Knowing When You're the Problem

I am going to be honest with you about something that took me longer than it should have to understand.

There was a period in my work where nothing seemed to land. Teams were not performing the way I believed they could. Projects were losing momentum. Conversations kept arriving at the same stuck place. And I had a very sophisticated and coherent explanation for all of it that pointed outward.

The wrong people. The wrong context. The wrong timing. The wrong resources.

What I did not do, for longer than I am comfortable admitting, was ask the one question that might have actually changed something.

What if I am the variable?

Why this question is hard

There are structural reasons why most people, and especially most leaders, resist this question.

The human brain has a consistent tendency, researchers call it the self-serving bias, to attribute successes to internal factors (my skill, my effort, my judgement) and failures to external ones (bad luck, other people, the environment). This is not unique to leaders. It is how nervous systems protect ego.

But for people in leadership roles, the protection has more cover. There is almost always something external to point to. Teams, structures, markets, timing, are real factors, and they really do shape outcomes. The attribution to them is rarely entirely wrong.

The problem is that it is rarely entirely right either.

Chris Argyris, an organisational psychologist whose work I return to often, described what he called defensive routines: the ways organisations and the individuals within them protect themselves from learning that is threatening to their self-image. The most sophisticated leaders he worked with were, in some ways, the most skilled at defensive reasoning. They could construct elaborate, internally consistent explanations for failure that never required them to examine their own contribution.

He called this skilled incompetence. You are so good at defending that you become incompetent at learning.

What the honest look requires

The leadership books will tell you: get feedback. Run 360s. Create psychological safety so people can tell you the truth.

This is all correct. And it is downstream of something harder.

You have to genuinely want to know.

Not want to demonstrate that you are the kind of leader who seeks feedback. Not want the process of soliciting it. Genuinely want the information, including the information that implicates you.

That wanting is not automatic. It has to be built. And it is built through what I would call identity robustness: a sense of self that is secure enough to receive challenging information without collapsing.

If your identity is built on being right, on being the competent one, on having the answers, then feedback that suggests you are contributing to a problem is not just uncomfortable information. It is an attack on who you are. And the defences mobilise accordingly.

The person whose identity is built instead on learning, on growth, on being honest about where they are so they can move toward where they want to be, can receive the same information and be genuinely curious about it rather than threatened by it.

Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset describes exactly this. The orientation toward mastery rather than performance changes how difficult feedback is experienced. It becomes information rather than indictment.

The specific signs worth watching for

There are patterns that tend to suggest you might be the variable, not the definitive list, but the ones I have found most reliable.

When the same problem recurs across different teams or contexts. If the difficult dynamic follows you, the common element is worth examining.

When people stop bringing you the hard things. The team that only shares good news is often a team that has learned the cost of sharing bad news.

When you find yourself consistently explaining why the other person or the other team does not understand. If you are regularly the clearest thinker in the room, you might be. Or you might not be allowing the room to think clearly.

When you feel threatened rather than curious by disagreement. The response to someone pushing back says something honest about where the security is coming from.

None of these are verdicts. They are signals worth taking seriously.

What happens when you get there

I want to tell you what the honest admission changed for me.

Not immediately, but over time, the willingness to genuinely ask what am I contributing to this? opened up a kind of feedback that I had not been accessible to before. Because when people sensed that the question was real, that I was not just performing openness while actually defending a position, they started telling me things.

And the things they told me were useful. Some were uncomfortable. Some challenged things I had been proud of. All of them helped.

The leadership range that became available after that admission was qualitatively different from what came before. Because I was no longer spending resources on maintaining a version of myself that was impervious to being wrong.

That maintenance is expensive. More expensive than most people know, because they have never stopped paying it long enough to notice.

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The work of building the kind of self-knowledge that makes this question answerable without collapsing is exactly what The Forge System is designed for. Twelve weeks. The real work.

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