Dr. Brad Owens is an Associate Professor in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. There his teaching and research focus on ethical leadership in business. His work examines the impact of humility on leader effectiveness, relational energy, and team functioning, and has received a number of awards and funding from The Academy of Management, as well as the Templeton Foundation. Brad’s work has received wide media coverage, including in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review. In this podcast, Brad and I discuss the details of what humility is, how it is often mischaracterized, and its effects for business leaders.
APA citation: Cazzell, A. R. (Host). (2020, August 11). The Best Leaders are Humble with Bradley Owens [Audio Podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.ambercazzell.com/post/msp-ep37-BradOwens
NOTE: This transcript was generated automatically. Please excuse typos and errors.
Amber Cazzell (01:17):
Today, I'm excited to be with Brad Owens. Brad is a friend of mine and a mentor of mine. We've collaborated on a couple of projects from my doc while I was in my doctoral program and continuing on today. So I'm really excited to be here with Brad. Brad is a business professor and he teaches courses on business ethics and his research niches in humility, which is pretty exciting space. And I'm looking forward to learning more about some of the research history that he has, that I've just heard tidbits up over the years. So Brad, thanks so much for agreeing to come on the podcast today.
Bradley Owens (01:56):
Thank you, Amber. It's great to be with you.
Amber Cazzell (01:59):
So Brad, I always start these podcasts out by hearing about researchers' backgrounds. And I'm curious, I don't know that we've really discussed it much. How did you come to be interested in business ethics? How did you become a business professor? Why are you researching humility?
Bradley Owens (02:20):
Great questions. So how did I become interested in becoming a business professor? Actually I had no idea what professors did or, you know, what research even was. And I had a, a career project in my master's program where I had to interview a bunch of people about their careers and on a whim just decided to include a, to throw a professor in there and just was blown away at how much I loved what they said about the lifestyle of professor and how much autonomy they had and kind of creative license and the balance teaching and doing research just sounded like a really full and rich career path. And so that's kind of what set me off generally toward pursuing a degree in academia. And I was always kind of interested as I read biographies and, and kind of books on history about leadership.
Bradley Owens (03:21):
And so I kind of gravitated toward this this field of, of business and management a core piece or a big piece of the research in this field has to do with how to lead well or how to motivate people or pretty visions for organization. So I guess in a nutshell, that's kind of where that ambition came from or that interest. So as, as far as business ethics, that was kind of a transition. I was kind of a pure organizational behavior HR guy for a few years and then was recruited here to the Marriott school of business to teach ethics in part, because they saw my research on leader humility is having clear kind of moral underpinnings. And so, yeah, so to answer your question, it was kind of just an accidental thing, you know, no grand vision from the beginning, just kind of incrementally making small decisions that led here.
Amber Cazzell (04:30):
Yeah. Cool. So did you think of humility as moral yourself before? Like, were you thinking of that from a moral frame of reference before going to BYU?
Bradley Owens (04:43):
Not entirely I'm from the beginning, I was just thinking in terms of leader effectiveness. So I first happened upon the idea of leader humility when reading the popular book. Good to great by Jim Collins, where he talks about the concept of level five leaders, those who have kind of this paradoxical blend of intense professional will and competence and decisiveness, everything we think of from the typical top down leader, but then combined all that with humility, that fosters lots of great outcomes. And so I thought that was a really curious combination. And so went into the academic literatures to try and find more information about humility and just couldn't really find very much there's a lot of people that wrote about it in theoretical terms, but not a lot of concrete details and, and nobody had really tried to or had successfully measured it. And so initially it was just leadership effectiveness and how to maybe temper some of the stronger characteristics of leadership. And it's only since then that have come to understand and read about how much humility has at the very root of, of moral philosophy in the minds of many people.
Amber Cazzell (06:11):
Yeah. That's, that's interesting. So it sounds like your interest really originated from a popular book that triggered you going into the literature and feeling dissatisfied with what you were finding there.
