Window or Mirror

When things go horribly wrong in your business, do you see the results through a window or mirror?

How about when everything is running smooth, what do you look through then?

In his best selling book, Good to Great, author Jim Collins explains a concept called “the window or the mirror.”

Collins’ research found that the best leaders look out of a window to credit others for success and look in a mirror to absorb responsibility when things went wrong.

Conversely, unsuccessful leaders tend to look through a window to blame others during tough times, and look in a mirror to take credit when things go according to plan.

Have you been around these different types of leaders?

Collins nailed this idea of window or mirror. I can think of a handful of good and bad leaders who squarely fit these descriptions.

What about you? Through what lens do you view good or bad results?

Speaking from experience, it is not always easy to fit the description of a good leader that Collins explained.

As an example from this website, a few months ago I posted a story about a book from Jay Bilas. The link was tweeted on the Attention.Land Twitter and Jay Bilas retweeted it to his 700,000 followers. This led to a very high traffic day for the site.

When all that went down I was feeling pretty good about myself. You’d think my arm would’ve been sore from patting myself on my back for writing such a riveting post.

I was doing exactly what Collins was talking about when he said that bad leaders view success through a mirror and take all the credit.

Had I chosen to look at the situation through a window, I would have noticed that fellow Attention Lander Aaron does a fantastic job with our social media which helped attract the attention of Jay Bilas. And it was Jay Bilas’ power that got all his followers to check out the site.

So all in all, my “riveting post” had very little to do with the great day of website traffic. Although, I’d never know it given all the time I spent checking out myself in the proverbial mirror.

Viewing success or failure through the right window or mirror is not easy. But I do think it is a skill that can be learned and improved. When we are in the midst of a success or failure we need to remember to step back and refocus our gaze through the correct piece of glass.

Photo credit: Wikipedia