I’ve noticed that many thoughtful leaders tend to be quite self-critical when it comes to their leadership.
Rather than blaming the team, the organisation or something else, they tend to instead start blaming their own actions or capabilities.
On one hand, this can be seen as admirable.
After all, you’re not shirking accountability and pretending it’s someone else’s fault.
No – you’re owning up to it.
But what if it’s not really your problem to own? What happens then?
In this post, I’m going to take a look at the challenges of being self-critical in leadership roles and how to try to push back against this natural thoughtful leadership tendency.
What Does it Mean to be Self-Critical in Leadership?
The Cambridge Dictionary describes a self-critical person as someone who:
“Often criticizes themselves, especially their own behaviour, work, or performance.”
So when it comes to leadership, this would relate to a thoughtful leader’s ability to lead their team to get things done.
Some examples of being self-critical in leadership include:
- Blaming yourself for a mistake that one of your team members made
- Feeling like things would have turned out better “if only I’d done <something else> instead”
- Believing that other people would have done a better job in your situation
- Criticising yourself for being unable to achieve a goal, even when this was impacted by factors outside of your control
- Telling yourself you’re not experienced, qualified or <something> enough.
As you can see, this type of thinking can be quite draining and puts much of the blame for anything squarely on your own shoulders.
While some may call this “taking accountability”, it can go too far if we aren’t careful.
Why Do Thoughtful Leaders Tend to Be Self-Critical?
Thoughtful leaders are often people-people.
That is – they like to help and support others, and they enjoy seeing other people improve and succeed.
I believe this is part of the reason why thoughtful leaders can be self-critical in leadership.
Because it’s easier to criticise yourself (you’re not hurting anyone else), than to be critical of others (which might make other people feel bad).
Thoughtful leaders are also often introspective thinkers. They mull over what happens in their lives, and they think deeply about situations.
This introspection can be a curse when it turns into unreasonable overly self-critical thinking.
Learn More: 3 Ways to Reduce Unhelpful Thinking.
Is There an Upside to Being Self-Critical in Leadership?
As with many things in leadership, it’s all about balance.
And as usual, I believe there are some positive aspects to being self-critical.
Firstly, thoughtful leaders who are self-critical can often have a strong motivation to improve. They blame themselves for poor performance, and have a strong desire for it not to happen again.
This may mean they are more conscientious and prepared as a result.
Next, self-critical thoughtful leaders are not looking to make excuses or lay blame on others. They are blaming themselves, if anyone.
Blaming yourself all the time is not recommended, but blaming others is a sure-fire way to destroy trust in a team and look like you’re just trying to avoid accountability.
And lastly, shouldering the burden of accountability can build trust in a team, when people see that you’ve “got their back”.
The trouble starts if the team starts seeing that the leader is taking accountability for things that really aren’t their fault. This can reduce the leader’s credibility as they start to wonder why they are taking the blame for someone else’s mistakes.
Learn More: The #1 Way That Leaders Damage Team Trust.
How Do You Know if You’re Too Self-Critical?
It can be difficult to tell if you’re too self-critical in your own leadership, because it’s hard to see outside of your own thinking:
“It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the jar.”
I’ve already mentioned some examples above – so if you notice these things happening consistently, then being self-critical might be an issue for you.
Seeking Advice from Others
Another way to test whether this might be an issue would be to seek support, in the form of feedback or advice from others.
Good sources of this support include trusted colleagues, mentors, therapists or coaches.
Basically, anybody you can enlist to help you sense-check your gut feelings, reactions and thought patterns, who have your best interests and improvement at heart.
Note that I didn’t recommend friends in this list. Only because sometimes, they tell us what we want to hear, not what we need to hear.
It’s simple. You tell your trusted advisor how you’re feeling and where you think you went wrong, and they can assess whether you’re being unreasonable or not.
Most of the time when we’re being self-critical, we are being unreasonable.
Acknowledging when we stuff up is not necessarily self-critical. Self-critical is when we unreasonably take the blame or ownership for things that really we had nothing much to do with, or couldn’t have foreseen.
Reflection
As you probably know, I’m a big fan of structured reflection to try and spot patterns in our behaviour and improve the way we respond to situations.
You can check out my Useful Thinking Journal to start your own reflective practice here.
This could include free-form journaling, where you write down your thoughts and reactions that you had throughout the day.
Or it could be more structured (like in the Useful Thinking Journal above), where you answer specific questions about events that occurred.
I’m a big fan of more structured reflection, because you don’t need to think so much about any questions you’ll answer, they’re already done for you.
The other benefit of structured reflection is that it can help you identify patterns, such as the times when you notice you are being unreasonable self-critical.
When done well, it also helps you to self-distance, meaning you become less attached to the thoughts that are running in your head, and you can respond more objectively.
One of my favourite reflection questions
One of my favourite reflection questions is:
“What would you tell someone you respect and trust, if they were in your situation?”
When asking this in a coaching setting, I find that my thoughtful clients often respond very easily with advice for somebody else.
But they have trouble following this advice themselves.
Often when we are not the one in the difficult situation, we can advise others with statements like “Don’t be so hard on yourself – you can’t have known that would happen”.
But in our own heads… it’s often “I’m an idiot! I should have known this would happen!”
Consistent reflection can help us to see that we are being unreasonable about what we expect from ourselves.
Harnessing the Power of Being Self-Critical in Leadership
It’s not helpful or pleasant to beat ourselves up about all the things we should have foreseen or done better.
But then again, it’s good to improve, too.
And herein lies the power of being self-critical.
As I mentioned earlier, being self-critical often drives people to want to improve. But being overly critical is unpleasant, and can destroy your confidence if you are constantly telling yourself you aren’t good enough.
The improvement aspect is a good thing – it’s the constant *unreasonable* negative commentary in our heads that we need to reduce.
We need to get practical and specific
To improve, we need to be pragmatic and specific.
In other words, we should ask ourselves:
- What would I do differently if a similar thing happens next time? or
- What skills, knowledge, tools or support do I need to be able to better handle this?
If you are able to come up with a specific action, task or strategy that will help you to address the problem you encountered, then this is what I call Useful Thinking.
It’s useful, because it is something you can take action on, rather than just a “what if” or a “I’m an idiot”.
We need to turn our internal criticism into meaningful action.
When we land on a meaningful action, I find that often worry and criticism tends to fade, because we’re doing something about it.
If you are unable to find a meaningful action to take, then this should be a signal that you’ve done what is reasonably required in the situation.
But don’t take your own word for it.
Remember your trusted colleagues or advisors? Ask them what you could do to improve.
If they think you’ve done enough, then the chances are that you are being unreasonably self-critical in your leadership.
Do you find yourself often slipping into self-critical thinking? What do you do to overcome it, or make the most of it? Let me and all the thoughtful leaders know in the comments below!
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