I once watched a talented executive spin in circles for months. She been tasked with transforming an organisation that had grown complacent, and she came to me exhausted, angry, and confused. She had communicated the vision clearly. She had set the expectations.
Yet her team responded with withdrawal, polite agreement without follow-through, or surface-level compliance that evaporated the moment she turned her back. She felt she was pushing against a wall. For weeks, she operated from a place of righteous frustration. She complained about peopleʼs lack of ownership. She catalogued their failures in our coaching conversations.
And yet, nothing shifted. The organization remained stuck in a stalemate: a leader demanding accountability while broadcasting contempt nonverbally, and a team playing games to appease her on the surface while protecting themselves from her disapproval and from making the difficult changes required.
It was only when she stopped looking at them and started examining her own contribution to the dysfunction that the possibility of real change emerged.
The Mirror We Avoid
What she had to confront was the reality that as a leader, we are cast into situations not of our making, yet entirely ours to navigate. She had inherited this team. She had not created their habits of avoidance. But she was responsible for the reality that now existed.
As Viktor Frankl thoughtfully pointed out, while we may not choose what is being put in front of us, we create purpose the moment we accept the task life sets before us.
This is the difficult truth of leadership: we are always responding to conditions we did not choose, yet we remain fully responsible for how we meet them.
For the leader I spoke about earlier, the deeper challenge was to understand and confront her own mind. When I asked her to track her internal narrative during moments of frustration, she discovered something unsettling. Her brain was protecting her ego through a subtle distortion: the story that she was the competent victim of incompetent others. She painfully realized that she was operating from an illusion of being the one who leads, but in reality through her story she made herself the helpless victim of an incompetent team. This is the self-deception that denies our freedom and responsibility, the quiet dishonesty of claiming we are doing everything we can, there is nothing else we can do.
We tell ourselves that others force our hand, that circumstances dictate reality. In doing so, we abdicate the very agency that defines us as leaders.
The Architecture of Excuse
This pattern does not remain personal for long. Organizations are systems where leader patterns replicate across the system, like ripples in the water.
When a leader operates from a point of frustration and self-deception, blaming external factors while denying their own agency, they give permission for everyone else to do the same. The result is not merely a collection of individuals avoiding responsibility; it is systemic decline.
The organization begins to decay because no one is holding the line against the natural drift towards avoidance of responsibility. We must also dismantle the postmodern myth of the heroic leader, the solitary figure who either saves the day or fails alone. This narrative actually enables avoidance.
If we believe leadership is about being the hero, we become fragile to feedback that suggests we are fallible.
We reject data that contradicts our self-image. Total responsibility requires a different posture: it requires acknowledging our vulnerability as humans. We need to acknowledge that as a leader, we all have good days and bad days.
When we are confronted with things that seem insurmountable, too difficult to face and change, it is normal that our brain will want to shield us from facing this difficult reality. Looking at ourselves with a combination of self-compassion and clarity enables us to examine our minds, recognize our own stories and avoidance tendencies, and move past denial, self-deception or avoidance. This enables leaders to distribute ownership not by telling people what their responsibility is, but by role modelling the discipline to see oneself clearly within the system, and to act from a place of accountability.
The Practice of Total Responsibility
For the executive I mentioned, the breakthrough came through rigorous self-observation. In a moment of truth, this leader recognized that she was stuck in a frustration loop, and she recognized that being stuck in this loop provided her the easy way out of blaming everyone else while maintaining the status quo. She took her own frustration as a signal to go deeper in self-reflection. The practice of auditing her internal narratives for ego-defensive distortions in real time enabled her to shift her story first and then her behavior.
She learned to recognize the heat of frustration as a signal, not of others’ failures, but of her own resistance to reality. She began to see her team not as obstacles, but as individuals operating from their own conditioning, their own history of behavioral patterns developed over years.
This awareness allowed her to shift from emotional reactivity to compassionate self-reflection and self-correction, acknowledging her own avoidance tendencies without self-flagellation.
She recognized that her frustration had been a form of emotional abdication, a way to feel active while actually avoiding the difficult work that needed to be done. With this foundation, she could finally exercise total responsibility toward her team. She stopped complaining and started defining reality with precision. She set clear goals and expectations for every individual on her team. She gave honest feedback consistently, yet without the emotional contamination of her previous resentment.
And the breakthrough came when she established clear timelines for coaching versus decision-making. She accepted that some leaders had been operating in their current mode for decades and might choose not to change, and that she was responsible for the consequences of that reality, not the fantasy of what she wished them to become.
Some of her leaders responded very well to the clarity she established. For those leaders who did not respond, she made the difficult decisions she had been avoiding. She changed the composition of the leadership team when coaching reached its limit.
She did so, not from a place of anger, but from a point of clarity, and she was able to make even those difficult decisions with empathy and care.
A New Standard of Leadership
I share this story because I believe we are at an inflection point in how we think about leadership. The challenges we face cannot be met by leaders who operate from self-deception, who blame their boards, their markets, their teams, or their circumstances while claiming innocence for themselves.
Total responsibility is not a burden. It is a liberation. When we stop fighting reality, when we cease protecting the fragile ego that needs to be right and safe, we gain the energy and clarity to actually change things. We move from the passive voice of things happening to us to the active voice of us happening to the world.
This is the invitation I extend to you today. Examine your internal narratives. Notice where you feel the heat of frustration or the urge to blame. Ask yourself what reality you are unwilling to see, and which decisions you are avoiding to take. Practice the discipline of seeing clearly, and the courage of acting from that point of clarity.
The future belongs to leaders who can hold the tension between compassion and accountability, between acceptance of what is and responsibility for what must be done. It belongs to those who refuse the easy comfort of excuse and embrace the difficult freedom of total responsibility. Will you be one of them?
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
ALBERT ELLIS
