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In the pursuit of success, it’s easy to want to puff yourself up in front of others. You want to show off your successes. You want to distance yourself from failure. You want to be viewed as someone who always does the right thing, and to have everything you touch turn to gold.

In truth, you need to be very careful about this, because true leaders actually do the opposite. True leaders, and truly successful people give away credit for things that have gone well, and take blame for things that turned out poorly.

The window and the mirror

Author and business researcher Jim Collins talks about CEOs of truly great companies in his book Good to Great. In companies that are great – not just good – he describes the CEOs of having a peculiar behaviour. He noticed that these CEOs “look out the window for success and in the mirror for failure”. That is to say, they look to give credit and praise outside of themselves when things go well. When a project goes belly-up, they look at themselves and ask what they could have done better to have avoided the failure. They refuse to blame others because they know laying blame is a fruitless endeavour. You can only change yourself, so it makes no sense to lay blame on anyone but yourself. You can, however, praise others for the good that they’ve done to reinforce the behaviour and the success.

Leadership guru John Maxwell discusses a similar idea in his book The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader. He argues that leaders are only secure in their leadership if they can give credit away. If you are uncertain of yourself, you’re likely to hoard credit to boost yourself up as much as possible. Confident leaders know themselves, know the contributions they’ve made. They know that they’ve had enough of an impact on the world around them that their actions can speak for themselves, so they don’t have to be vocalized.

How to put it into practice

This all might seem a bit counterintuitive. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me at first, but if you think about the possible outcomes, it’s clear what you should do.

Say, for example you did a great job on something. You can either praise yourself or praise others for the contributions that they’ve made to help you in the success. If you praise yourself, it’s unlikely anyone will look at you in a brand new light and think to themselves “Wow! That guy is way better at life than I could have dreamed!”. Nope. They won’t. It’s more likely they’ll view you as pompous. Alternatively, if you praise others for their help the people around you will see you as kind, confident, and are more likely to believe what you have to say. Compliments are more likely to be taken at face value when they come from an objective third party about someone else.

Take a look at the opposite situation, when a project or endeavour doesn’t go that well. You have the choice to blame others, or blame yourself. Blaming others can lead only to making others feel bad about themselves and to drive a wedge between you and your colleagues. Looking at yourself for opportunities to do things better, on the other hand, shows others that you’re committed to self-improvement, that you’re self aware, and that you have a degree of humility. This will make it easier for people to know, like, and trust you, which is critical for success and leadership.

“Great things can happen when you don’t care who gets the credit.”
– Mark Twain

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Challenge

I challenge you to take time this week to praise someone else for the great work they’ve done, and to keep quiet about your own accomplishments. Later, come back to this post and fill in the comments section below to let me know how it felt and what the results were.

Article sponsored by Triad Engineering 10/20/2014 Boston Massachusetts

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