I want to start with a question that I think most leaders answer too quickly.
Are you serving your organization, or are you serving your position within it?
Take a second with that. Because those two things can look identical from the outside for a long time. And then one day, something happens, a decision gets made, a client gets claimed, a task gets declined, and the answer becomes very clear very fast.
Today’s episode is about humility. Not humility as a soft skill. Not humility as something you put in your leadership philosophy statement and then forget about on a Tuesday afternoon when someone steps on your territory. Humility as an operating model. As the thing that, when it actually runs through an organization, makes the silos fall down on their own.
I have two stories for you. They come from different places in a leader’s life. But they land in exactly the same spot.
The Shoe Shine Principle: Why Culture Lives in Objects, Not Policy Documents
A few years ago, I visited a close friend of mine. Same industry. Sharp guy. He and his business partner had just moved into a new two-story office building, and he was showing me around.
As we walked toward his office, something stopped me.
Right there, in plain view, was a full commercial shoe shine chair. The kind you see in an airport or an upscale hotel. The pedestal, the elevated seat, the footrests. And alongside it, shoe polish, rags, and brushes—the whole setup.
I looked at my friend, and I asked him what I think anyone would ask. Why?
He said, “It’s a reminder.”
Of what, I asked. The shoe shine place you used to go to?
He smiled and said no. It’s a reminder that none of us in this company is above the others. For this company to be what it can be, we all have to lend a hand in helping one another—every single one of us.
I was tracking, but not fully. I said, “Okay, but how does a commercial shoe shine chair do that?”
And then he told me the story behind it.
Not long before, they had brought on a new sales professional. One afternoon, my friend asked him to run over to the office supply store and pick up a few things. The new hire pushed back. He said the errand was beneath him. His job was driving sales, not running errands.
My friend looked at him for a moment. Then he looked down at the man’s shoes. Scuffed. Unpolished. And he said, "If your job is sales, how are you doing it walking around in shoes like that?”
He reached into his desk drawer, pulled out shoe polish, and told the man to sit down.
The co-founder and co-owner of the company then got down and shined the shoes of his new sales hire. And when he was done, he looked up and said: No one in this company is above a task that serves the good of this company as a whole. That includes me shining your shoes. Now, please go to the office supply store.
His business partner then went out and bought that commercial chair. And they put it where everyone could see it—every day.
Why “My Client” Thinking Is Costing Your Firm More Than You Know
Now I want to stay here for a minute before we move on, because there is more happening in that story than a good anecdote about a humble founder.
What my friend did in that moment was not just an act of service. It was an act of empowerment. He created a teaching moment so visceral, so specific, so impossible to forget, that it became part of the company’s cultural DNA. And then he made it physical. He put it in the room. He gave the lesson a permanent address.
That chair is not a decoration. That chair is the culture’s memory when the founder is not in the room.
Think about what it communicates to every person who walks through that office. New hire or twenty-year veteran. It says, “Your title does not exempt you from service.” Your function does not exempt you from service. Your seniority does not exempt you from service. We are all here to serve. Full stop.
Now here is where this gets organizational, and this is the part I want you to sit with if you lead a team, a practice, a department, or a firm.
When this model actually runs through an organization, when people have genuinely dropped the ego and are oriented toward service, something remarkable happens. The silos collapse. Not because of a reorganization. Not because of a new incentive structure. Not because leadership sent a memo about collaboration.
They collapse because the thinking that creates silos in the first place, my client, my practice, my service line, my utilization number, that thinking has no oxygen left when everyone is operating from service.
Think about what drives a silo mentality. It is the belief that my success is a separate thing from your success. That protecting my territory is rational because the organization rewards me for what I own, not what we build. That is not a structural problem. That is an ego problem wearing a structural costume.
When a leader, and I mean a real leader, not just someone with a title, when that person is genuinely operating from service, they don’t think in those categories. They ask, “What does this client need?” What does this team need? What does this moment require? And they do that thing, regardless of whose name is on the account.
Your performance goals, your utilization, your origination, those don’t disappear in a service model. They get better. Because the investments the organization makes in marketing, sales, operations, and talent development are all driven by the same purpose. When everyone is rowing from service rather than from ego, the metrics follow. The alignment is not a strategy you implement. It is a byproduct of the posture.
But it requires someone to kneel down first.
It requires someone to pull out the shoe polish.
What Leadership Looks Like When There’s Nothing Left to Prove
The second story was sent to me by a listener and former colleague, and it has stayed with me.
A principal in Atlanta. Thirty-three years in education. Fifteen of those years were spent as the principal of his school. He served the children, the families, and the community. At 58, he retired.
He thought the free time would be good. It wasn’t. He missed it. He missed giving. He missed contributing to something that mattered.
So he went back.
You might think he went back as a superintendent. An administrator. Some title that honored his tenure. No. He went back as a site manager. A handyman. Part-time janitor, depending on the day.
He mops the bathroom floors. He cleans the gutters. He inspects the fire extinguishers. And in his own words, he still feels like he’s contributing meaningfully to a place he really cares about.
This man ran the building for fifteen years. He knew every family. He shaped the culture of that school for over a decade. And he came back to clean the gutters.
That is not servant leadership as a practice. That is servant leadership as an identity. The role changed completely. The orientation never did.
Here is the distinction I want you to hold between these two stories, because I think it tells us something important about humility and where it lives in a life.
My friend deployed humility as a leader with full authority and full intention. He knew what he was doing. He chose the act. He institutionalized it. That is humility as a leadership instrument. It is powerful and intentional, producing results that outlast the moment.
The principal is different. He has nothing left to prove. No authority. No audience. No lesson to teach. He came back because the place mattered to him, and he still had something to give, and he was completely at peace with being the least important person in the building.
That is humility that has run all the way through. It is not being deployed. It is just what he is.
Different roads. Same destination. Our purpose is to serve.
And here is the thing I keep coming back to.
One shouldn’t have to wait until retirement to arrive at that conclusion.
The principal is a beautiful story. And somewhere inside, it is a quiet question for every leader listening right now. What would it take for you to operate from that place today? Not at the end of your career. Not after the title has expired and there is nothing left to protect. Now.
What would you do tomorrow morning differently if you had already let go of the thing you are holding onto?
Humility as a Leadership Operating Model: The Only Two Categories That Matter
I want to bring this back to something practical because this show is not about inspiration. It is about the application.
Humility as an operating model means this. Every action and every inaction is an act of service or a failure of it. Those are the only two categories. When you claim a client as yours rather than the firm’s, that is a failure of service. When you decline a task because it is beneath your title, that is a failure of service. When you withhold information from a colleague because sharing it does not serve your number, that is a failure of service.
And when you kneel down with shoe polish in your hand to make a point that matters, that is service. When you mop a floor in a building you used to run because you still care about the children inside it, that is service.
The measure of your commitment to service is not what you say about it. It is what you are willing to lay down to practice it.
The sales rep laid down his pride. My friend laid down the distance that comes with being the founder. The principal laid down the title, the status, and the entire architecture of his professional identity.
The principal’s story is one I keep returning to as I work on my leadership book. Because what he did at retirement is really a completion of the Golden Leadership Cycle in the fullest sense. He reinvented. He held. And then he empowered the next version of himself to keep giving without needing anything in return. That is what the cycle looks like when it runs all the way through a life—more on that in the book.
What are you willing to lay down?
Drop the ego. Act in service.
That is the model. That is the gold standard.
