Leadership and Success - People Who Learn to Accept Responsibility For Their Faults Will Succeed

If you are an effective leader who wants to succeed in your chosen profession then you need to accept responsibility for your failures. It is not good leadership to blame others for your failures - it weakens your own character and self esteem. You may become depressed and start to lose the respect of your team if you refuse to accept responsibility for your failures.


Successful leaders embrace change. Successful leaders talk about issues. Successful leaders accept responsibility for their failures so that they can improve as a human being, and, therefore, inspires them to strive harder so that they can contribute to making the world a better place. By not accepting responsibility for your failures you will not be able to rise to the challenges of the world.

Why do some unsuccessful ones fly by the seat of their pants? It is not because they are weak. It is because they want others to look down on them and they don't want to take any responsibility for their own failures. Most unsuccessful entrepreneurs continuously learn from their past mistakes and grow. Others accept responsibility for their failures and become successful.

People with success do what it takes so that they can excel at what they love to do. Successful individuals give others inspiration to do the same. People with success give others hope. They inspire others to pursue greatness. Those with success accept responsibility for their failures so that they are able to make things better. In doing so, they look better as a professional, team player, or leader, because they accept responsibility for their own actions.

Now let's examine what those who embrace change face. Those who don't accept responsibility for their actions are faced with the hardest things. When you don't accept responsibility for your actions, you run the risk of what I have referred to as the ostrich effect. Ostrich effect refers to what happens when an individual sits back and waits for others to pick up the pieces, when there are plenty of things done right in the world, before they pick up the pieces and act. Those with success, or the ostrich effect, are in the business of self-employment or business ownership, where the most difficult things to achieve are the hardest things to do.

When you don't accept responsibility for your actions, and you don't look at what you do and what you have done, others will pick up the pieces and act, while you sit back and wait. That is the ostrich effect in action. You may hope others will fail and continue to fail, because it gives you a sense of control; that by not accepting responsibility, you somehow control those around you, that you can tell them just how it is supposed to be, and they will inevitably follow your lead.

But leadership and successful people give others room to succeed and they also encourage them and stand behind them when they need a ride. They encourage and sometimes even stand behind the person with the bright future, even though they may have started out on a downward spiral. This is because the successful people give themselves room to grow and develop, to learn from their past mistakes, and to become better people, while the unsuccessful people take off running in the opposite direction. They don't evolve. They don't change. Instead, they just keep running in the same direction, always looking ahead, always expecting to see other people fall in line behind them, because they are convinced all along that if only they could make it this far, they would become the next successful person.


Leadership and successful people want others to succeed because they feel a personal responsibility to help them reach their goals and fulfill their dreams. They don't allow their past mistakes to stop them from continuing forward and becoming the person they want to become. They do not allow their past failures to control or influence them; instead, they continually learn from their past errors and strive harder to become better human beings.