Looking for a Humble Leader

from Ben's mom

The June 5, 2006 issue of TIME magazine carried a short viewpoint article by Sherron Watkins, the former Enron employee who blew the whistle on faulty accounting and illegal reporting there. It was a sideline article to the news of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's convictions for their part in the scandal. Watkins had some great things to say. If you are a subscriber, you can read the whole article here. Here is some of the wisdom Watkins shared:

...I still wonder whether we truly recognize and value the appropriate traits in our leaders. We want honest leaders who are decisive, creative, optimistic and even courageous, but we so easily settle for talk that marks those traits instead of action. Worse, we often don't even look for one of the most critical traits of a leader: humility. A humble leader listens to others. He or she values input from employees and is ready to hear the truth, even if it is bad news. Humility is marked by an ability to admit mistakes.

There is no humility in either Skilling or Lay. As I watched Lay after the verdict, I was deeply dismayed by his inability to discern truth. He did not discern the truth of my warnings in August 2001. He failed to discern the truth of his own culpability; he refuses to take responsibility. He hides behind words of Scripture, but even these he misuses.

By the fall of 2001 Lay was telling us that Enron's future had never looked better, even as he was cashing in his Enron shares. By taking care of himself, Lay violated one of Jesus' leadership lessons, found in Mark 9:35: "If anyone desires to be first, he must be last of all, and servant of all." We need to applaud the servant-leader, the one who clearly demonstrates that the interests of the organization and its customers, employees and investors (in that order) come first, not his own. Humility is a critically important trait in leaders. We have to ask ourselves, Is our society cultivating humility? Do we exhibit that trait individually and collectively as a nation? Will we stop and learn from the Enron lesson in leadership failures, or will we just shrug our shoulders and thank God we're not Ken Lay?

I've worked for some very charismatic and dynamic leaders. Unfortunately, like Ken Lay, most of them were limited by their lack of humility. For some, it has been nearly crippling. As we raise our children to (hopefully) accomplish great things, how can we instill in them both confidence and humility?

The fear of the LORD is to hate evil; pride and arrogance and the evil way and the froward mouth do I hate.-Prov. 8:13 (NKJV)