I recently attended a wine tasting hosted by the Irish New Zealand Business Network. Alan Brady and Brian Shaw told the story of Wild Irishman Wines, and took us through tasting five of their fine wines.
I was taken in their story by the similarities to authentic leadership.
- All the well researched leadership models at the moment have humility as a key component – in a rapidly changing and complex world leaders need to recognise they don’t know everything. They need help the people around them to use their skills and knowledge to deal with the ambiguity and complexity.
- The hard part of this is maintaining humility when people get into senior leadership positions – as the people around them start filtering out information or sugar coating messages. Over time this leads to overconfidence and decreases in empathy and humility – even at a biological level senior leaders mirroring neuron’s are impacted (the neuron’s that help us read the situation around us and respond to that).
- Bill George developed case studies on highly effective leaders and found they maintained their humility by staying connected to their roots – in fact they had a deliberate habit of visiting their home town once a year. They also deliberately fostered ‘truth tellers’ around themselves – people who they new would tell it like it was but were doing it from a place of having their back.
Alan and Brian’s story of creating fine wines was very similar – being humble which lead to continuous learning, cooperation and sharing knowledge; staying connected to your roots/ whakapapa to give you a sense of belonging and being grounded; and realising the impact of balancing family and work. Being humble in their work acknowledged the role of the weather in the product they produced and working with that rather than trying to work against it.
Perhaps the themes of authentic leadership apply to all people at the pinnacle of their profession?