Bradley Owens (06:26):
Yeah, that's right. Okay.
Amber Cazzell (06:28):
So what were your first steps then? In terms of research, how did I mean, it sounds, I know you've done work with creating measures of humility. I also know from our conversations over the years that you have well formed opinions about the construct of humility and how to define it, was that your starting place?
Bradley Owens (06:53):
Yeah. So what I did, I love Jim Collins book on humility, and I thought he did a pretty good job in, in defining it. But as I looked to create more nuance and, and kind of, kind of identify different perhaps dimensions of humility that kind of represented this overall construct or behaviors that could be reflected on a measure. I th those that level of detail is what I wasn't able to find. And so with a couple of research assistants, we combed the literature on humility. We looked at philosophical and psychological journals and independently kind of made note and kind of content analyzed what was out there and then came back and discussed and tried to boil it all down as best we could into a concrete definition that we can then use to create a measure. And in some cases we found because humility has such a rich history. One definition had 13 different dimensions and making it an unwieldy construct to operationalize into a measure. And so through a process of kind of identifying what are the dimensions that seem to be most core what are kind of ideas or behaviors that STEM from humility, but maybe not represented by the core attribute of humility kind of parsing this these concepts apart. We, we settled on three core dimensions of humility.
Amber Cazzell (08:40):
I'd love to hear about those. Let's talk about those.
Bradley Owens (08:44):
Yeah. So the first dimension that was, I think if my memory serving me correctly, it was mentioned the most often from our independent analysis of the was a willingness to see oneself accurately, and the idea of a willingness to see oneself accurately important because achieving perfect self awareness is, is maybe not possible, but humble individuals embrace the journey or the quest to accurate self self awareness. And so there's
Bradley Owens (09:20):
Quite a bit of literature in psychology about those who have an inflated sense of self have lots of maladaptive outcomes. And it's kind of a brittle ego defense system and less social poise and presence. And there's, there's lots of benefits to instead trying to understand the self accurately, and then they don't have the taxing burden of trying to defend or maintain an inflated persona. So that was the first one. The second one was an appreciation of other's strengths and contributions. Humble individuals are not threatened when they see other people who have strengths or who make contributions that they have not made or strengths that they do. They don't have. Instead they're willing to draw attention to the strengths and contributions of others so that everyone can learn from these individuals. And in some ways, humility is like social learning on steroids, where you become the student, a student of the strengths of those around you.
Bradley Owens (10:35):
And then you have a more nuanced idea of the kind of interpersonal resources around you and people that you can learn from go to UC mentors everywhere who can help you in specific ways to, to continue to grow or to learn. So humble individuals see others, not as rivals but as exemplars from whom they might learn, it helps someone transcend the comparative competitive social lens. That seems natural to most of us. And then the last dimension is teachability, and this is this willingness to be open to learning feedback, new ideas from others to seek advice, a continual desire to learn. And so these three dimensions we used, we developed a bunch of items reflecting these three dimensions, and then through the process of administering to five different samples, we were able to whittle it down to a reliable a measure that had was differentiated from existing and related constructs, but also was predictive of some important outcomes.
Amber Cazzell (11:56):
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So when you were talking about that first dimension, a willingness to see oneself accurately, I wonder if you could speak to kind of the distinction between modesty and humility here, because, you know, like you were giving the example of not thinking of yourself in an inflated way. And I think in the past, you've kind of also contrasted humility with modesty.
Bradley Owens (12:27):
Yeah. So I see modesty is as not being boastful and sometimes underselling one's accomplishments and some cases with holding positive information about the self. I see modesty is different from humility in that modesty doesn't really have to do with a motivation for personal learning or development per se. It's just having the social sensitivity, not to draw too much attention to, or talk about the self too much or to boast about the self. So I definitely think they would be related, but there's just aspects of humility related to personal learning and self awareness that modesty does not capture.
