People don’t like to be wrong. They like to fail even less. This is especially true with big mistakes and faulty predictions.
So, after mistakes or failures, they naturally reflect upon what occurred in an attempt to understand what happened and why.
But a funny thing happens on the way to drawing a conclusion. People commonly underestimate their own role and actions in creating the outcome.
Instead, they look for answers that don’t include them. They have a need to attribute negative outcomes to anyone but the person staring back in the mirror.
Defensive attribution refers to the strong tendency people have to view negative outcomes as a result of things outside of their control. Instead of seeing themselves as responsible for a mistake or defeat, they defensively attribute the outcome to the situation, to luck, to incompetent others, or to factors outside their control.
Not surprisingly, positive outcomes are more likely to be attributed to hard work, talent, and skill.
This applies to decision-making and forecasting as well. Decisions that produce the desired outcomes and forecasts that come true are commonly attributed to the skill and insight of the forecaster, while decisions that result in negative outcomes are defensively attributed to other factors.
Defensive attribution serves to protect the self-esteem of those on the losing side of outcomes. The vulnerability of admitting they were wrong or failed is just too much to bear sometimes. That’s why everyone attributes outcomes defensively on occasion.
Good leaders guard against making defensive attribution a habit by focusing on solutions rather than spending too much time looking for blame or attribution.
To learn and improve, it is only natural to seek the reasons why outcomes occurred. But our defensiveness can get in the way of accuracy.
Given the tendency to attribute success to ourselves and failures to others, good leaders challenge themselves to rise above self-protection and deal with the consequences instead. They seek a remedy rather than blame. That’s because they know that failure is compounded when attribution is its only ally.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
