If you imagine what a successful leader looks like, the image that probably comes to mind isn’t a humble one. The popular icons of corporate success in the last forty years — Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Elon Musk, several generations of aggressive founders and combative CEOs — have been distinctively not humble. They’ve been confident, visionary, charismatic, sometimes brutal. Their humility, to the extent it appeared at all, was of the performed-for-magazine-profiles variety rather than the built-into-how-they-actually-operate variety.
So when a management researcher named Jim Collins, writing in 2001, proposed that the most effective corporate leaders he had studied were characterised primarily by humility, the claim was genuinely counterintuitive. Collins’s book Good to Great, which sold millions of copies and became one of the most influential business books of its generation, argued that the leaders who produced sustained transformation in the companies he studied shared a specific combination: fierce professional will combined with deep personal humility. He called these leaders Level 5 leaders, placing them at the top of a leadership hierarchy he had constructed.
The research that produced this claim, and the subsequent debates about whether it actually holds up, tell us something useful both about leadership and about how to read business research with appropriate care.
Collins’s methodology
Collins’s team at Stanford spent five years identifying companies that had made sustained transitions from merely-good performance to durably-great performance — at least fifteen years of consistent market outperformance after an inflection point. They found eleven such companies in their database of 1,435 US companies studied. They then compared these eleven with control companies that had had similar starting positions but hadn’t made the transition.
What distinguished the great companies, in Collins’s analysis, included several factors — disciplined hiring, focused strategy, a “flywheel” effect of compounding advantages. But the first and most distinctive factor was leadership. Every single one of the eleven companies that made the transition had, at the critical moment, a CEO who fit Collins’s Level 5 profile.
The profile was specific. These leaders were relentlessly ambitious — but for the company, not for themselves. They gave credit to others for successes and took responsibility for failures. They made sure their successors were better prepared than their predecessors had been. They avoided personal spotlight. They worked hard without needing to be seen working hard. Many had unglamorous backgrounds — one was a former military officer who had gone into paper mills; another was a pharmacist who took over a family drug-store chain. None matched the charismatic-visionary-CEO archetype that dominated business writing at the time.
This was an original contribution, and it landed. Good to Great became one of those rare pieces of business research that reshaped how executives, boards, and business-school curricula thought about leadership.
The academic research that has built on this
Separately from Collins’s popular work, academic researchers have developed more systematic research on humility in leadership. The most influential has come from the American organisational psychologist Bradley Owens at Brigham Young University, whose research programme has developed measurable operationalisations of leader humility and tested them in real organisations.
Owens’s definition of humble leadership has three specific components:
Willingness to acknowledge personal limitations and mistakes. The humble leader can say I was wrong, I don’t know, I need help. These sentences are genuinely hard for many leaders, because they seem to undermine authority. The research suggests the opposite: they build the kind of trust and willingness to be honest that actually strengthens influence.
Appreciation of others’ strengths and contributions. The humble leader notices what their colleagues and subordinates are good at, acknowledges it specifically, and genuinely relies on it. This isn’t the same as praise; it’s the specific recognition that the leader isn’t the only source of capability in the organisation.
Teachability — openness to learning from others, including those with less status. The humble leader can take feedback from a junior employee, consider ideas from outside their expertise, change their mind in response to new information. This is what distinguishes humble leadership from the more common pattern of leaders who acknowledge their own humanity abstractly but don’t actually update based on it.
Owens’s research, conducted across many different organisational contexts, has consistently found that teams led by humble leaders show higher engagement, better learning, more information-sharing, and — depending on the specific measure — better performance than teams led by less humble leaders. The effects are real and replicable, though their magnitude varies across contexts.
The Schein extension
A related and earlier tradition comes from the MIT organisational psychologist Edgar Schein, whose 2013 book Humble Inquiry developed a specific framework for what humble leadership actually looks like in practice.
Schein’s central argument was that most leaders ask too many questions of the “telling” variety — questions whose purpose is to confirm what the leader already thinks, or to guide the employee toward a predetermined answer. Humble inquiry, by contrast, consists of genuine questions — ones where the leader doesn’t already know the answer, and where the asking itself conveys that the respondent’s perspective matters.
Schein distinguished several types of questions. Humble inquiry is the most useful type — open-ended, genuinely curious, not leading. Diagnostic inquiry is slightly more directive, aimed at getting specific information. Confrontational inquiry involves challenging the respondent’s perspective. Process-oriented inquiry asks about how the conversation itself is going. His argument was that most leaders over-rely on diagnostic and confrontational modes and under-use humble inquiry, producing conversations where employees feel examined rather than heard.
This framework, which has been influential in executive coaching and leadership development, extends the Owens research by specifying one of the specific behaviours that humble leaders do differently from others. It’s not just that they feel humble; they ask questions in specific ways that produce different kinds of responses than non-humble leaders get.
