Today I Believe

The mirror test

Before you ask your team to look honestly at their work, look honestly at your own.

An essay by Dustin Michael Drozd

Teams calibrate to the mirror behavior of their leader, not the meeting behavior. They watch what you do when nobody is being graded and they take their cue from that.

If you handle your own mistakes openly, they will. If you hide them, so will they. The pattern is set early and is almost impossible to change later from the top down.

The mirror test is unglamorous. It mostly looks like saying out loud, in front of the team, the thing you wish had gone differently this week, and what you intend to do about it.

Over years, this is how a culture of honest improvement actually gets built.