Amber Cazzell (13:15):
Do you think of modesty as a virtue as well?
Bradley Owens (13:19):
I do. I don't know if it's quite as powerful over time. I think you won't ruffle feathers with modesty and people will feel more comfortable around you generally. But I think that there's something deeper with humility that reflects a positive kind of self journey towards developing in lots of different virtuous and instrumental aspects of the self.
Amber Cazzell (13:51):
Yeah. And this sort of reminds me of this idea I've heard thrown around a bit that humility is a gateway virtue or like a master virtue.
Bradley Owens (14:04):
Yeah. I've heard of it that way, as well as like a mother virtue that gives birth to the others where it provides both the self awareness to see what gaps you currently have in your character, as well as kind of an innate belief in personal development that not only can you kind of perceive those gaps, but that there's something you can do about it. That's through effort and learning from others and being teachable, you actually can help begin to bridge those gaps.
Amber Cazzell (14:36):
Yeah. Interesting. So do you, it sounds like you agree with that view.
Bradley Owens (14:43):
Yeah, I do.
Amber Cazzell (14:47):
How, I'm curious too, about to what degree there's shared consensus around the definition of humility and sort of the factors that you're putting forward. What's your take on that? Do you get the sense that researchers are coming to a consensus?
Bradley Owens (15:15):
I think we're getting closer in psychology, as well as in, in business, there's been more kind of an explosion of research in the last, you know, eight, 12 years I would say. And typically literatures do begin over time to kind of congeal around a definition. My take on humility has been more kind of social or interpersonal, like the displayed manifestations of humility. My interest was in organizational context, which is a rich social environment and especially the, the interactions between leaders and organizational members others in psychology have taken a more kind of intra personal view of humility viewing humility as one of the intellectual virtues that is worth cultivating. And so I, I think that there's those who have the more social bent on humility. And it seems from what I've seen, the definitions are, are pretty close. There may be a dimension, kind of an extra dimension here or a phrasing that's a bit different. But intellectual humility and then social humility, those definitions seem to be more, there's more consensus around those definitions over time that I've seen.
Amber Cazzell (16:43):
Okay. And could you define intellectual humility for me? I'm not sure that I really know what that means.
Bradley Owens (16:56):
I can try, I'm not an expert on intellectual humility. But I do know that it has a lot to do with the degree to which you are open in it, it relates to this idea of teachability, even though it's kind of an internal inside your own mind type of a construct and the confidence with which you attach to your own opinions. You know, you, you leave open the possibility that the conclusions you've arrived at may be altered with subsequent information and rather than some intellectual rigidity about one's views and conclusions. So it's, it's cognitively intellectually seeing that you, you, you may have gaps or limits and rather than being diffident about that, you're motivated to, to try and again, continue to learn and to refine your thinking and to be open to others. And so it's just, just more humility inside one's own mind. And certainly that influences the way that people talk to others and the questions they ask. But yeah, that's hard. It's just rooted in that kind of cognitive stance that you have towards your own positions, your thoughts and your current knowledge.
Amber Cazzell (18:26):
Okay. I want to shift gears now and talk a bit about some of the empirical work you've done looking at humility in organizations. So it sounds to me like you did a lot of construct work with humility first and then moved into examining it in action. Is that fair to say?
Bradley Owens (18:49):
Yeah.
Amber Cazzell (18:50):
Okay. So what were some of your first empirical studies with humility in leadership?
Bradley Owens (18:57):
So with regard to leadership we've found a company that was willing to let us gather a bunch of data. It was a healthcare company, and we found in this particular organization that leaders who scored higher on humility and we had the employees actually rate their leaders on humility. And then we took a consensus score of, of those humility ratings. And we found that leaders who showed more humility were more likely to retain their talented employees. So high performing employees like to work for humble leaders. Maybe they feel more listened to, they just feel more engaged, generally the leader is sharing credit. And so the job attitude that kind of linked leader humility to re job retention was job satisfaction. Those employees were much more satisfied in their work and therefore they were more motivated to stay and to work hard.