The counter-thread worth hearing
Before endorsing the Collins-Owens-Schein tradition wholesale, several serious caveats.
The cases of leaders who have succeeded with aggressive, non-humble styles are too prominent to dismiss. Steve Jobs’s second tenure at Apple produced one of the most valuable companies in history, and by many accounts his leadership style included significant elements of abrasiveness, personal dominance, and unwillingness to acknowledge his own mistakes. Elon Musk, whatever one thinks of him personally, has built several important companies through leadership that nobody would describe as humble. Jack Welch’s General Electric outperformed for decades under a management style that emphasised intimidation and ruthless competition. These cases don’t disprove the humble-leadership thesis — the researchers would argue that they’re exceptions, or that the companies might have done even better with different leadership — but they complicate the picture.
Collins’s methodology has been critiqued. His selection criteria, applied retrospectively to find companies that succeeded, are vulnerable to the kind of survivorship bias that affects many business-research projects. Some of the eleven “great” companies he identified subsequently underperformed, raising questions about whether the transformations were as durable as he claimed. His qualitative characterisation of Level 5 leadership is less tightly operationalised than the Owens academic research, and some scholars have argued that Collins’s conclusions outran what his data could support.
And the humble-leadership frame has been criticised for cultural specificity. Research by Bradley Owens and others has found that humble leadership travels less well across cultures than the early enthusiasm suggested. In cultures with stronger hierarchical expectations — much of East Asia, parts of the Middle East, many traditional corporate settings — leaders who display too much humility can be perceived as weak or unfit for their role, and the benefits documented in American samples may not fully replicate. This doesn’t disprove the framework, but it does suggest that the right amount and expression of humility is context-dependent rather than universal.
So the honest picture is: humble leadership, as measured by the more rigorous academic research, really does produce better outcomes on most measures in many contexts. But the relationship is not uniform across cultures or situations, some famously non-humble leaders have succeeded, and the strongest popular versions of the claim (humility is the key to great leadership) probably overstate what the evidence can support.
What to actually practise
For a young person learning to work with others, with or without formal authority, a few practical implications emerge.
Distinguish genuine humility from performed humility. The performed version — self-deprecating comments, ritual acknowledgements of help received, modest language — is easy. The genuine version is harder: actually not knowing things you haven’t bothered to learn, actually being willing to be wrong, actually taking seriously ideas from people whose status is below yours. The performed version produces none of the benefits the research describes. The genuine version does, but it requires internal work that the performed version doesn’t.
Build the specific behaviours that humble leaders exhibit. Ask questions you don’t know the answer to. Acknowledge mistakes clearly rather than managing them away. Let people with relevant expertise lead on their expertise even when you’re the formal authority. Give credit for specific contributions rather than taking it yourself or generalising it. These are practices, not personality traits, and they can be cultivated.
Don’t confuse humility with lack of conviction. Collins’s Level 5 leaders had fierce resolve alongside their personal humility. The humility was about themselves — their capacity to be wrong, their debt to others, their role as servants of the organisation’s mission. The resolve was about the mission. Humility that erodes into indecision or lack of commitment doesn’t produce the effects the research describes; it produces something weaker.
Calibrate to context. In cultures or settings where hierarchical signals are expected, unmodulated humility can undermine your actual effectiveness. This doesn’t mean abandoning the underlying values, but it does mean expressing them in ways that fit the setting. A humble leader in a traditional Japanese corporation will express humility differently from a humble leader in a Silicon Valley startup, and that’s appropriate rather than hypocritical.
The question that remains
The deepest thing the humble-leadership research teaches, beyond the specific findings about Level 5 leaders and psychological safety and humble inquiry, is something about what leadership actually requires. The popular image of leadership emphasises the attributes that make the leader stand out — confidence, vision, charisma, force. The research literature, looked at carefully, keeps pointing to attributes that make the leader better at serving the people around them — the questions they ask, the credit they give, the limitations they acknowledge, the mistakes they own.
This is not a sentimental claim that being nice makes you effective. It’s a more specific claim that a particular configuration of self-awareness, teachability, and respect for others produces real organisational benefits that more self-focused configurations miss. The leaders with that configuration may be less visible than the ones making the news, but the organisations they build tend to outlast the organisations built by the more visible leaders. Over the long run, this matters more than the short-run glamour.
The question worth carrying, as you think about who you want to become as you acquire influence over others:
When you eventually have some authority over how other people spend their time, will they still want to work with you if you weren’t the one paying them?
Key research referenced: Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001); Bradley Owens’s research on humble leadership, beginning with Owens and Hekman 2012; Edgar Schein, Humble Inquiry (2013); methodological critiques of the Good to Great framework; cross-cultural research on the limits of humble-leadership effects.