The Embarrassment Audit

Let me ask you something honest. When was the last time you went looking for your own failures?

Not waiting for someone to point them out. Not noticing them once they became impossible to ignore. Actually going looking.

Most of us never do. We carry a natural instinct that says if something isn't broken loudly enough to hear, leave it alone. That instinct feels like focus. In reality, it protects your ego while quietly undermining your team.

A few years ago, I started a practice I call the embarrassment audit. Once a quarter, I set aside time to deliberately look for the things I should be embarrassed about. The decision that isn't working. The system my team works around instead of through. The promise I made and never kept. The initiative I championed that quietly faded.

The first time I did it, I found so much that I almost stopped. It was uncomfortable in a way I did not expect. But on the other side of that discomfort was something valuable. Once I could see the failures, I could fix them. The things I had been avoiding were the exact things holding my teams back.

The Policy That Felt Like Leadership

A hospital administrator I worked with ran her first embarrassment audit and found a policy she had put in place three years earlier. Every patient complaint letter had to be routed through her office before anyone could respond. Her intention was quality control. She wanted every frustrated patient to receive a thoughtful answer.

What she found was a six-week bottleneck. Patients who had written in frustration were waiting nearly two months to hear back. Her team had adapted by sending generic holding responses, which made everything worse. And nobody had told her, because the policy was hers. The culture made it hard to push back on something the leader had personally created.

When she saw the data, she was embarrassed. Then she acted. She eliminated the requirement and gave response authority to her department heads. Response times dropped to four days. Patient satisfaction in that category improved 31% within a single quarter.

The policy had felt like leadership. The audit revealed it had become an obstacle.

Why Your Team Won't Tell You

Here is what makes this so difficult. The higher you rise, the less honest information reaches you. That isn't because your people are dishonest. It's because they are doing the math. Raising a problem with something the boss built carries a cost, and most people decide the cost is too high.

That silence is common. A February 2026 survey of 2,000 UK working adults by MHFA England found that 45% of employees feel unable to raise mistakes or risks at work, and 15% say they have made preventable mistakes because they did not feel safe speaking up.

So the workarounds multiply. Your team builds quiet detours around the decision you made, the process you designed, the meeting you insist on keeping. From the outside it looks like adaptability. Underneath, it is your team protecting you from news you haven't asked to hear.

That is why the embarrassment audit has to be something you initiate. If you wait for the feedback to arrive on its own, it usually arrives too late, and it arrives as a resignation, a lost client or a crisis.

Self-Protection Wearing a Suit

There is a version of leadership that feels productive but is actually self-protection in professional clothing. It defends past decisions because changing them would mean admitting they were wrong. It avoids looking closely at the initiatives we championed because we are emotionally invested in their success.

I understand that instinct. I've lived it. But earned conviction doesn't come from never being wrong. It comes from being willing to see clearly, especially when what you see is uncomfortable. Leaders who look for their own failures send a powerful signal to everyone around them. They make it safe for others to do the same. As I've written before, your mistakes are your team's best curriculum, but only if you are willing to name them first.

This is different from a routine performance review. A traditional review asks what went well and what you could improve. The embarrassment audit asks a harder question: what have I been avoiding because looking at it would make me feel exposed? If your answer doesn't make you a little uncomfortable, you probably aren't looking closely enough.

It also pairs well with the quarterly discipline I describe in Keep, Stop, Start. One helps you decide what to keep doing. The other forces you to face what you have been refusing to see.

Where to Begin

Start with one honest question this week. What decision, process or promise in my area would I be embarrassed to have examined in front of my team?

You probably already know the answer. Most leaders do. The work isn't discovering it. The work is choosing to look at it instead of looking away.

The discomfort of seeing your failures is temporary. The cost of refusing to see them is permanent. And every time you choose to look, you earn a little more of the conviction that no title can give you.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.