Why Leaders Are Afraid to Be Humble

March 20, 2012 at 5:20 AM

In 1887, a 5-year old Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited the White House. The young Roosevelt, who grew up in a privileged and powerful family, had the honor of meeting the sitting president, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland, who endured a turbulent presidency fighting corruption and, in his second term, dealing with economic depression, shared with the innocent young boy his wish for him: “Boy, I hope you will never, ever become president.”

Forty-six years later, of course, that boy would become president, despite Cleveland’s best advice. Cleveland wasn’t telling the young Roosevelt that he hoped he would never become president because he disagreed with the 5-year-old’s tax and fiscal policy. Jokingly, he was venting about the pressures and trials of leading the free world, of holding the office President Harry Truman once called the office “the great white jail.”  

We’re partly to blame for making the presidency a prison. It’s been said that we don’t get the government we want, but the government we deserve—and, in a sense, we've also been getting the leaders we deserve. We've created an environment in which our president and presidential candidates—as well as leaders in general—are forced into self-preservation mode to survive the obstacles of office. It’s no surprise that our leaders today are afraid to be humble.

Here are three reasons our leaders, specifically our elected officials, are afraid to be humble:

1. They’re afraid to lose power.

In an interview last year, Republican Congressman Tom Coburn was asked to deliver an honest, bi-partisan assessment of the failure of both parties to function and work together. The telling answer he gave reveals a lot about why our leaders are afraid to be humble. “The problem is there's an imbalance in terms of what [Congressional representatives] view [as acceptable] for themselves vs. what they view [as acceptable] for the country. This idea that you're going to protect your position, instead of doing what's the best…for the country is now where we are at significant risk as a nation.”

2. They are representative of us, and we’re not humble.

In other words: Washington is broken because we are. Anyone who tries to tell you anything different isn’t giving you the full story. In an interview with Politico, President Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, said it best: “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, politics is so uncivil. Isn’t that terrible, why can’t they get along, gee, I’ve never see anything like this.’ Well, it should be better, but maybe it’s more reflective of society. And watch the cable [news] shows. What gets [ratings]? The angry, the nasty, the insulting, the edge thing. So maybe politics is just more reflective of society than we want to admit.”

3. We don’t value humility.

Day after day we watch news reports and click on salacious web stories touting the demise of another leader. We fuel the daily ratings-and-traffic beast with our eyeballs, clicking on stories chronicling how the mighty have fallen. We share YouTube outtakes of a candidate fumbling over a word or forgetting the name of a world leader. Presidential debates are no longer substantive exchanges over policy differences. Instead, they’ve become gladiatorial events during which candidates are expected—encouraged, even— to deal their opponents mortal political wounds. And if they don’t, if they play nice, if they’re diplomatic in their appraisal of their opponents, we vanquish them from the arena.

Question: Why do you think leaders are afraid to be humble? What can you do to encourage humility from the leaders in your life?