Bradley Owens (20:06):
So another finding that we had in the same organization was that leaders who show humility, foster what's called a learning goal orientation, and those that they lead. And that's where the employee, rather than doing their work to try to kind of impress and prove their competence to others. They are inclined to be motivated to try to select harder tasks, to choose higher goals, tougher goals in order to develop, to grow and to learn. And there's lots of great outcomes that occur when you have employees that have a learning goal orientation versus a performance goal orientation. Performance is really important. But learning goal oriented employees actually perform better over time and they, they grow their, their value over time as well.
Amber Cazzell (21:10):
That's interesting. That kind of reminds me of the fixed mind, like some of the mindsets work with Carol Dweck. Are you familiar with that?
Bradley Owens (21:17):
Yeah. In fact learning goal orientation is rooted in that growth mindset and then the performance performance goal orientation is rooted in the fixed mindset.
Amber Cazzell (21:29):
Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. very cool. So, and you, at one point had mentioned like really a really interesting study that you did with, I wanna say it was the Marines, was it the Marines?
Bradley Owens (21:45):
I'm with West point with with, yeah, with that study Colonel Jordan Swain, who is in charge of the leadership development curriculum at West point, he gave me a call. I think it was the day he defended his dissertation at Yale which was entitled humility in military leadership. And he called and he said, we need to do something together. He'd been thinking a lot about humility even before his dissertation and, and why it's important in the military. And someone in his position where he gets these really impressive cadets who come in, who've been very high, achieving all their lives and they, they make it into West point, which is difficult to do. And then they are given some really excellent training. And they're, they're often told that they're the best of the best. And, and Colonel Swain said their training is excellent.
Bradley Owens (23:00):
And this is based on my, my memory. I'm trying to piece together this conversation, but that, but the humility is something we need to learn. How better to kind of legitimize as an important piece of an overall suite of leadership approaches or, or characteristics. Because over-confidence, they've learned just from kind of anecdotal evidence in the after action reviews after a mission, as they evaluate how things went that overconfidence or arrogance hubris that really endangers people and can get people killed. And whereas humility enables a leader to kind of value and empathetically understand the fears you in value the lives of the soldiers more than their own career and it helps to, to save and prevent undue loss of life. So we've been over to West point to interview West point trained leaders who've been out in the field and that have been invited back to West point to train the next generation of, of officers.
Bradley Owens (24:10):
And I'm asking them to share with us stories from combat and special forces missions about how leader humility. I mean, does it have a place in, in military leadership? When is it a good idea when, when it is a, is it a bad idea? How does it influence the soldiers during, you know, missions afterwards and even after they go home from a PTSD standpoint, are there any connections there when a leader is, is willing to kind of show humility and kind of their own humanness? And the things that we learned were pretty powerful. And first of all, at least to us, we, we felt that there seems to be some very important psychological benefit for a leader to be able to say, maybe after the mission is over and the leader has gotten them through a very difficult and dangerous situation for the leader to able be able to say to the soldiers.
Bradley Owens (25:20):
You know, I also was very scared, you know, out of my mind even though I didn't show it back there cause I needed to get us through there. And it's okay for you that it's very difficult to process what we all just saw. You're still a good soldier you still belong. And so I just, you know, spending some of that kind of leadership capital by opening up their own reactions to a very difficult situations, helps a soldier to also be able to say my kind of battle proven and experienced leader also had a similar human reaction to something very awful that we just experienced and that it again helps them to not feel so isolated psychologically. Like everyone's okay with this, except for me, everyone's handling this so well, except for me. And that's what humility helps to kind of break down and create instead connections and maybe ways of psychologically processing, making sense of and healing from some of the very difficult things that the soldiers have to see and go through.
