Head to the website TrumpInOneWord.com and you'll find all sorts of words users have submitted to define our president-elect.
There's WINNER and RICH, ARROGANT and DANGEROUS, and others we can't say on the radio.
And, then there's the word HUMBLE which has 66 votes.
If our new leader wants to fare well in the years to come, he may want to try to bump those numbers up a bit. That's according to new research on how humble leaders are better at what they do. Ashley Merryman, co-author of the books NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children and Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, wrote about recent studies on humility for The Washington Post.
"Humble people do it completely differently," Merryman told Alex Cohen. Merryman listed qualities are practices of humble leaders and how it helps their businesses.
- Minimize disparity in pay. "The humble leader flattens pay disparity. They're not getting $100 million when their second-in-command is getting $5 or their secretary is getting pennies."
- Build a leadership team and delegate. "They hire a larger leadership team and diffuse responsibilities from them and throughout the company."
- Encourage personal development. "The focus for the humble leader is on improvement, recognizing their flaws, and saying, 'okay, what do I need to do to be better?' and because they put this priority then on improvement, they tell the people who are working for them, 'hey, I'm getting better, I recognize my weaknesses — what are you doing to get better?' They will actively then encourage others, solicit other's opinions and value them: 'I'm counting on you because I know I'm not really good at this, so can you do this?" People who work for someone who says that really step up and rise to the challenge."
"All of that catalyzes better bottom lines," Merryman said. "Companies with humble CEOs actually make more money. They have less employee turnover and more consistency."
Being an arrogant leader can be detrimental to a leader and his or her goals. "The arrogance or the humility actually become leadership social contagions," Merryman says. "If the leader is never willing to admit he does anything wrong, no one around him ever does everything wrong either. It all becomes about blame and diffusion and doubling down on mistakes rather than admitting there was a problem."