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Great leaders understand the virtue of humility and owning up to their human failings

Jon Foster-Pedley
By Jon Foster-Pedley
5 May 2025
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Great leaders stay curious, and curiosity begets humility. They epitomise the truth in the adage that the extraordinary really lies in doing simple things really well.

Some leaders are revered for generations, their legacies held up as inspirational lodestones to the leaders who follow. Others manage to become reviled in their own lifetimes. Perhaps the key difference — and determinant — is how each type of leader deals with adversity.

There is a time in every leader’s life, irrespective of their level in an organisation or the community, when they go through tough times. The first time it happens is always awful, and for some it never improves. Somehow most of them power through and get to the other end.

Outsiders call it grit, which is true, if trite. For most of the leaders who break through that metaphorical wall, stopping on the way through a problem is never really a viable option, they keep going because if they don’t, they fail. That same failure might cost them their corporate lives, or even their actual lives.

The one thing that they do get from this process, which no one can take away from them afterwards, is the substance within themselves that now unlocked reveals the motherlode of resilience that they will mine for the rest of their careers.

No guarantee


Substance does not necessarily develop into success. There’s no guarantee that it will, and it shouldn’t because success is often temporary, it is a fickle master. This isn’t a new thought: Winston Churchill famously said: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” Rudyard Kipling enjoined the world to treat triumph and disaster as equal imposters, worthy of the same treatment.

Substance is about being able to see success for what it is from the perspective of knowing exactly who you are, the context of how you achieved that success, the shoulders of those you had to stand on to reach it — and owning up to your own failings as a human being. It is only through letting yourself be fragile and vulnerable that you can be honest enough to start achieving the true greatness that you are capable of.

We don’t need reminding of what happens when you can’t see the person in the mirror clearly. Howard Hughes colonised Hollywood and revolutionised air travel, but ended up as a billionaire hypochondriac recluse on the hermetically sealed top floor of a luxury Las Vegas hotel, still convinced of his messianic role to change the world. Markus Jooste took his own life when the Serious Crime Unit was at the door.

There are many other examples of extreme hubris, some with their fingers very close to the nuclear codes that could kill us all.

But far from these men — and so many are men — being cautionary tales, far too many of them are looked upon as aspirational models by young managers climbing the leadership ladder.

It’s the wrong model.

Doing simple things really well


Great leaders stay curious, and curiosity begets humility. They epitomise the truth in the adage that the extraordinary really lies in doing simple things really well. What no one really speaks about is how these leaders have managed to bring the hell hounds of ambition to heel within them, those same drivers that let them go the extra mile; to work when everyone else was off, to take risks when others didn’t. They have harnessed those urges because the best leaders know what happens if those hell hounds are not disciplined.

Those leaders understand the virtue of humility, of doing the simplest things extraordinarily well all the time rather than faking it till you make it. They will remember what were once bad times and be grateful for the exposure and for the lessons that they didn’t know they were learning at the time. We have all got memories like that — and as we look back, we are thankful for the inflection points that they would become to shape our later lives.

Many years ago, in my zen-searching younger years, I worked for a while as a gardener and handyman at an old age home, caring for the elderly’s surroundings with as much dignity and respect as they deserved. What I remember most though was the incredible satisfaction I felt when the old Yorkshire gardener took me aside and taught me how to sweep properly, more efficiently and more effectively than my efforts had been until then. Learning that simple lesson and applying it well, filled me with more simple joy than I could ever have imagined.

The most important knowledge that we can glean, is that however dire the situation we all have choices, as Viktor Frankl reminds us in Man’s Search for Meaning. Leadership is unutterably lonely and all leaders will face fear and uncertainty. The best of them will feel like frauds and impostors half the time.

Leaders will feel angry when they are unjustly vilified. They will feel sad when they are rejected, but the higher up the leader is the more this will happen because people put leaders on pedestals of projection, they idolise them and then they despise them, because those very same people have no inkling — and nor do they want any — of the rigours that their leaders have to endure, whether it is making ends meet to pay a 13th cheque and afford the annual pay increase, or implementing widescale S189 cuts to resize and reshape the company.

Weight of expectations


The almost overwhelming weight of all those expectations and the inherent unfairness in all of them can drain a potentially great leader, leaving only an empty husk in which the hell hounds of ambition run amok.

Or it can reveal the substance needed for someone to push beyond success to significance, to create something that endures, that benefits far more than just those sitting at the top table and that is sustainable.

In life, there is no light without shadow. Part of the “art of substance” is to choose to understand our own toxic and terrible behaviours, identify them, master them and harness them for the greater good. We need to use every success to amplify our mission to be the change we want to see in the world, not chase success for the sake of success.

But to achieve that, we must choose to do that. The only question is whether we are prepared to. DM

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