Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall,” celebrates a different sort of leader. He’s found that many of the reliably successful leaders combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.”
Alongside the boardroom lion model of leadership, you can imagine a humble hound model. The humble hound leader thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses. She knows her performance slips when she has to handle more than one problem at a time, so she turns off her phone and e-mail while making decisions. She knows she has a bias for caution, so she writes a memo advocating the more daring option before writing another advocating the most safe. She knows she is bad at prediction, so she follows Peter Drucker’s old advice: After each decision, she writes a memo about what she expects to happen. Nine months later, she’ll read it to discover how far off she was.
In short, she spends a lot of time on metacognition ”” thinking about her thinking ”” and then building external scaffolding devices to compensate for her weaknesses.
She believes we only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure, to be corrected by the next one. Even walking involves shifting your weight off-balance and then compensating with the next step.
With all due respect to Mr. Collins, and a deep appreciation for the message he espouses, my time following rabbit dogs causes me to wonder if “humble hound” is the correct sobriquet for what he is describing. “Focused”, “pack deaf”, “simple”, and “loving” all fit the hounds I have known and loved, but not a humane and caring manager.