Week 6 Day 3: Authority Without Humility Is Tyranny; Humility Without Authority Is Abdication

We have all seen the leader who uses authority without humility. They do not listen. They do not admit mistakes. They make every decision unilaterally and treat disagreement as disloyalty. That is tyranny, and it destroys trust. But we have also seen the opposite: the leader who is so committed to being humble that they never exercise their authority. They defer every decision to the group. They avoid giving direct feedback. They refuse to overrule anyone because it feels hierarchical. That is abdication, and it destroys clarity.

The balance is not a permanent setting -- it shifts depending on the situation. In a crisis, you lean toward authority. Your team needs clear direction, fast. 'Here is what we are doing, here is who is doing what, let us move.' Humility in a crisis means acknowledging you might not have all the information, but you are going to act on what you have. In a planning phase, you lean toward humility. You need diverse input, creative ideas, pushback. But you still need someone to synthesize and decide. The mistake I see most often is leaders who pick one mode and stay there regardless of context. The perpetual authority figure who runs brainstorms like they are crisis rooms and kills creativity. Or the perpetual humble facilitator who runs crises like they are brainstorms and kills urgency. The best leaders I have watched are situationally fluent -- they can read the room and shift their ratio of authority to humility based on what the moment requires. That fluency comes from self-awareness. You need to know your default and practice the other mode deliberately.

The tension between authority and humility maps directly to the concept of 'paradoxical leadership' researched by Marianne Lewis at the University of Cincinnati. Lewis' work on organizational paradoxes demonstrates that effective leaders do not resolve tensions between competing demands -- they learn to hold them simultaneously. Zhang et al. (2015) published a study in the Academy of Management Journal specifically on paradoxical leader behavior, finding that leaders who simultaneously demonstrated self-centeredness and other-centeredness (authority and humility), maintained both distance and closeness with employees, and enforced work requirements while allowing flexibility generated the highest levels of employee proactivity and adaptability. The research contradicts the Western tendency to resolve paradoxes by choosing one pole. In practice, this means the effective leader is not humble or authoritative -- they are both, calibrated to context. The ability to shift fluidly requires what Kegan and Lahey at Harvard call 'self-transforming mind' -- the most advanced stage of adult cognitive development, where leaders can hold multiple frameworks simultaneously rather than being embedded in any single one.