5 min read
Recently, a leader shared this story with us. Every Monday morning, she walked into her team's standup, bracing for impact. Arms folded. Already frustrated before anyone spoke. The team had just missed a major deadline, a key employee had put in their notice, and a cross-functional project was stalled because two departments wouldn't talk to each other. She sat down, looked around the table, and thought: "Why am I surrounded by people who can't get it together?"
We hear versions of this story in nearly every organization we work with at Arbinger. The specifics change, but the pattern doesn't. Something hard happens, and the first instinct is to look around the room and assign blame. My team isn't stepping up. Leadership doesn't support us. Nobody cares as much as I do.
The challenge itself isn't what's hurting your organization. It's the way your people are showing up to face it.
Let's be honest. Work is full of difficulty. Projects go sideways. People underperform. Strategies that should work fall flat. Budgets get slashed. Good people leave. None of that is hypothetical. That's just Tuesday.
And most of us respond to those difficulties in one of two ways. We just don't realize that the way we choose changes everything—not just for us, but for every person we work with.
When We Turn Inward, We Make Everything Harder
When a challenge hits, and we turn inward, we become self-focused. We stop seeing the people around us as people, with their own pressures, their own goals, their own struggles. Instead, we start seeing them as obstacles. Or threats. Or as irrelevant to what we're trying to accomplish.
Think about what that actually looks like. A restructuring gets announced, and instead of asking, "How is my team experiencing this right now? What do they need from me?" the leader is running a private calculation. How does this affect my role? My visibility? My standing in the organization? The people on the team become variables in a personal equation.
Notice what happens next. Because the focus is inward, a narrative starts forming. The boss doesn't get it. Peers are only looking out for themselves. Direct reports aren't stepping up. I deserve better than this. That leader starts carrying around a story that justifies every frustrated, checked-out, blame-filled response.
This is what we call the inward mindset. And it doesn't just make one person miserable. It spreads. The team picks up on it. They can feel when a leader isn't really with them—when they're being treated as problems to manage rather than people to lead. And what do they do? They turn inward, too. They protect themselves. They disengage. They stop bringing their best thinking because, really, why would they?
The reality is, the challenge itself (the restructuring, the missed target, the difficult employee) isn't what's destroying a team's ability to respond. It's the mindset people bring to it. An inward mindset takes a hard situation and makes it dramatically harder. It layers self-deception on top of the original problem. Now you're not just dealing with the challenge. You're dealing with the challenge plus a team full of people who've stopped trusting each other.
Turning Outward Doesn't Mean the Problem Disappears
Now, here's what an outward mindset does not do. It doesn't make problems disappear. It doesn't mean pretending everything is fine or stuffing down frustration. This isn't about being nice. It's about being effective.
When we face a challenge with an outward mindset, we see the people around us as people. People who matter as we do. People with needs, goals, and pressures of their own. And because we see them that way, we respond differently. We ask different questions. Instead of "Why isn't this person performing?" we ask, "What's making this harder for them? Am I part of the problem? What do they actually need from me right now?"
Think about that for a second. Same situation. Same restructuring. Same missed target. But a leader who's outward isn't spinning into self-justification. They're getting curious. They're stepping into the difficulty instead of armoring up against it.
And here's what's worth paying attention to. Challenges become genuine opportunities when people approach them this way. Not in a motivational-poster sense. In a real, practical, measurable sense. Every time a leader faces something hard and resists the pull to turn inward, every time they stay connected to the people around them instead of retreating into their own story, they build the kind of trust that makes teams actually hold together when it counts.
We've seen this play out across organizations we work with. One senior VP was managing a large-scale integration after an acquisition. Two cultures, completely different ways of operating, and her gut instinct was to push her team's approach because she believed it was the better one. Better than. That should sound familiar. But she paused. She started meeting with leaders from the acquired company—not to convince them, but to learn. What are your challenges? What's working that we might be missing? What would make this transition actually work for your people? Within three months, the integration was ahead of schedule. Not because the problems went away, but because people stopped fighting each other and started solving things together.
What You Can Do This Week
Here's the practical question: how do you actually make this shift when you're in the middle of something hard?
Start with one thing. Check your mindset. Before your next difficult meeting or conversation, pause for 30 seconds and ask: Am I seeing the people in this situation as people? Or have I already turned them into obstacles, threats, or irrelevancies in my mind? If you notice frustration, resentment, or that familiar sense of "I deserve better than this," that's a red flag. Those emotions are signals that you've turned inward. They're not proof that you're right about everyone else.
Then take one more step. Pick the person who frustrates you most in this situation. The one you've written the biggest story about. And get curious. What are their challenges? What's life like for them working with you? What might you be doing that's making their job harder? We call this a "Meet to Learn." It's not about being soft. It's about getting honest enough with yourself that you can actually lead.
The challenges aren't going away, you already know that. The question isn't whether things will be hard. The question is whether your people will face those hard things in a way that pulls them together or drives them further apart. An inward mindset guarantees more friction, more blame, and more of the same problems everyone is already exhausted by. An outward mindset won't make the work easy. But it will make it possible to build something that lasts.
To learn more about how this may be playing out in your organization, grab your sample chapters of Leadership and Self-Deception below, or schedule a strategy session with one of our Arbinger experts, it is the fastest way to see how the inward mindset works and what you can do about it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is an inward mindset?
A: An inward mindset is a self-focused way of operating where we see others as obstacles, threats, or irrelevancies rather than as people with their own goals and challenges. It shows up as blame, self-justification, and image protection, and it spreads through teams when left unchecked.
Q: What is the difference between an inward mindset and an outward mindset?
A: With an inward mindset, we focus on our own needs and see others as problems to manage. With an outward mindset, we see others as people who matter like we do, and we ask what they need and how we might be contributing to the problem. Same situation, very different outcomes.
Q: How does mindset affect team performance during challenges?
A: An inward mindset layers self-deception on top of the original challenge, creating blame cycles that erode trust. An outward mindset helps teams stay connected and solve problems together. Organizations that shift outward see measurable improvements in collaboration, accountability, and speed of execution.
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