Subtract your faults first?

And there is this story about how the King asked for a way to achieve something impossible and the Philosopher gave him a magic potion to do it...which would work only if the King did not think of mangoes (slot in anything in the place of mangoes as you please) for the next three days. AND, as you may have guessed, the King, who had never in his life bothered to think of mangoes before, could not help obsessing about them for the next three days. THAT, sometimes, is the way their advice works...ask you to do the impossible if you want results.

Like Tiru here...

Thankutram neekkip pirarkutrang kaangirpin enkutra maagum iraikku - Tirukkural

Faultless is the leader who first assesses and removes his own faults before judging the faults of others - Loose Translation

Of course, Tiru said 'king' and not 'leader' but the advice is about leadership, so...

You can see this multiple ways. If, for example, there has been a failure of governance, it is for the leader to see how his own mistakes had contributed to the failure. Having clearly assessed his own contribution to the issue, he can then see how the failure was caused by others. In other words, you need to see if your strategy was erroneous first. IF it was, there is no real point in getting after the guys who were only implementing it. To rectify things, a clarity of where the fault lies is important and if the fault lies in the leadership, then THAT is what needs correcting.

You can see this as a character issue. IF the leader identifies his own faults - lack of knowledge, lack of specific qualities of leadership etc - and learns how to correct them first before he starts judging others, who can fault him thereafter? Like, when the leader is honest enough to identify and work on his own flaws, it is hard to blame him when he gets after you for your flaws. (You know, the standard thing of 'As though HE is always right' etc does not work very well when you can see him working on what HE got wrong!)

The whole problem with this entire proposition is that you can file it under 'Easier said than done'! I mean, how many people have YOU met who can be clear headed and honest enough to admit that THEY may be wrong? Are we not all made perfect and sent down by God only to suffer failure because of all the imperfect idiots that He surrounded you with? How can WE ever be wrong?