Great post from Frank Belzer:

I had a chance to meet with an executive last week and we discussed some ways that we could help him get better results out of his sales people. After the meeting I was reflecting on why the meeting had went so well, why we had made such progress in such a short time, why we had got along so well and the answer to all of these questions has to do with this executive having the oh so rare quality of Humility!

his gentleman was very savy, very smart and obvioulsy had some excellent leadership skills. His business had grown very progressively over the years and yet rather than getting overly confident or even pompus about his success, he still had an "I don't have all the answers" demeanor. Oddly enough those who follow this mantra usually find themselves having all the answers.

The best lesson to take away from this is that a big reason that this CEO is probably successful is because he is very willing to admit that he doesn't have all of the answers. He doesn't know everything. He knows that he doesn't know what he doesn't know.

I speak to a few people every week that want to try to battle me like it's the internet marketing knowledge showdown. First of all, who gives a crap? There are plenty of people who know more than me about internet marketing. And there are many more people with more and better experience too. I'll admit it. But, I've never had an open conversation about internet marketing with someone where I wasn't able to find something I could help them with. I advised a leading social networking site the other day with a strategy that will probably triple their traffic from search engines. I have clients that are generating 4-6x leads now than they were just a few months ago.

But, guess what, if you don't want to admit there's something you could do better and the possibility that I could help, than you'll never know. Why are you even talking to me? (Actually, why am I even talking to you?)

These people are usually just trying to make themselves feel good about the job they're doing. And most of them are probably doing fine. The problem is that they're making themselves feel good about themselves to the detriment of finding out how they could actually do their job even better.

They should take a lesson from the CEO above.