This short YouTube talk by Cameron Herold advises entrepreneurs and CEOs to practice introspection—taking personal responsibility for problems rather than blaming others. Herold argues that when leaders own failures and support their team, it fosters respect and reduces externalizing/blame within the organization.
Chapters
So one of the best traits that I've seen for entrepreneurs is called introspection. It's about the ability to blame yourself for the problem or look at your own contribution to the problem versus blaming the external world. It's all too easy to blame your employees, or blame your suppliers, or blame the economy, or blame the market, or blame, blame, blame. But the reality is, at the end of the day, everything stops with the CEO. It really is your responsibility. It was your responsibility to hire the team, it was your responsibility to find good marketing consultants. It was your responsibility to grow the team's skill set. So if you take responsibility for all of that, your team gives you a lot more respect. And then your team will stop externalizing and blaming the outside reasons as well. If they realize, wow, you're always taking blame for stuff, they feel like in a no blame environment where you're not really blaming the other things, they realize that if they blame themselves, you're going to be there to support them as well. So I think introspection is a really strong skill for entrepreneurial organizations to have.
