Relax as we face this fact together: When those who report to you disappoint you, it’s probably your fault.  ~Patrick Lencioni

I recently read an article by Patrick Lencioni entitled Humble Yourself at Work.  It’s one of those articles that stays in the back of your mind and kind of nags you during specific instances when you realize the author was right about their assessment.  Patrick points out that we all like to say that we aspire to be humble leaders, but unfortunately, aspiring to be humble usually doesn’t get us there.  As I’ve learned over the last number of years, humility isn’t something you can aspire to; it’s something you have to go through.  In other words, there’s usually a little (or a lot) of pain that accompanies the journey to humility.

Patrick provides a wonderful, and probably hard to accept (that’s the humility part), illustration.

I don’t really teach my sons to misbehave. It’s not as though I sit down and give them instructions on how to provoke their brothers, break dining room chairs, or talk back to their parents. But I must have done something to give them the idea that it would be okay to do those things—or more likely, that the consequences for doing so wouldn’t be significant.

In that moment of realization, I have a choice: I can either humble myself enough to acknowledge that the first person I need to address if I want to change my son’s behavior is me, or I can go on venting about how ornery he is and watch the orneriness continue.

The same thing happens to me—and to all leaders—at work. On a bad day, we often find ourselves complaining about something people in our organizations are doing. We turn to our colleagues on the leadership team (or our spouses) and vent. “The mid-level managers in this company are terrible at giving constructive feedback to their employees.” That’s just one of the common complaints I hear from executives.

Now, if we’re lucky enough to have a colleague on the management team, a consultant, or a spouse who is upfront with us—or if we are somehow struck with a blinding ray of humility in that moment—we will realize that we’re ultimately complaining about ourselves. As a consultant, my favorite way to remind leadership teams of this inescapable conclusion is to ask them: “How many of the people you’re complaining about report to someone outside of this room?”

Many times when I think of being a humble leader, the first example that comes to mind is admitting when we’re wrong, which does require a dose of humility.  But I think Patrick’s example of owning the fact that when our reports disappoint us, it’s our fault, takes humility to an entirely new level of character building.  As leaders, are we willing to address ourselves (and our behaviors) first, when others disappoint us?