The strong leader… decisive, inspirational and right. Opening up to the idea that ‘I might be wrong here’ can be difficult for both aspiring and more experienced leaders to accept. Leaders don’t do that.

Leaders who open the door to intellectual humility, on the other hand, acknowledge their own fallibility. They recognize they don’t know everything and value the opinions of others. This facilitates their own adaptive growth, while also enabling wider organizational benefits and psychological safety for the people who work with them. And while many leaders will cognitively grasp the potential benefits of intellectual humility, and may even apply it usefully in some situations, it will lie dormant and unseen as an option in others. In this session, Tom Loncar expands on his recent article in The Psychologist: ‘Helping Leaders Harness Humility’. Five scenarios are explored that highlight the costs of more palpable absences of intellectual humility in leadership development, followed by an examination of psychological flexibility processes that can help surface and nurture it.

Key takeaways:

• Understand how intellectual humility has been viewed historically, and its more recent conceptualizations across subfields of psychology, leadership and organizational behavior.
• Explore scenarios where a lack of intellectually humility can occur in executive coaching and leadership development contexts and the nature of associated costs, along with contexts where intellectual humility may not be beneficial.
• Appreciate the role of psychological flexibility processes in fostering intellectual humility.

Helping Leaders Harness Humility