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Humility: The No. 1 Job Skill Needed For The Smart Machine Age

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POST WRITTEN BY
Ed Hess, Professor of Business Administration and Batten Executive-in-Residence at UVA's Darden School of Business
This article is more than 8 years old.

In the next decade, Smart Machines will displace many workers in many industries including logistics, construction, distribution, sales, retail, services and even the jobs of highly trained professionals. If what you do is highly repetitive, reasonably predictable, involves limited choices or involves linear processes, you are at risk. Jobs with a low risk of displacement are those that require complex critical thinking, creativity, innovative thinking, high emotional engagement or perceptual problem solving requiring real-time adaptive physical dexterity.

There is general consensus about this coming workforce transformation evidenced by three recent well-reviewed books: Smart Machines (2013); The Second Machine Age (2014) and Rise of the Robots (2015). In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of the University of Oxford published the most definitive research to date attempting to predict the magnitude of jobs lost to technology over the next 10-20 years. They predicted that 47% of the U.S. workforce had a high probability of being displaced by technology and another 19% had a medium probability of displacement. The breadth of the impact is staggering.

Displacement will occur in professions thought to be immune to automation: lawyers, doctors, CPAs, architects, middle managers, journalists, and technically trained researchers. This will create an intense focus on the development of professionals’ critical thinking, innovative thinking and high emotional and social intelligence capabilities, because those are the jobs technology will be unable to do for the near future.

I believe humility is the basic building block that enables high proficiencies in those skills.

Why Humility?

Humility is having a realistic view of your strengths and weaknesses. We all have weaknesses. We all make mistakes. We all know far less than we think we know. Humility also involves having a balanced awareness and appreciation of self and others as compared to a strong appreciation of self. C.S. Lewis is reputed to have defined humility as not “thinking less of your self,” but “thinking of yourself less.” Humility is the opposite of arrogance, superiority and narcissism. It means stepping out of what Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a leading positive psychology scientist, calls our “cocoon of self-absorption.”

Humility enables more open-mindedness, better reflective listening and more effective collaboration—all of which are necessary for high-quality critical and innovative thinking and high emotional engagement with others. Think of humility as the being the gateway to thinking, listening, emotionally engaging and collaborating expertise. Because humility allows for thinking about the self less and others more, it also enables empathy, which is critical to the emotional engagement endemic to the processes of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Humility is a necessary condition for those skills because naturally, we are not good critical or innovative thinkers. In fact, it is nearly impossible for anyone to be good at those activities by themselves. Why? It’s because we know that cognitively we are generally fast, reflexive thinkers. Most of the time we seek to confirm what we already know. Emotionally, we generally are reflexively defensive thinkers. We tend to deny, deflect or defend challenges to how we think. We are also poor listeners because we are usually focused on confirming that our idea or belief is correct or better than the other person’s. Likewise, many of us view collaboration as a competition to see who is right, not a process to determine what is right.

One could call us very “me-oriented” in our thinking, listening and collaborating. This should not be surprising in a society that is very individualistic, or as some say, narcissistic. We celebrate “winners” and “people in power.” We judge ourselves by our “place” in the hierarchy; and we have been encouraged to exude self-confidence, self-promote and to “fake it till you make it.” We are very good at telling and advocating and not very good at listening and asking questions.

Unlike humans, smart machines have no ego, cognitive biases or emotional defenses. In many ways, smart machines will be better than us. They’ll remember more, remember better and retrieve knowledge more accurately and faster than us. They’ll be better at pattern matching and even make better sense out of large data sets. I think you get the picture—we need to take our game to a higher level.

To raise our game requires us to overcome our “humanness”—our reflexive autopilot way of cognitively and emotionally operating. To do that, we need the help of others, because it is practically impossible for any of us to control our cognitive biases ourselves. As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman has stated, “It is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.” To overcome our “humanness,” then, requires effective collaboration. To be a good critical or innovative thinker, you have to be a good “making meaning together” collaborator. “Making meaning together” is the process of deeply understanding each other’s mental models that underlie our beliefs and positions as well as understanding the assumptions and the evidentiary basis for those beliefs so all can be evaluated and considered in a rational manner. To do that, you have to emotionally engage with others and be a good reflective listener. To be a good reflective listener, you have to be open-minded.

To be good at open-mindedness, you have to decouple your ego from your beliefs (not values). That means you have to internalize that “you are not your ideas” and “our mental models are not reality” as so aptly stated by Ed Catmull, co-founder and president of Pixar Animated Studios. This requires quieting your ego, i.e., humility.

So, humility enables open-mindedness that enables reflective listening that is necessary for “making meaning together”. They are key skills that underlie critical thinking, innovative thinking, doing experiments, customer co-creation and emotionally engaging with people whom you manage, lead, team with or care about.