Amber Cazzell (26:35):
Yeah. Yeah. And I think you had told me that you actually, in addition, I want to say you, you got some empirical evidence for the hypothesis that humility and leaders might save lives or save injuries from happening.
Bradley Owens (26:54):
At this point, we have just the, the qualitative evidence. So we're doing a qualitative study first, and we're talking with Colonel Swain, dr. Swain and putting together a field study where we hopefully can train some cadet leaders to train and prepare for a specific field mission with more humility in showing more humility in their approach. And then others with kind of a more kind of neutral leadership approach and observing whether or not there are there's more adaptability or whether or not the different groups perform differently in tasks. These wouldn't be life or death tasks, but ones where there's quite a few metrics about success and leadership effectiveness. So we're working on that. But actually going into the field and gathering empirical data is something that we hope to do in the future, but we haven't been able to kind of put that together just yet.
Amber Cazzell (28:02):
Got it. Yeah. I didn't realize that this research was ongoing, how cool. It's a very, very interesting and, and also refreshing to see some of this work being applied in such important contexts. So is, are you helping to develop a humility development program there at West point, or I'm curious like how one goes about developing humility, cultivating that
Bradley Owens (28:38):
With West point Colonel Swain, he wrote some, a book chapter and he has some curriculum that he's using in order to train the cadets on humility. And so it's, I think it's the first year that he's been using it. And so we are learning how effective it is and getting feedback about it. Aside from what's happening at West point, some colleagues and I have been engaging some corporate and other business audiences and taking them through some trainings that are based on these three dimensions that I mentioned and some self reflective exercises and hopefully adding them going back into their organizations and getting kind of ongoing feedback about how this humility, humility development is, is going and, and the effects that's having. We do have some research in China having to do with, we call it this nostalgia project.
Bradley Owens (29:44):
And that's where the leaders actually reflect on a positive past experience. It's this self-affirmation self-validation idea where psychological resources are kind of cultivated at the beginning of the day, that enables a person then to have the kind of wherewithal to display humility, which in some cases it can take some psychological resources to admit mistakes or admit what you don't know. And so having those daily kind of psychological sprucing up or boosting through the self-affirmation process is something we're, we're looking into to see whether or not that could be one viable way for, for developing humility, but the, in our kind of engagement with people and trying to help them to really embrace this, we really don't come across people, very many people who don't think that humility is a good idea in leadership in most cases they feel like they've had enough leaders they've observed others who have had too little humility and they've observed their effects or how they personally, personally felt being led by such a leader.
Bradley Owens (31:05):
But I think that there's a difference between being, you know, aware of and thinking it's a good idea versus having the skill to actually incorporate it, or for the idea of humility leadership to go from one's head to kind of, to their heart where they're motivated to kind of embrace and practice it. And, and that's an important idea, Aristotle viewed virtues like humility as more like skills that we choose to develop rather than innate traits that we either have, or we don't. Right. And so besides kind of defining what we mean by humility and relating some research that shows why it's effective really convincing people that humility is more like a habit that you can choose to inculcate, you know, reflexively into your, into your kind of daily interactions. Cause unless they believe that it, it, it's very difficult to help them to develop it if they believe it's an innate trait or they have this fixed mindset about humility.
Amber Cazzell (32:17):
Right, right. Really interesting. So in a last minutes here, I would love to hear some more about kind of what ideas you're chewing on, what research is in the pipeline for you and what you might want to see other scholars pick up on from work and run with, or just general ideas you'd like to see fleshed out and developed more.
Bradley Owens (32:45):
Mm yeah. That's a, that's a great question. That's certainly something that coauthors and I are talking about and thinking about quite a bit, I'm fascinated with how psychologist are using MRIs and EEG data in order to kind of link the hard sciences with the soft sciences and understand what are the neural kind of networks that are associated with some of these psychological constructs like humility. And so currently working with some scholars at Arizona state who have been doing a lot of this work. They, they use EEG kind of caps that they put on people's heads, and then they have them engage in tasks. And we are at, we have some data and the beginnings are encouraging where we're finding that there seems to be some specific neural pathways that are correlated with leaders penchant towards narcissism versus humility.
