Hi Andrea,

Thank you for the post. What you mentioned as intellectual humility is a very interesting idea to me. Intellectual humility is important in a world of self-made experts. It also allows for the wisdom of the group. Hughes, Beatty and Dinwoodie (2014) recognize this as the knowledge at all levels of the organization that can help forming strategies. I find the idea of intellectual humility very empowering because it allows all members of the group to participate and contribute. It also recognizes that there are many opinions on any given topic and that different perspectives exist. Intellectual humility allows for many voices to be heard and that is a positive thing. I am interested in hearing more voices in policy making, and global media coverage of the news. Hearing voices from other language groups and socio-economic backgrounds would produce more intellectual humility in any population in general. I wonder too how our business strategies might change if we heard more voices from other ethnic/linguistic groups. It is interesting to remember that Greenleaf (monograph) said that servant leadership can only come with listening because you can only serve when you know what the needs are and you can only know what the needs are by listening.

I’m interested in thinking about the applications of transformational servant leadership in the context of intellectual humility and how they apply in a totally different situation or environment. I am thinking of the Middle East and Asia and how different it is to North America. How does transformational servant leadership apply in situations with very different ideas of power, hierarchies, and care? Leader as patron, vs. leader as guide (Ungerer, Ungerer and Herhldt, 2016) is an example of this. Is it always possible to have a leader as guide?

In Becoming a Strategic Leader (Hughes, Beatty, Dinwoodie, 2014), the authors discuss strategy as a learning process, where the environment and the strategy are constantly being learned, implemented, reassessed and revised again. This idea of constant learning is consistent with the way the world works now, with new information continually coming out, and many different channels of communication and information. I see the danger in taking intellectual humility too far and deciding that there are no final answers on certain topics (war, torture, etc.). But a balanced understanding of intellectual humility is very powerful.

Hughes R., Colarelli-Beatty K. & Dinwoodie D. (2014) Becoming a Strategic Leader. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Second Edition.

Ungerer, M., Ungerer, G., & Herholdt, J. (2016). Navigating Strategic Possibilities: Strategy Formulation and Execution Practices to Flourish. Randburg: KR Publishing.