Leadership

19 Pages 4751 Words

the seams of a cohesive unit. A little defensiveness is healthy self-protection...like the immune system. Excessive defensiveness will prevent learning from one’s mistakes. After all, why do anything different, if all mistakes are someone else's fault? Feeling angry because of changes imposed from above? This move can be self-defeating if it stops an individual from understanding his rationale and coming to terms with his own resistance to change. If people have healthy self-esteem, they should be able to admit their mistakes. If a person has low self-esteem, that individual will either be too hard on him for even small mistakes, or he will overreact and defensively never admit them!
When anticipating the failure of a project, do many people start telling others why it will fail? These people are setting up their defenses in advance so they will not have to create them after the fact. Advance defensiveness can even facilitate failure. Some people will even sabotage their own projects, when they start to think they will fail, if they ...