Reframing Humility as a Good Thing

How to look at humility as a benefit rather than a curse

Truth wins out in the end.

Keep this in mind as jump into this post here.

If you take any modern leadership course or even something like the scrum master designation, you’ll most likely be exposed to this idea called servant leadership. Now, I’ll be totally honest: that’s a poorly worded term as words totally matter. Regardless of the originator’s intention, the receiver interprets and associates words however their brain processes them. This is why Google had to change their original slogan away from “Don’t be evil.” Even though the phrase clearly states to not be evil, the presence of that word “evil” alone made people constantly juxtapose Google with evil. It got bad enough that Google eventually ditched that slogan for the newer version, “Do the right thing.”

People won’t say this, but I’m certain this is why many people don’t really like to talk about servant leadership. The presence of that word “servant” often gets correlated to other concepts like “slavery” or “being made lesser than,” which are things with negative connotations. The same can be said about humility or being humble. Heck, take the tongue-in-cheek phrase “humble pie” as an example. Nobody wants to be associated that way!