How to Become a Humble Leader

Humility is an essential element of a good leadership. Without it, leaders will hardly influence their followers to accomplish their common goals. But how can one become a humble leader? We know that it’s hard to put ourselves low, especially when the authority of leadership is upon us. There are even people who don’t want their pride to be taken away from them. Well, pride is the opposite of humility, and because humility is good, pride lies in the opposite of good. In the following discussions, we will tackle further how to embrace humility and uplift people in your organization.

 

Do you really need to be proud?

Most people misunderstood pride and being proud. As I said earlier, some people even protect their pride at all cause. When people do something outstanding, they become proud of themselves. Are you proud of your children? Are you proud of your parents? You should be proud… these are the common words we hear about the seemingly positive things about pride. But is there really a positive pride? Pride and being proud is a sin. People just can’t distinguish pride from honor. Pride and honor are two different and opposing things. Pride is selfish, while honor is selfless. Pride is boastful, while honor is humble. Being proud attracts negative consequences, but being honored attracts great things. Thus, we really don’t need to be proud, but we need to be honored.

 

The effects of pride in leadership

Leaders who are seated in the highest positions are tempted with pride. There are leaders who don’t admit their own mistakes. There are also leaders who don’t want to share honor and recognition to others. There are many negative consequences of pride in leadership. When a leader doesn’t claim his share of fault and blame, his followers lose morale.  Likewise, when a leader fail to share the glory and honor achieved by a team or an organization, the trust and confidence of his followers also fade away. When a leader puts himself too high above from his people, his people are positioned too low from him. This situation makes a leader and his followers apart from each other. Thus, it ruins unity and harmony inside an organization. Humility is a sense of sacrifice – a very important attribute of a good leader. Without the sense of sacrifice, the whole organization cannot prosper and achieve success.

 

Getting rid of pride and becoming a humble leader

Now if you want to be a successful leader, you should be a humble one. And as a leader, you should be the one to lead in overcoming pride. To overcome pride, a leader should be wise to choose humility over pride. He should be strong to stand on that choice; he must be patient and enduring to stay on that stand. Becoming wise is a product of admitting that we don’t know everything and we should keep on learning. A leader’s strength is achieved by having great principles in his mind and heart. Patience and endurance are attained by believing and keeping one’s faith on those principles.

As you see, becoming a humble one is a process of digging into the basic yet deepest principles of human life. Humility and pride are both universal; they are basic. That is why to get rid of pride, you need to be deep to remove its roots. Finally, to be a humble leader, we need to plant deeply within ourselves, not only with humility alone, but also with the other basic virtues that support it, such as patience, self-sacrifice, honesty and faith.