Humble Leadership: What It Is, the Research, and How to Practice It

By Tara Minh · Updated Oct 10, 2026

Humble leadership is a style in which a leader builds open, trusting relationships, admits what they don't know, credits the people doing the work, and keeps learning in public. Two bodies of work define it: Edgar and Peter Schein's relationship-based model and Bradley Owens' research on leader humility. Neither asks you to be meek.

The idea has gained attention because it answers a real problem. No single leader can see everything in a fast-changing business, so the "heroic" executive who has every answer becomes a bottleneck. This article covers what humble leadership is, what the research says, how it differs from similar styles, and how to practice it with a template you can copy.

What is humble leadership?

Humility in a leader is often misread as softness or low confidence. The research points the other way. A humble leader holds high standards and strong views, and still treats their own knowledge as incomplete. They ask, they listen, and they change their minds when the evidence changes.

Two traditions shape the term, and they're worth keeping apart:

• The Schein model treats humble leadership as a relationship style. It's about how leaders and followers relate: personal, open, and trusting instead of purely role-based.
• The Owens model treats humility as a set of observable behaviors. It's about what a leader visibly does: admitting mistakes, spotlighting others' strengths, and showing they're still learning.

Both lead to the same place. The leader stops performing certainty and starts creating the conditions in which the team can surface problems early.

Key Facts

Key Facts

• Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust is by Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein and published by Berrett-Koehler. The second edition adds a chapter on "situational humility."
• Owens and Hekman's 2012 study drew on 55 in-depth interviews with leaders and found that leader humility works by modeling to followers how to grow.
• In that research, leaders named three core behaviors: admitting mistakes, spotlighting follower strengths, and modeling teachability.
• Owens, Johnson and Mitchell (2013) built an observer-report measure of expressed humility across eight lab and field samples.
• In their field data, leader-expressed humility was related to employee retention and engagement, but the findings are correlational, so they don't prove that humility alone causes better results.

The Schein model: Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 relationships

Edgar Schein spent decades studying organizational culture. With his son Peter, a former Silicon Valley executive, he wrote Humble Leadership, which Berrett-Koehler describes as an argument for setting aside strict hierarchy and engaging people as people. According to the publisher's description, the approach lets ideas move freely and brings mistakes to the surface right away, instead of leaving decisions to committees or one dominant executive.

The core of the book is a way of sorting relationships into levels. The summary below follows an interview-based overview of the authors' ideas.

The authors' central recommendation is to build Level 2 relationships, and they call the process "personization." You don't need Level 3 to run a good team, and most workplaces shouldn't aim for it. But Level 1 alone, where everyone stays inside a role, makes it hard for bad news to travel upward.

Why does this matter? In a Level 1 culture, a junior analyst who spots a flaw in the forecast has little reason to tell the VP. The relationship is transactional, the VP is senior, and speaking up carries risk. In a Level 2 culture, the same analyst knows the VP, trusts that the VP will listen, and says it. Same facts, very different outcome.

The second edition adds the idea of situational humility: leaders need to shift between several types of relationships as conditions change. So humble leadership isn't "be personal with everyone at all times." It's choosing the right depth of relationship for the task, and being willing to go to Level 2 when the work needs honest information.

The Owens research: how leader humility works

Bradley Owens and David Hekman ran the study most often cited on this topic. Their 2012 paper in the Academy of Management Journal drew on 55 in-depth interviews with leaders from a wide variety of contexts. The authors concluded that leader humility involves modeling to followers how to grow, and that it produces positive outcomes by making followers believe their own development and uncertainty are legitimate at work.

A press summary of the study says the sample included 16 CEOs, 20 mid-level leaders, and 19 frontline leaders. Across those ranks, leaders pointed to three behaviors:

1. Admitting mistakes. Saying "I got that wrong" in front of the team.
2. Spotlighting follower strengths. Naming what someone does better than you and putting it to use.
3. Modeling teachability. Asking for feedback, asking questions, and visibly changing course.

Notice what those behaviors share. Each one shows the team that being imperfect is allowed. That's the mechanism the authors describe: when a leader models growth, followers feel free to do the same.

What the later studies add

Owens, Johnson and Mitchell followed with a quantitative paper in Organization Science (2013). According to the published abstract, they used eight lab and field samples. Five of them were used to develop and validate an observer-report measure of expressed humility, meaning how others rate a person's humble behavior rather than how the person rates themselves.

In the abstract's description of the later studies:

• Expressed humility predicted individual performance and contextual performance (the quality of a person's contribution to the team), beyond conscientiousness, global self-efficacy, and general mental ability.
• It may compensate for lower general mental ability in individual performance.
• In a large field sample, leader-expressed humility was related to employee retention, with job satisfaction as the mediator, and to employee engagement, with team learning orientation as the mediator.

Owens and Hekman then looked at teams. Their 2016 paper in the Academy of Management Journal, titled "How Does Leader Humility Influence Team Performance? Exploring the Mechanisms of Contagion and Collective Promotion Focus", examines how a leader's humble behavior spreads to the people around them and affects how the team performs.

