|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Is It One or the Other, or the Right Balance of Each?
When you’re lucky enough to get invited into a family to work with various family members, you face an interesting learning curve.
You want to learn a lot about each person quickly, so that you can begin to add value based on the assessment you make of each person you meet.
But in most cases, the first family member you meet gives you some clues as to what you can expect from the others, which creates a clouded perspective when you finally meet each one.
It’s always interesting to hear parents, for example, tell you about their offspring, and then when you meet their next gen, you end up shaking your head, amazed at how different they are from what you were led to expect.
When you realize that this happens in over 90% of the cases, you learn to take everything with a grain of salt.
Making a Quick Assessment
I had a recent case where I had a very brief meeting with a G3 parent, about helping their business onboard a G4 member.
We’d arranged a 3-way Zoom call for a chemistry meeting, but Dad had to miss the call, so I got to spend some good one-on-one time with his son first, before I got the benefit (or curse?) of Dad’s version of his son’s qualities and faults.
Instead, I got to hear a bit about Dad from his son, which then had me arrive at that next call with Dad with some expectations based on Junior’s comments.
Hmmm, I thought, this is getting interesting.
And that’s when I began to realize some of the specific parts of each of their demeanors that I was subconsciously analyzing.
So that’s where we’re going this week, but not without a surprising twist that I came to thanks to a quick Google search.
My Initial View: Humility > Hubris
This was a company I’d heard of, in their second century and going on to their fourth generation, so I expected a certain amount of hubris from both of them.
I was pleasantly surprised, however, to note much more humility than hubris, which I actually shared with the father when I spoke with him.
In my mind, because both these words start with the same two letters and I conjured them up together in this case, I thought I might be on to something.
I imagined some sort of “HQ”, or H Quotient, like IQ or EQ, but where you divide someone’s humility score by their hubris.
A lot of humility in the numerator and little hubris in the denominator would make for a high (good) score, whereas the opposite would give a low (bad) score.
Or Is It: Humility + Hubris?
But maybe I wasn’t carving out new territory here, so I Googled “humility hubris quotient” and when I saw the results, well let’s just say that I learned something.
You can Google as well as I can, so I won’t rehash the results, but it became clear that I wasn’t the first try to find something useful in the interplay between these two words.
The biggest A-Ha came from a “Humility Hubris Index ‘HHI’”, because that doesn’t look at this idea as a quotient, where one is divided by the other, but as a product, where you might multiply them together.
The implication here is that both are necessary traits, and that success in many areas depends on the presence of both.
So maybe it comes down to finding a good balance of both.
A Coach’s Perspective
When I think about families I work with, for me to be able to coach family members, they absolutely need to be above average on humility. See Humble and Kind from 2016
As for where family members stand in terms of hubris, those who’ve been instrumental in building the family wealth typically exhibit some high level of self-confidence; but does it reach the point of being “excessive”, which is where it becomes hubris.
Consider how different family members exhibit each of these traits too, because each person likely scores differently.
Also think about how their hubris shows up in business situations versus within the family, and then do the same for humility.
I think I’ve got something here, and I plan on continuing to work with it.
Hopefully I’ve given you something to think about too.