Bradley Owens (33:57):
And so that's a place where we want to go further. Hopefully it can generate some insights that could be useful for development or just understand the construct from a physiological standpoint. So also with just the idea of developing humility, that's something that I think most leadership scholars say we need to get better at empirically capturing the effect of developmental efforts. And so that's always going to be something that we're interested in the antecedents of humility whether it's life experiences or other personality traits or salient life events I think would also be important to understand, again, to inform development. We have some qualitative statements about individuals who experienced a very inspiring mentor who in their own way was a very accomplished, successful, powerful, but yet showed a lot of humility. So and this individual before that feeling like humility is not something that they necessarily wanted to embrace in their leadership, but when they observed this individual up close, that inspired them, that they really opened them up to wanting to emulate this individual. We also have some anecdotal evidence that when people experience significant life are acquainted with how fragile life is sometimes that also changes them and, and, and helps them to, to really embrace virtues like humility. So understanding these types of kind of the underpinnings or antecedents of humility more fully, and getting empirical about these antecedents, I think is an important path forward for this literature.
Amber Cazzell (35:59):
Yeah. You know, as you were finishing that, and this is backtracking a bit, but I was thinking about what you said that a lot of people don't like, like they agree that humility is needed. And yet when I think about maybe not corporate business, but like small startups, I often think about entrepreneurial types that I don't associate with humility that go out and pull off these big unicorn business success stories. So I, I'm a little bit surprised that there seems to be a disconnect between these broader societal narratives that I, I mean, maybe I have a skewed view because I'm kind of involved in the, in the startup world, but that you should like go big or go home, be bold, be like stretch your limits, try to pull off something that, you know, doesn't, doesn't seem like an accurate view of the self in a way. I'm surprised about like a disconnect between that and then what you've actually witnessed in your research and in your, your practitioning.
Bradley Owens (37:25):
Yeah. They, the startup personality is an interesting one and I think it takes lots of different strengths to really be successful. And I am aware of some research about like angel investors and what characteristics they look for in people they choose to ultimately invest in or the, you know, the leads leaders of startups that they choose to give money to. And they definitely are looking for someone who's extremely confident that they can persevere through huge amounts of, of adversity. And, and I think most people who begin startups are aware, hopefully that it's the vast majority of them don't work. And so you have to be, have the kind of personality to, to risk just engaging in a, in a, in that kind of a risky venture. But at the same time angel investors also want to see that this person is willing to take feedback from them who are going to, many of them comprise their own board of directors.
Bradley Owens (38:39):
They need to see someone who's willing to adapt according to market changes and willing to, to, to, to be learning continually in order to, again, try and take advantage of, of opportunities to pivot or, you know, competitive advantages that that present themselves. So I think that us, like Jim Collins mentioned in his level five leadership idea that you need someone with intense professional will. But if that's, if they don't have something to help temper or guide that like the characteristics the dimensions of humility, then sometimes those strong characteristics can actually be someone's undoing. And I think it was Marshall Goldsmith. If I'm remembering, right, he wrote a book called what got you here, won't get you there. And basically this idea that you have individuals who have achieved some success in their careers but in order to get to the very top of organizations using the hard driving kind of authoritative decisive, larger than life kind of tactics of influence and leadership are just not necessarily going to work.
Bradley Owens (40:08):
And they, there needs to be what's called Oh, I was reading this Harvard business review article and it's called the second leadership rebirth or something like that, where you, you do your own personal pivot and reinventing where you add humility to these other characteristics. And then that enables you to build a team and to build that deep level of trust with others, and actually learn from and a broader set of experts as you ascend and go up an organization there's so much more for you to know, and to manage that you can't really keep track of yourself. You become increasingly reliant on experts and specialists, and it becomes increasingly difficult for any one person to just figure it all out at the top. And so adding humility to the mix is really important. So a startup person, they are the entire organization from the get go.