A caution the research itself raises

The 2012 study also found that humility doesn't pay off equally for everyone. The summary of the research reports that leaders who were young, nonwhite, or female said they had to keep proving their competence, so their humble behavior was expected and valued less. Experienced white male leaders reported gaining more from the same behaviors.

That's a finding about perception, not a recommendation. But it matters for practice. If you're promoting humility in your organization, don't hold some leaders to a higher humility bar than others, and don't read a quiet admission of error from a newer leader as weakness. The authors also advise that humility can't be faked, because followers notice whether a leader genuinely wants to grow.

Humble leadership vs servant, Level 5, and authentic leadership

Humility shows up in several leadership models. Owens and Hekman's own paper notes that the servant leadership, level five leadership, and participative leadership perspectives all single out humility as a virtue. So how is humble leadership different?

The styles overlap, and a single leader can use several at once. If you want a fuller view of how humility and service interact, the servant leadership guide is the closest sibling. For the idea that humility and ambition can coexist, read about Level 5 leadership.

How to practice humble leadership: a step-by-step approach

You can't switch humility on with a policy. But you can build habits, and habits are what teams actually notice. Work through these steps over a few weeks.

Step 1: Name what you don't know

Before your next planning meeting, write down two or three assumptions you're making that you haven't tested. Say them out loud at the start. "I'm assuming our biggest churn risk is onboarding. I haven't checked that. Tell me where I'm wrong."

Step 2: Ask better questions

Replace statements with open questions. Instead of "We should drop this feature," try "What am I missing about why we built this?" The aim is to learn something, not to lead the witness. A question that you already know the answer to isn't inquiry.

Step 3: Admit one mistake a week, specifically

Vague apologies don't register. A specific one does: "I set that deadline without asking engineering. That was my error, and here's what I'll do differently." Owens' research lists admitting mistakes as one of the three core behaviors, and specificity is what makes it believable.

Step 4: Spotlight someone else's strength

Pick a person on your team whose skill exceeds yours in some area. Tell them so, in front of others, and hand them the decision or the presentation. This is the second Owens behavior, and it also spreads your attention across the team instead of concentrating it on you.

Step 5: Build Level 2 relationships on purpose

Schein's model says relationships can be built. Use one-on-ones to ask about the person, not just the project: what they're working on, what's blocking them, what they'd do if it were their call. Share something real about your own work in return. The point is two-way information, not small talk.

Step 6: Ask for feedback and show what changed

Ask your team one question each month: "What's one thing I should do differently?" Then report back on what you heard and what you're changing. If nothing changes, people stop answering. The visible follow-through is what tells them it's safe.

Step 7: Protect the person who brings bad news

When someone tells you about a problem, thank them first and solve second. People watch how leaders react to bad news more closely than they listen to what leaders say about openness. This also ties directly to psychological safety, the shared belief that you can speak up without being punished.

Ready-to-copy template: humble leadership practice plan

Use this table in a notebook or a shared doc. Fill in one row per behavior and review it with a peer or coach every two weeks.

And a short script for the feedback step you can paste into a team message:

I'm asking each of you one question this month: what's one thing I should do differently to help you do your best work? I'll share what I heard, and what I'm changing, at our next team meeting. Honest answers help more than polite ones.

Examples by business function

These are illustrative scenarios of the behaviors in action, not case studies.

For the coaching side of this, see the coaching leadership style, which uses many of the same question-led habits.

Do's and don'ts

When humble leadership fits, and when it doesn't

Humble leadership works best where the work is complex, knowledge sits with the people closest to it, and mistakes are costly if hidden. Product teams, professional services, clinical settings, and fast-moving go-to-market teams all fit that description.

It doesn't mean abandoning direction. In an emergency or a clear compliance requirement, a leader still needs to give a clear instruction and expect it to be followed. Schein's idea of situational humility supports this: the skill is knowing which kind of relationship the moment calls for. And a leader who is humble but indecisive isn't practicing humble leadership. They're avoiding accountability.

Humility also works better alongside other ideas. It pairs naturally with inclusive leadership, which makes sure the people you're listening to reflect the whole team, and with leader-member exchange theory, which explains why the quality of each one-on-one relationship shapes how people respond to a leader.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Performing humility. Followers notice when a leader only wants to look teachable. The authors of the original research advise that humility can't be faked.
• Over-sharing weakness. Admitting a mistake is different from unloading anxiety. Share the error, the learning, and the plan.
• Confusing humility with consensus. You can listen to everyone and still make the call.
• Skipping the follow-up. Asking for input and never acting on it teaches people not to bother.
• Making it a one-time event. A single "humble" all-hands changes nothing. The effect comes from repeated, small behaviors over months.

Learn more

• Servant leadership
• Level 5 leadership
• Authentic leadership
• Psychological safety
• Inclusive leadership