It is far easier to see what’s wrong with everyone else. The colleague who overcommits, the team member who avoids conflict, the peer whose ego gets in the way — these are obvious, and naming them feels like clarity. What’s much harder, and far more useful, is to turn the same clear-eyed attention onto yourself, especially onto the failure you’d rather not look at directly.
Most of us carry a private gap between the leader we present and the leader we actually are. We know the call we ducked, the credit we took, the person we treated badly when we were tired. The instinct is to manage that gap — to explain it away, to keep it hidden, to correct others energetically while leaving our own faults carefully unexamined. But a leader who is forever pointing at the small faults in others while ignoring the larger one in themselves loses authority slowly, because people can tell. They always can.
There’s a discipline here that runs against every instinct: deal with your own failure first, and deal with it honestly. Not performatively — the public self-flagellation that’s really just a bid for reassurance — but actually. Name what you did. Own it without the softening clauses that shift the blame. Make it right where you can. The leader who can say “I got that wrong, and here’s what I’m doing about it” is not diminished by it. They become someone safe to follow, because everyone can see that failure in this place is survivable and need not be hidden.
This is also the heart of restoration, which leadership cultures are generally bad at. We’re quick to write people off and slow to give them a way back. But the leader who has been honest about their own failure tends to leave room for other people’s — not excusing it, but offering a route to repair rather than a permanent label. That’s not softness. A team that knows mistakes can be owned and recovered from will tell you the truth far earlier, when problems are still small. The alternative — a culture where failure must be concealed — guarantees you’ll only ever hear about the disasters once they’re too big to hide.