We’ve been taught that leadership requires projecting confidence. Show up prepared. Speak with authority. Own the room. Being humble seems out of place.
Jesus disagreed.
We’ve been exploring Dr. Craig Kain’s research on magnetic people. Last time we saw that three of the habits he identified all pointed to one quality: presence. Presence communicates value. Full attention says, without words, “You matter.”
Today, we’ll look at three more habits from Dr. Kain’s list: staying comfortable in their own skin, balancing confidence with humility, and putting others first. All three point to humility.
Humility is one of leadership’s most misunderstood qualities. Some mistake it for weakness. Others think it means downplaying their abilities.
But humility doesn’t mean thinking less of yourself. It means thinking of yourself less.
Much of leadership is spent managing perceptions: appearing competent, capable, and in control. We need the final word. We interrupt to show what we know. We defend our ideas too quickly. We compare ourselves to others. We feel threatened when someone else gets the credit. We struggle to admit we’re wrong.
The common thread is insecurity. When we’re unsure of our worth, we spend a lot of energy protecting it or proving it. That can keep leaders from becoming people others naturally trust.
Jesus showed us another way.
On the night before His crucifixion, He gathered with His disciples for the Passover meal. Washing dusty feet was a servant’s job, but there was no servant. The disciples had been arguing about who was greatest, and none volunteered.
Then Jesus stood up.
John pauses to tell us something important. “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under His power… and that He had come from God and was returning to God.” (John 13:3) He knew exactly who He was.
We’ve been conditioned to think leaders don’t stoop and important people don’t serve. Jesus dismantled that idea with a towel and a basin. People weren’t drawn to Him despite His humility. They were drawn to Him because of it.
There’s something deeply attractive about a leader who has nothing to prove. They ask more questions than they answer, admit when they don’t know or when they are wrong, welcome pushback without getting defensive, and celebrate others’ success. They also create a safe space for people to speak, contribute, grow, and shine. Teams that feel safe often outperform those that don’t.
Dr. Kain is right: people are drawn to those who are comfortable in their own skin, quietly confident, and put others first. Jesus simply shows us where those qualities come from.
When we know we are deeply loved and valued by God, we no longer need to prove our worth. Humility stops being something we perform. It becomes the natural fruit of a heart secure in God’s love.
So the real question isn’t, “How do I become more humble?”
It’s, “Am I secure enough to make this about someone else?”
Next time, we’ll explore another quality that drew people to Jesus and why it may be one of the most overlooked strengths in leadership.
One thing I’ve learned over the years: humility doesn’t grow in isolation. We become better leaders when we’re surrounded by people who challenge us, encourage us, pray for us, and tell us the truth when we need to hear it.
That’s one of the reasons I started Kingdom Factor Cohort (KFC). If you’re a Christian CEO, founder, or executive looking for that kind of community, you can learn more here.
Since I became so immersed in culture change, I’ve heard this question countless times: was it the environment that shaped the leader, or was it the leader that shaped the environment?
My thinking has increasingly moved away from that binary. After four decades of workplace experience, and after listening to thousands of observations across LinkedIn, Substack, Psychology Today and elsewhere, I’ve come to see human behaviour less as a simple cause-and-effect problem and more as a dynamic interplay of wiring, survival, identity, and environment. Our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and actions are not formed in isolation. They are shaped over time by what we have lived through, what we have learned to fear, and what has helped us survive.
That is why I find it more helpful to think in terms of a healthy self, a trauma-influenced self, and a survival self. From the moment a baby is born, it is reading faces, tone, gesture, and presence. It is not merely observing; it is orientating itself toward safety. Where there is love, attunement, and consistency, the child is more likely to develop into a more integrated self, able to tolerate uncertainty, navigate conflict, and withstand high levels of prediction error without becoming overwhelmed. In that kind of formation, affective empathy can flourish, and a person may grow into leadership without losing too much of their identity in toxic environments.
