Never Let Ego Outshine Humility: What Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” Teaches About Humility
Every school I’ve worked in has asked its staff to be humble in some form. We ask teachers to welcome feedback after a lesson observation, to admit when a strategy isn’t working and to learn from colleagues with less experience than them. Far fewer schools ask the same of the people at the top. Almost none, in my experience, check whether the leaders are actually doing it. That’s because the person who would have to do the checking is usually “the” leader.
The Track
Kendrick Lamar released “HUMBLE.” on 30 March 2017 as the lead single from DAMN., over a beat by Mike Will Made-It. It became his first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 as a lead artist, won three Grammys, including Best Rap Song, and a year later DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first time the prize had gone to a work outside classical music and jazz.
The hook tells everyone else to sit down and be humble, and the verses spend most of their time explaining why Kendrick doesn’t need to. He told Rolling Stone that “be humble” was simply the first thing that came into his head when he heard the beat. It’s a brilliant record, and it’s also a neat picture of how humility usually works in organisations: an instruction aimed at other people, delivered by someone who has exempted themself.
What makes it more than a boast is where it sits on the album. The track immediately before it is “PRIDE.”, a slower, more inward song in which Kendrick turns the question on himself and wrestles with his own pride and his failure to live up to the person he wants to be. Played in order, the two tracks show the same man twice: one version reflecting honestly in private, the other performing certainty in public. Most leaders I know (including myself) carry both of those tracks around with them. The question is: Which one does their team gets to hear?
Status Changes What People Tell You
This is Commandment 4, Never Let Ego Outshine Humility, and the pressure behind it is status. Nobody sets out to become arrogant. What happens instead is that a title changes the information that reaches you. The higher up the ladder you go, the more people laugh at your jokes, agree in meetings and soften the bad news before it lands on your desk. After a few years of that it’s very easy to mistake a quiet room for proof that you’re right.
The commandment doesn’t ask leaders to shrink. Kendrick never does, and nobody wants a CEO or Headteacher who apologises for leading. It asks something more specific, which is that your ego never becomes brighter than the work or the people doing it. Confidence in your direction is part of the job. Needing to be the smartest person in the room, the one who gets the credit and the one who is never wrong, is where ego starts to outshine everything around it.
Credit and Correction
In a school, ego usually shows itself in two places: those who get the credit and those who get to be right.
The credit test comes round every August. Results are up, the local paper wants a quote and the Trust wants a case study. It’s remarkably easy for the story to become the Headteacher’s strategy rather than the maths department that rewrote its scheme of work and ran intervention groups every lunchtime for two years. Nobody has to lie for this to happen. The Headteacher gets asked the questions, their name goes on the post, and the people who did the work end up as a line of thanks at the bottom.
The correction test is quieter and does more damage. A middle leader points out to the senior team, that the new behaviour policy that was launched in September is creating more removals in Year 9, not fewer. You can say “you’re right, show me the data”, or you can explain why it’s too early to judge and move to the next item. The second answer protects your standing for about ten minutes. It also teaches everyone in the room that pointing out your mistakes is a risk, and a term later, when the policy really is failing, nobody tells you.
When Humility is its Own Kind of Ego
Too little humility is easy to spot, because it looks like the leader who takes the credit and can’t be corrected. Too much is harder to spot, because it looks like a virtue. It’s the leader who deflects every compliment, insists they’re just one of the team and won’t make a clear call in case it looks like they think they know best. Staff end up guessing where the school is going, and the leader gets to feel modest while the people around them carry the uncertainty.
That version is still ego, because it’s still about how the leader is “seen”. Real humility points the attention somewhere else entirely, at the work, the evidence and the people doing it. It lets you say “this is the direction and I’m confident in it” in one breath and “I got that wrong, thank you for telling me” in the next, without either sentence costing you anything, because neither was ever about you.
The Track Your Team Hears
Teams copy what their leader does with being”wrong”. If they watch you thank the person who corrected you and change course, they’ll bring you problems early, while they’re still small. If they see you get defensive, they won’t announce that they’ve stopped telling you the truth, they’ll just start taking the bad news around you instead of to you. Then one day you’ll hear about it in your next inspection visit, when it’s too late to fix it quietly.
Never Let Ego Outshine Humility. Kendrick could release “HUMBLE.” with that much swagger partly because “PRIDE.” came first, and he had already done the honest reckoning on record. Most leaders do their “PRIDE.” privately, if they do it at all, and play “HUMBLE.” to the staff. The work this week is to let the people you lead hear a bit more of the first track.
Wisdom Wednesdays draws on The 10 Character Commandments of Leadership by Adrian McLean, out now. Each week takes one track and one of the ten commandments, and the book works through all ten pressures in full, with the self-assessment and the virtue dial behind each one. Read it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H8HYN78Z
