Today I want to share with you about a principle of leadership from Clay Scroggins, on the difference between critical thinking and just being a critical person:

“Critical thinking is different than being critical. Criticism leads to cynicism, and then you start to expect people to fail. With a critical spirit, you secretly want people to fail, and you celebrate their failure, because it confirms your bad attitude towards them.”

“Jesus, though, lived and led in a different way. He didn’t walk around with a clipboard grading people; He walked around with a towel and a washbasin. He didn’t use His leadership role to grade people’s feet, He washed people’s feet.”

“His attitude was not, ‘how can I critique you?’, but ‘how can I support you?’ I’m not here to criticize you; I’m here to help you grow and achieve.”

The irony of leadership is that it is all about serving others. The higher your level of leadership; the more people you get to serve, support, and promote. A leader’s success is in helping those we lead to grow and achieve.

That’s the difference between critical thinking and being a critical person. The critical thinker has an attitude toward helping, supporting, and mentoring others to success. The critic just wants to beat people down by telling them all the ways they did something wrong.

So as leaders, whenever you observe someone doing something the wrong way – or maybe they are just doing it in a way that is different from you – choose to be a leader who mentors them toward growth and achievement, rather than just criticizing them for what they are doing or the way they are doing it.

As leaders, we are there to serve those we lead by mentoring them, empowering them, and helping them succeed. Like Scroggins said, think not “how can I critique you?”, but “how can I support you?” How can I help those I lead to grow and achieve?