Where survival is the dominant mode, however, the person may become highly skilled at cognitive empathy, able to think through how others feel without necessarily feeling it with them. That can mean they adapt, assimilate, and comply rather than challenge, correct, or discern. In that sense, organisations often recruit not only on competence, but on image, performance, and what looks like empathy. And this is where things become complicated, because the appearance of strength, care, or even change can be mistaken for the real thing.
This is why humility matters so deeply. Humility is not weakness. It is strength under control. It is the willingness to lose pride, lose the performance, and lose the optics of appearing to bring change when in fact no real correction has been made. Too often, what is presented as correction is actually pride disguised as correction. It sounds right, looks responsible, and may even be praised, but if it does not produce genuine repair, accountability, or change, then it is still only performance.
So for me, it is not simply environment first or leader first. It is bidirectional. Leaders shape environments, and environments shape leaders. But beneath that, there are deeper forces at work: early attachment, stress physiology, emotional regulation, and the values that have been wired into us over a lifetime.
In my own case, I’ve often felt I have affective empathy, yet spent much of my career in commercial settings because I believed that was where I could offer the most value to society. That tension is part of the story too. It reminds me that people do not always end up in the sectors their wiring might seem to predict.
What has grounded me is faith, and particularly the Christian call to love our neighbour as ourselves. That kind of formation can provide a powerful inner platform for unity, courage, and truth-telling. It helps us speak up when something is wrong, not out of pride or superiority, but out of a desire for what is right. Not saviours, but with saviour-like strength under control. As Jesus taught us, humility is not weakness. It is strength rightly ordered.
I appreciate this thoughtful response. I especially like your observation that leaders shape environments and environments shape leaders. I don’t think it’s an either/or either.
What stood out to me most, though, is your last paragraph. You described faith as an “inner platform” that enables courage, truth-telling, and humility. That resonates with what I’ve been wrestling with in this series. Psychology can explain WHAT humble leaders do, but it struggles to explain WHY some people can keep serving, keep telling the truth, and keep putting others first even when the environment rewards the opposite.
That raises an interesting question for me: do you think that kind of humility can ultimately be sustained without an identity anchored somewhere outside ourselves?
I love this, Mun-Wai.
A few years ago, when I started exploring what really matters in the workplace if we want to bring about healthy change, I began a dialogue with Melody Wilding. It was around the time I was breaking out of my technical quest at Fujitsu and realising it wasn’t working. I couldn’t see anything fundamentally changing.
Looking back, I realised that even in my early twenties, what motivated me was solving problems. Yet the root causes upstream seemed to remain untouched. We held repeated lessons-learned retrospectives, but too often the lessons remained unlearned.
I worked in a strong team of six on the Fujitsu Post Office account. The team had been cut back to the bone, yet that pressure forged deep trust between us. We used to joke that “there’s no I in team,” and we could laugh because we genuinely trusted one another. We didn’t wash each other’s feet, of course, but there was a quiet humility among us. We understood we were one cell within a larger body, and we looked after one another.
Then the flare-ups from surrounding parts of the organisation gradually broke our team apart. I watched that trust slowly erode. I moved into an adjacent team and eventually crafted my exit as managers who lacked humility gained influence.
So yes, I love the meekness you speak of—not weakness, but strength under control. The kind of strength that serves rather than dominates, and the humility that seeks to heal instead of pride masquerading as correction.
Thank you for sharing that. I was especially struck by your observation that the pressure forged trust, but the surrounding culture eventually eroded it. That reminds us that humility isn’t just a personal virtue. Organisations can either cultivate it or quietly squeeze it out.
I also appreciate your distinction between meekness and weakness. Jesus never lacked strength. He simply never needed to use it to prove His worth. That’s very different from many leadership models today.
I’m curious, looking back, what do you think changed first? Was it the leaders themselves, or did the culture begin rewarding different behaviours?