Surprising Truth: Humility Makes You Smarter

As many of you know, I am in the final stretch of my book manuscript Radical Humility: Be a Badass Leader AND a Good Human with Amplify Publishing Group (You will be the first ones to know when it is out for pre-order!). 

The overarching thesis of the book is that to be a badass leader who achieves strong results and develops your people in today’s tumultuous environment; you need to adapt your leadership approach to our current reality. You need to lead with Radical Humility.

As part of my research for the book, I discovered numerous surprising truths about humility in leadership and life. Here is one all of you who have kids will find helpful.

What is the most important characteristic you want to teach your children to help them get good grades at school? Hard work? Thoroughness? Self-confidence? No doubt those are all important, but as it turns out, what is even more important to getting good grades is being humble. 

In a remarkable study, Professor Bradley Owen, one of the foremost academic experts on humble leadership, surveyed and measured the performance of 144 students at the University of Washington in my hometown of Seattle. Over the course of the management class, students took a mental ability test, several other psychological assessments, and rated each other on humility.

The results showed the most important predictor of a student’s overall performance was humility. It's more important than mental ability (aka smarts), self-efficacy, and conscientiousness. What’s more, humility was the best predictor for how much a student improved between the midterm and final exam. Humility even compensated for mental ability, meaning students who scored lower on that test were able to keep up with “smarter” kids if they were humbler.

According to the research, the reasons for these surprising findings are:

(1) Humble students are more willing to ask for and receive feedback from their professors and fellow students. They are also more willing to act on it.

(2) They more accurately assessed themselves, which made them better at realistically planning how much time and effort they needed to study for exams.

(3) Humble students were more likely to appreciate the habits of strong students and then successfully model their behavior accordingly, which increased their own performance.

As a dad and even before I was aware of this study, I have been emphasizing the importance of humility, especially as it pertains to study habits, with my boys. I still remember my younger son Liam working hard on a middle school geography project that the teacher did not initially seem impressed with. By embracing the humble skill of frequently checking in with his teacher and proactively asking for feedback on what specifically he could do better, as well as emulating some of the habits of the strongest students in his class, he was able to significantly improve his final project, earning him an excellent grade.

Want your kids to get good grades? Teach them to humbly ask for feedback, know themselves, and model the behavior of their strongest peers (hint: these tips also apply to us adults in the workplace!)