Bradley Owens (41:15):
And so they, they need to be able to be all those things. And that might be one of the reasons why it's so difficult to do this is having a person that's that complete individual. And of course there are exceptions, you know, people who lack humility who become very successful, but the benefits of humility enable I think, competitive advantage over time and adaptability and ongoing learning. So I'm not sure if I answered your question directly, but I think it's a fascinating idea that when we see people who are so so self confident in, in their vision of, of this product, they want to bring to market and they kind of need to be but hopefully we can make a case that take all of that and then add humility to it as well. And your chances of success increase.
Amber Cazzell (42:11):
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. In general, have you, as a researcher seen changes in how like pop culture orients towards humility, like this is sort of a broad question, but you know, like when I, when I was speaking with a researcher who worked out of Florida and I think, I think she takes more of a modesty kind of a definition of humility. But she was saying like, almost the opposite, like everybody out there, these college students, I should say, college student samples out in Florida, or like, well, ma like this is dumb. Why wouldn't he, like, it's not a good thing that people reach for. Now maybe that's partly because she's using it just a different definition, but I'm curious if you've seen like approaches or attitudes towards humility change over the years.
Bradley Owens (43:21):
I think that since like the turn of the millennium, when positive psychology started to really kind of get bigger in the kind of collective psyche of what we, we should be understanding humans, we understand so much of what's wrong and how humans are broken, but really the mission of social science and psychology in particular is to understand the entire breadth of human functioning. And that's opened up, I think a lot of science as well as kind of popular dialogue about virtues like humility and, and what place they have in our contemporary world. And so I, because I've been looking for these and kind of getting a pulse on what, what are people talking about with regard to humility and how well is it being embraced? I see lots and lots of evidence of, of popular articles in business. And other places saying that that humility has becoming more and more kind of embraced and seen as needed.
Bradley Owens (44:35):
At the, also at the turn of the millennium, we had a bunch of pretty large scale corporate scandals that many of which were attributed to the hubris and sense of entitlement and narcissism or the executives involved. And so there was this perceived crisis of leadership where we seem to be this is something missing in the business, student training and socialization that were given to these budding a next generation business leaders. We need to make some changes in order to help avoid creating these types of business leaders that are involved in these large scale scandals that hurt a lot of people and, and humility was identified as part of that remedy in solving this crisis of leadership. And so since then, there's quite a bit of popular press articles that you can find where people are advocating. You know, we need to understand this more and embrace it.
Bradley Owens (45:38):
There's also scholars that say humility sounds nice. I know there's a book Jeff Pfeffer wrote and I know Jeff about how, you know, leadership and who really understands power and how to, to keep and, and leverage power to get things done that, that humility is not a core piece of, of one strategy for ascending to the top of an organization. And he could probably say that better than I, I would, but I know that in his book, he, he talks about how humility is not something that leaders necessarily need to embrace. It's kind of a popular in vogue thing. But one that practically doesn't really work in developing powerful and successful leaders and hopefully with our accumulating kind of research and the publications that we have that we're, we hope to be able to change that, that view. Yeah. So there is a unique kind of power that is associated with humility and leaders who are willing to take kind of the short term sacrifices to lay this foundation where everybody feels free and kind of liberated to grow, to, to admit mistakes, but then also learn. And that the leader is, is investing kind of building this legacy of continual learning and credit sharing that actually can lead to very powerful economic outcomes.
Amber Cazzell (47:23):
Very cool. Well, Brad, thank you so much again for coming on the podcast. It's been fun Talking to you and getting to learn more about your background that even over the years of working with you, I didn't know. So thanks so much for sharing all of that.
Bradley Owens (47:41):
You're welcome, Amber, it's been a privilege being with you.