Think about the last time you were supposed to do something and didn’t. Maybe it was something related to work, or something you were supposed to do for your family or a group you are a part of. When you didn’t accomplish what you were supposed to, did you begin to create negative thoughts about the people around you because you failed to do some work?”
In the Harbinger Institute’s book Leadership and Self Deception, one of the key things they bring up throughout the entire book is that chances are, if we are blaming others, being salty or petty, we likely neglected to do something we were responsible for ourselves. A common situation can be this: an individual can be putting forth a great amount of effort toward a project, and others might not be pulling their share of the load. As a leader, if we fail one of our assignments, even an easy one, we can easily make excuses, “Well they aren’t helping… They haven’t done much… I’m the only one doing work”. At the end of the day, this line of thinking can damage views we have of others or damage rapport in trying to build a team. The real problem though stemmed from our inability to act successfully in our own assignment. We had our own moment of self denial and maybe an inability to trust or delegate.
Before we get upset with other people, take a step back and look at the situation. Is it actually something that we didn’t do ourselves? Is it something that we are about to fail at or don’t feel like doing? Is the other person really at fault? If we can accurately evaluate these things, we will be able to build our team, and increase our teamwork and limit our excuses and blame others less.
