What Is the Most Important Quality In A Leader?

Leif Babin

The most important quality in a leader is humility. It's absolutely humility, because when you can't stay humble, then you can't innovate and adapt, you can't listen to anybody else, you can't learn, you can't educate yourself about new methods or new technologies or new ways of doing things. You start getting complacent, you start taking your enemies or your competition for granted, and worst of all, you can't self-assess. You can't look yourself in the mirror and take a brutally honest assessment of yourself to think where you can improve, how you can take ownership of the situation to make that outcome better. When you can't do that, you're setting yourself up for failure.

Jocko Willink

What made this really obvious being in the seal teams was the fact that the leaders that would get fired would get fired because they lack humility, because when someone's not humble, you can't coach them. You can't give them any advice. They don't listen to anybody else, so they continue down whatever path they're on. They don't make any changes. They don't get better. It comes from a lack of humility. I think this is an answer that caught the world off guard when we first started talking about the fact that humility is the most important characteristic for a leader to have, because generally I would say for a traditional thought pattern, what people would say is, "Oh, it's important for a leader to be charismatic," or, "It's important for a leader to have presence,," or, "It's important for a leader to be articulate."

Look, all those things are great. There's dozens of other leadership characteristics that we can point out that are important. But all of those leadership characteristics are negated if a human being lacks humility. In fact, I can't think of anything worse than someone that is articulate, but not humble. What are they going to do? They're going to talk more about how great they are. That is not what we want to have from a leader. What about somebody that's got a lot of presence, but they're not humble? Well, now no one else can get a word in edgewise. No one else can participate in the planning. No one else can even impact that person's thought because their presence is so great and they have a big ego, which means you can't get a word in edgewise.

Leif Babin

I saw this when I was teaching the junior officer training course in the seal teams with every single seal officer that came through our training pipeline. You would see some people who had a lot of natural talent and skills, and some people who didn't have a lot of natural talent and skills. The only people who couldn't be successful leaders were those who just simply wouldn't listen. If a young junior officer was willing to take out a notepad, take some instruction, accept some constructive criticism and work to get better, we saw them become cable leaders, and we saw them go out into the seal teams and have successful careers, even if they didn't have a lot of charisma, or even if they got nervous standing up in front of a group and that was not something that they felt comfortable doing.

As long as they were willing to work on this, learn, get better, accept constructive criticism and guidance from people who were more experienced than them, they could be successful. The only people who failed were those people who wouldn't listen, who weren't humble, wouldn't take any criticism, and therefore they continued to not grow, to not get better. They ultimately failed.

Jocko Willink

So, we could go on and on about this, but it all boils down to the fact that if a human being is not humble, they are not going to be able to become a good leader. That is why humility is the most important characteristic for a leader to have.