How To Avoid Hubris: Your Long-Term Success Is At Stake

Have you noticed how leaders with self-assurance bordering on arrogance fill the news? Such portrayals usually imply that resolute certainty is the mark of authentic leadership. Yet this facade of sureness can sometimes mask a perilous trait—hubris.

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Hubris transcends mere high self-esteem. It is an extreme, harmful pride characterized by an exaggerated belief in one's capabilities and significance. Contrary to well-grounded self-confidence rooted in reality and self-awareness, hubris severely threatens a leader’s long-term effectiveness. It can cause individuals to ignore the viewpoints of others, overestimate their abilities, and take reckless risks.

Although a healthy level of self-confidence is vital for your leadership, hubris can ruin your effectiveness. However, with a keen self-awareness, you can maintain poise while avoiding the dangers of self-importance.

Understanding Hubris

To avoid falling prey to hubris, you must understand how to spot it before it takes over.

Hubris manifests as an exaggerated belief in one’s abilities, knowledge, or influence. This overblown arrogance leads to a dismissive attitude toward the input, capabilities, and contributions of others.

Leaders with hubris are self-righteous. They resist negative feedback or criticism because they believe they are above reproach.

Often, they overstep boundaries by acting beyond their authority or competence without adequately considering the consequences.

Recognizing the Threat Posed by Hubris

Hubris is dangerous. It might yield rewards if others confuse it with strength or power. However, in the long run, you will likely lose status and respect if you allow it to sneak up on you.

If your arrogance gives rise to significant failure or scandal, it can severely damage your career prospects.

Negative Impact of Hubris

The possible negative fallout includes:

1. Isolation - If you succumb to arrogance, you may alienate team members and colleagues, eroding trust. Your resulting isolation may deprive you of valuable insights and support from others.
2. Poor Decision-Making - Even hubristic leaders who can avoid isolation and get input from others risk making poor decisions. Many times, they view gathering input as merely a performative exercise. Thus, they disregard the ideas and advice, believing their judgment superior. Ignoring diverse perspectives can leave you uninformed, leading to poor decisions.
3. Reckless Risks - Due to overconfidence, you may take unnecessary or excessive risks, assuming that success is guaranteed. To your surprise, these risky decisions may lead to failure.
4. Ethical and Legal Issues - Hubris may cause you to ignore ethical considerations, prioritizing your ambition over what is right or just. Likewise, it may cause you to overstep your authority and engage in unethical or illegal activities, believing you are invincible.
5. Organizational Dysfunction - Organizations are likely to suffer from leaders’ hubris since it can permeate the culture. The work environment can become toxic as arrogance and self-interest prevail over mutual respect.

How to Avoid Hubris

The lure of feeling infallible is powerful, yet it can also be deadly to your success and detrimental to the effective functioning of your organization in the long run.

You must demonstrate self-confidence without arrogance to develop and sustain a practical leadership framework.

The key to leadership success is to learn to blend self-confidence with humility.

Understanding Self-Confidence and Humility

The relationship between self-confidence and humility is more than merely a balance of the two opposing traits. Instead, these qualities are interdependent. Together, these traits allow you to make bold decisions while remaining open to input and feedback.

At its core, self-confidence is believing in your abilities and judgments. It is essential for taking reasonable risks, making decisions, and leading with authority.

Humility, in contrast, is the recognition and acceptance of your limitations and the value of your associates’ contributions.

Humility fosters empathy, which is crucial for understanding and connecting with others. It is not self-deprecation but rather an accurate assessment of yourself and a deep respect for others.

The key to developing this somewhat tricky yet powerful combination of qualities is cultivating a keen self-insight and self-control, two of the primary components of emotional intelligence.

Developing Self-Insight and Self-Control

Just as self-confidence and humility are powerful interdependent traits for leaders, self-insight and self-control go hand in hand and play a crucial role in leadership success.

To be an effective leader who avoids self-doubt on one hand and arrogance and hubris on the other, you must know yourself well—your strengths, weaknesses, emotional triggers, values and purpose, history, and dreams.

Achieving the depth of knowledge you need requires intention. Mindful and purposeful self-reflection practices sharpen your self-insight. Reviewing past decisions, including successes and mistakes, can enhance your self-awareness, mainly if you reflect on the reasons behind the outcomes.

Self-insight doesn’t automatically translate into self-control, however. While staying on top of your emotional reactions is undoubtedly necessary, self-control requires an appreciation of when and how to limit tendencies to behave in a manner that could harm you, your team members and colleagues, or your organization. Self-control depends on the level of your empathy and the degree of discipline you can bring to bear on your behavior.

One way to tighten up your self-mastery is to reflect on times in the past when you have acted out of impulse and emotion. Note the outcomes of these behaviors. Think through alternative behaviors that could lead to better results in the future.

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The quest to avoid hubris by combining self-confidence with humility never ends. It requires continuous self-awareness and an unwavering commitment to professional growth. Embrace your story—where you have been and where you aspire to go. Think about what you have done well and what you can do better in the future. Reflect on what you have learned from others and what you have yet to learn. Doing so will help cultivate self-confidence and humility, setting the stage for enduring leadership success.

By Kathy Miller Perkins, Contributor