to the conclusion that self-confidence is only helpful when it's low. Sure, extremely low confidence is not helpful: it inhibits performance by inducing fear, worry, and stress, which may drive people to give up sooner or later. But just-low-enough confidence can help you recalibrate your goals so they are (a) more realistic and (b) attainable. Is that really a problem? Not everyone can be CEO of Coca Cola or the next Steve Jobs.

As a side note,  I point out that a friend of mine offered a gloss on this article for me: he would say that we are talking about humility here, not clinically low self-esteem. I would define humility as the trait of being willing to consider negative feedback; I suspect that there are many working definitions. The dictionary definition I found at www.dictionary.com is this:


 modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance, rank, etc.


I would say "unexaggerated" is a key component of this concept, but perhaps that is only my personal sense.

Regardless of the fine print on the definition of the opposite of over-confidence, I fervently hope Chamorro-Premuzic is right in his assertion that not-overly-confident people are more successful. In my bitter experience, boundless and baseless confidence are richly rewarded, without regard to the outcomes of those manly, clear-cut and confident decisions when complex, nuanced, multi-stage decisions would seem to be required. (With lots of checking to make sure that the path along which we are all running is the right path.)

It would be fabulous to put the Era of Empty Assertion behind us and move on to a more results-based, fact-based, reality-based, merit-based workplace, at least in IT. May it be so.