Welcome to Friday 411, issue #152. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll learn why you’re the last person to spot your worst leadership habits.
1 Insight
When other people mess up, we tend to blame their character. When we mess up, we blame our circumstances.
Early in my career, I (Garland) complained about a certain type of leader: those who passed people without acknowledging them. It drove me crazy when a leader walked by without making eye contact or stopping to greet others. I perceived these leaders as arrogant and hated their belittling nature.
But a few years into my leadership journey, I got the results of an anonymous engagement survey from more than 120 people across the organization I worked for. The comments came in batches, and one theme kept showing up over and over: My tendency to walk past them in the hallway without acknowledging them. I made people feel invisible.
At first, I was furious. Did all those people know how hard I was working for them? Every task on my overflowing plate existed because I was exhausting myself to help them, and here they were complaining that I didn’t say “hi” in the hallway.
After I gave my fury time to simmer and cool, I started to see what they were saying.
Prior to the surveys, I had told myself a story about myself: that I was naturally wired toward task-orientation. With no time to spare between sprinting to meetings, I had way too many important responsibilities to be bothered with interruptions. Everyone could see how much I cared about them by how hard I worked for them. I saw all the excuses I had given myself to not speak to them.
But all they saw was my aloof behavior and cold demeanor.
I had given myself a benefit of the doubt—one that I had never extended to a single leader who had walked past me in the same way.
And became the leader I complained about.
The Trap I Fell Into
Every person has flaws, but when a leader has them, their attitudes, behaviors, and habits hurt the people they influence. If you see behaviors in someone else, it drives you crazy. But when you see them in yourself, you justify it.
Psychologists have a name for this. They call it the Fundamental Attribution Error.
It boils down to a simple idea. When other people mess up, we tend to blame their character. When we mess up, we blame our circumstances.
In my mind, other leaders didn’t say hello because they were arrogant. I didn’t say it because I was busy. (But it was a good busy.) Same behavior. Two different verdicts.
Stop Making Excuses
Whatever your bad habits are, the reasons for them are real. Your intentions are good. But how others interpret them is another story.
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- When someone is talking to you, you look at your phone because you have a lot to do. But they think that you don’t care about them.
- You pack your schedule tight because you have a lot of important decisions to make. But your team sees you as unavailable and disinterested.
- You’re cranky because you stayed up late working on that last-minute report. But your team perceives you as grumpy and foggy-headed.
If someone did these things to you, you’d be angry or hurt. But when you do them to others, you know why you’re doing them. You’re okay with your behaviors, so everyone else should be, too. You assume everyone understands your good intentions.
But if a leader did these things to you, you’d reject their reasoning in a heartbeat. All that matters to you is how they made you feel. Just like all of those people reported in my engagement survey. My actions made them feel small, less-than, and unimportant.
That’s the cost of the Fundamental Attribution Error. You give yourself the grace you refuse to give others, and you withhold from yourself the truth you use to evaluate others.
You Can’t Fix This Alone
Here’s the part that gets uncomfortable. You will not catch this on your own.
Self-awareness has a ceiling. You can journal about it, read every leadership book on the shelf, and take every assessment ever written. You’ll still have blind spots.
That’s why you need other people. Not the ones who are paid to agree with you, and not the ones who are afraid of you. The ones who love you enough to tell you the truth, and who know you well enough to be specific about what they see.
It took a survey of 120 people to get a few of those to reveal what I could not see right in front of me.
That’s the cost of going it alone. You stay stuck in the same patterns for years longer than you have to, because the people closest to your blind spots don’t think it’s safe to name them.
It’s one of the reasons we built The Unleashed Community — to create a group of like-minded leaders who want to help each other grow. If you’re ready to continually upgrade your leadership, check out The Unleashed Community.
1 Action
Ask one trusted person this exact question: “What’s one blind spot you see in me as a leader that I probably don’t see in myself?” Don’t defend, don’t explain, and don’t justify. Just say thank you and write it down.