The Business of the Future

What does this mean for business organizations? If your value creation models are based on innovation, adaptation, entrepreneurship or constant improvement, then your organizational environment needs to enable and promote humility because it is the gateway to expertise in critical and innovative thinking, learning and high emotional engagement with others. Humility is a key enabler of reflective listening and effective collaboration, which are necessary for value creation based on knowing “how to learn” in fast changing environments.

Too many organizations today cling to old internal systems based on fear and competition, which encourage ego protection and inhibit humility and all the good learning and thinking behaviors that flow from it. Organizations of the future must adopt a new way of doing business:

Bridgewater Associates, LP, Google, Intuit, Pixar and W.L. Gore & Associates are examples of companies that embrace the new way. They emphasize humility through cultures that devalue ego and hierarchy. Intuit’s culture is evident in CEO Brad Smith’s statement that “It is time to bury Caesar.” Google’s is evident in its the policy that the best data-driven ideas win, and the highest paid person’s opinion (the “HIPPO”) does not reign supreme. At W.L. Gore, one is deemed a leader only if others want to follow—a leadership model that devalues big egos. Bridgewater Associates has the most advanced internal system designed to mitigate ego that I have studied. At Bridgewater big egos aren’t tolerated because as Ray Dalio said to me: “We all are dumb shits.”

Those companies also have put in place learning tools and processes to drive learning mindsets and behaviors. Many have rules of engagement for collaborative meetings. Many have put in place learning processes such as root cause analysis, rapid experimentation, critical thinking, design thinking, after-action reviews and processes for managing one’s ego, thinking and emotions. All of these companies stress that leaders and managers have to role model the desired mindsets and behaviors. All of them accept the fact that this type of collaborative behavior is not efficient or mistake-free, but it produces outstanding results when teams are open-minded, non-defensive and more concerned about what is correct than who is correct.

Central to the success of these kinds of cultures is each individual’s willingness to embrace humility as the enabling mindset and to view humility as liberating because humility makes not knowing easier. Humility frees one to be as honest, direct and curious as a child, as skeptical as a philosopher, as courageous as an explorer and as open-minded, data-driven and truth seeking as a scientist. In this kind of environment, “team” becomes something more than a label, and individuals get comfortable with having their thinking challenged. In fact, they become uncomfortable when their thinking is not challenged. How To Change?

How does a person who has become successful under the old rules and the individualistic “look out for me” model suddenly embrace humility? Well, you don’t. It takes hard work and a change in mindset. Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, said his personal transition began when he agreed to get real feedback from his direct reports and was surprised to discover how much deferred maintenance he had to work on. For others, it may take a big failure in one’s life to motivate a big reevaluation of self. Others can be transformed by going to work for a company that embraces humility and where to be successful you have to change.

I know it is hard. I personally have been on a journey to “quiet my ego” and embrace humility so I can be more open-minded and better able to reflectively listen and effectively collaborator in order to take my thinking to a more consistently higher level.

How did I start my change process some years ago? Step one was learning about mindfulness and meditating. I took that step after it became clear to me that Ray Dalio’s impressive learning philosophy had been influenced by his practice of meditation. This was transformative for me.

Step two was learning from the work of expert critical thinkers Richard Paul and Linda Eller to decouple my ego from my beliefs by adopting a mindset of defining myself not by what or how much I think I know but rather by defining myself by whether I use good thinking processes. I expanded that to include whether I also use good listening and collaborating processes. That was another game changer for me because it allowed me to operationalize the beliefs that I am not my ideas and my mental models are not reality.

Step three was creating tools to prep myself daily for engagements and to grade my thinking, listening and collaborating performance. If I performed poorly, I had to learn to reflect on why and how that happened in order to prevent it from happening the next time. That required me to notice early internal warning signals of oncoming emotional defensiveness or too much “its all about me” behavior.

Step four was internalizing the research findings in positive psychology on how gratitude helps build appreciation for others, which helps one step out of the “cocoon of self-absorption”. It really is not all about me.

I am still a work-in-process. Currently I am working hard on not automatically responding when asked a question but rather asking the speaker questions before I respond in order to make sure I understand what the person is really getting at and why. I am also working on “making meaning” with others rather than just explaining why I believe something to be true. That has been eye-opening for me and has taken my collaboration effectiveness to a higher level.

I have learned that taking my thinking, listening and collaborating to a higher level never can be taken for granted. It is way too easy to revert to a norm of autopilot driven by ego and fear. I have learned that we all are insecure and afraid—it is all a matter of degree. What differentiates people is how they manage those tendencies. And the work environment really matters in all of this. A positive emotional humanistic work environment makes of all this easier.

I believe in the Smart Machine Age humility will be the #1 job skill because it is the gateway for the kind of human thinking and emotional engagement that technology will not be able to do as well as us for at least the near decades. Humility also will be a key cultural and behavioral attribute of organizations that create value through critical thinking, innovation, and entrepreneurship processes.

Ed Hess is Professor of Business Administration and Batten Executive-in-Residence at the Darden Graduate School of Business and author of Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization.