Leadership’s Future: Hubris
by Miki Saxon
An article Monday asked, “Are we raising a generation of nincompoops?“
(Scary reading for managers for years to come if the parental attitudes that produced the examples continue.)
It was a comment at the end by Mark Bauerlein, author of the best-selling book The Dumbest Generation and a professor at Emory University, that prompted this post.
“A healthy society is healthy only if it has some degree of tension between older and younger generations. It’s up to us old folks to remind teenagers: ‘The world didn’t begin on your 13th birthday!’ And it’s good for kids to resent that and to argue back. We want to criticize and provoke them. It’s not healthy for the older generation to say, ‘Kids are kids, they’ll grow up.’
“They won’t grow up unless you do your job by knocking down their hubris.”
‘Hubris’ is defined as “excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.”
Reading the article made me think about the level of hubris in today’s world, which seems far more widespread than at other times in history—from the financial executives who toppled the global economy to workers who insist on doing it their way to all those who believe ‘my way or the highway’ is a good life/world-view.
What is missing are the healthy counter voices that knock down the hubris.
That knock down isn’t accomplished through
- rhetoric;
- replacing one version of hubris with another;
- agreeing because it’s less effort or to avoid making waves; or
- turning a blind eye when the pig says, “All animals are created equal only some are more equal than others.”
Hubris is knocked down with active voices, common sense and personal consequences for violating an ideology-free common good.
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/relevanceinadnauseum/4385225951/
