50 selected quotes by Edgar and Peter Schein on relationships, change, and humble leadership

1. Leadership is always a relationship, and truly successful leadership thrives in a substrate of high openness and high trust /Intro
2. Humble leadership nurtures relationships that are characterized by openness and trust, and it succeeds when these relationships ensure optimal exchange of information and ideas, from which new and better solutions can be set in motion /Intro
3. We must re-frame the personal challenge of improving one's leadership skills, turning it into a collective challenge of helping to improve our group's performance /Intro
4. Good management, stewardship, and governance never cease to be needed, yet humble leadership, in seeking something new and better, operates at the horizon beyond operational efficiency and towards change and innovation /5
5. Leaders can miss vital process information by paying too much attention to technical fixes rather than looking and listening for social context signals that are outside of the scope of the technical fix /6 
6. We generally need to consider what can be sacrificed in the long run when too much emphasis is placed on the known tasks and managing the technical "dials" need to hit only near-term goals /7 
7. Humble leadership can help teams see, feel, and conceptualize opportunities that are outside of the defined metrics /7
8. One rule of thumb is to consider allocating 20 to 25 percent of work effort away from managing metrics and toward collaborative information sharing focused on co-creating "new and better" using information shared across levels in an organization /7 
9. Situational humility is a developed skill characterized by the openness to see and understand all the elements of a situation by: (1) accepting uncertainty, while remaining curious to find out what is really going on, (2) being open, intentionally and mindfully, to what others might know or observe, and (3) recognizing when unconscious biases can distort perceptions and trigger emotional responses for work /8
10. Today's leadership challenges require that we observe, absorb, and decipher a dramatically expanded amount of information, and that we accept that we cannot do this alone /9
11. Developing the skills to clarify and share your insight, and then assimilating what others know can help you influence change (towards something new and better) and this is the practice of humble leadership /9
12. Culture can mean many different things. One helpful definition is simply "accumulated shared learning" /10 
13. A leader alone will not be able to sufficiently define what is new and what could be better in a challenging situation or uncertain cultural context /11 
14. Effective leadership behavior requires situational humility because the information needed to make effective decisions is likely to be widely distributed among members of the team /12
15. We have a relationship when we can anticipate the other's behavior to some degree /14
16. In a good relationship with another person, we share confidence that both of us are working toward a goal that we have agreed upon either explicitly or implicitly /14 
17. Negative relationships are characterized by domination, coercion, and impersonal control based on unequal distribution of power (such as the guard and a prison inmate): level minus 1 /15 
18. When there is shared understanding that the unequal power situation is bounded, and not interminable, level minus one relationships may also have a constructive function /16
19. Transactional relationships are involving role- and rule-based interactions, as seen in service and retail jobs, and in most forms of "professional" helping relationships (level 1) /15 
20. [Transactional interactions] are highly routinized exchange of give-and-take based on mutual expectations and low levels of personal investment /18 
21. Humans at work have a pretty good sense for authenticity, sincerity, and consistency, and an insincere show of collegiality often backfires and creates greater distance and less trust/ 19
22. Whole-person relationships are built on trust and personization, as seen in friendships and in effective, collaborative teams (level 2) /15
23. Intimate relationships are characterized by emotionally close connections, in which the participants share total mutual commitment (such as lovers or a married couple) /15
24. The more complex the work, the more we can fail to do it effectively unless level 2 relationships (whole person relationships) are achieved /21
25. Why level 2 implies supporting each other and avoiding harm, level 3 implies actively seeking ways of helping and enhancing each other through compassion and care (often defined as "suffering with each other") /26 
26. A defining skill of humble leadership is the ability to manage this balance between being too formal at one extreme and being too intimate at the other /31
27. This is the essence of humble leadership: a boss who acknowledges that they cannot see enough and know enough to create meaningful change without involving other team members and assimilating their insights /52
28. Relationships can exist in a formal hierarchy. It is possible to transform a top-down control system into an empowerment system without having to abandon the hierarchy /60
29. Long-time members of the organization especially might be hesitant to work for change when existing systems had always been considered "good enough" /71 
30. Humble leadership asks us to accept that the process may be difficult, but it promises that the internal transformation towards the new and better -a transformation we defined together, rather than we were forced into by a number of external forces- will be worth it and better for everyone in the end /72
31. Social psychologists studying organizations learned early on how powerful group relations are, and how much more gets done when employees are working together rather than alone /74
32. In a classroom more aligned to experiential learning, the students would bear the primary responsibility to learn, while the teacher's role would be to provide a learning environment and tools but not necessarily the syllabus, the lecture, and the readings /75
33. The ability to understand and manage group dynamics is a critical variable in determining optimal task outcomes and, therefore, demands that groups evolve from technical rationality into socio-technical rationality /85 
34. The process of inculcation, iteration, inspiration, and accumulation built on shared learning becomes the foundation for future growth /90 
35. The structure of culture is the accumulation of conventions -the established ways of thinking and acting- that have "gotten us to where we are today" /90
36. The practice of culture is the way we face every new day, including orientations for building, sustaining, and or changing what we do and how we think about what we do /91
37. Artifacts are the things you can physically see, here, and feel in the workplace /91
38. For humble leaders it is critical to see, hear, and adapt to the cultural milieu in which "new and better" is being pursued /96
39. These "sticky" conventions of "how we have always done things" can present stiff resistance to the changes aimed at moving toward the new and better /96 
40. We need to sharpen our situational humility so that we will be able to see that emerging cultural trends, though unevenly distributed, impact macro culture, social culture, and technical culture, and therefore need to be part of the humble leadership analytical frame /113
41. If everyone knows or can know, leaders are no longer sole experts, they are just one of the crowd, or one in the cloud! /115
42. Younger employees, while less experienced, might be far more savvy than their older colleagues when it comes to certain content-gathering /116
43. One of the key skills of the humble leader is rapid personization -the ability to quickly establish open communication at those times when groups are co-located (which in turn removes some of the pressure to hold more-frequent-in-person gatherings, especially when telepresence is more efficient) /122
44. Humble leadership leverages physical presence for the purpose of co-creation of momentum more than for correction or miscommunication /122
45. You are trying to move beyond the notion of role relations so that you can form whole-person to whole-person relationships /140
46. Relationship maps may have very little to do with an organization chart or a word process flowchart, which is exactly why the process is worthwhile /144 
47. We believe that the future of not only working effectively and but also enjoying work will hinge on recognizing the limitations of role-based transactional relationships and emphasizing the power of level 2 relationships to build the openness and trust the world of work will increasingly require /151
48. Silence does not necessarily imply agreement; sometimes it signifies only an unwillingness to object or to reveal important and relevant information. In some cases, silence may reflect unanimous disagreement, which can then lead to decisions no one wanted / 154 
49. Status differences can undermine the openness of more junior members and rhus may prevent them from sharing relevant information /154
50. Humble leadership can come from any member of the group, not just the convener or the person with the highest status /155 
51. Humble leaders learn that minding the behavior of groups, and improving the behavior of groups, is directly related to building at least level 2 relationships and recognizing that the group knows more than any one individual /156
52. Humble leaders recognize the importance of "reading the room," having sense of how groups behave, and knowing how to intervene with the right questions (content and process) when group behaviors deteriorates /156ç

Edgar H. Schein, Peter A. Schein

Humble Leadership. The Power of Relations, Openness and Trust

Berret-Koehler Publishers

Oakland 2023

172 pp.