There are some professional failures that I can barely remember. Projects that did not work, decisions I would make differently now, presentations that could have been better and initiatives that quietly disappeared because they never achieved what we hoped they would. At the time, some of them felt enormously important, but experience has a way of putting failure into perspective. You learn, recover and move forward. Embarrassment seems to work differently. There are moments from twenty years ago that I can still remember with uncomfortable clarity, not necessarily because the consequences were particularly serious, but because embarrassment attaches itself to something more personal. It affects how we see ourselves and how we believe other people see us, especially when it happens publicly. Perhaps that is why a sarcastic comment, a public correction or being made to feel small in front of colleagues can stay with someone long after the person responsible has forgotten it happened. The moment may last seconds, but the emotional consequences can remain for years.
I remember being involved in rehearsals for a very large event where I had somehow found myself responsible for managing the lights and sound, despite having no particular expertise in either. I was trying to help, learning as I went and doing a job that, if I am honest, I was not especially qualified to do. The person leading the event repeatedly belittled me in front of colleagues and other people involved in the production. This was not an isolated incident, because by then I had experienced similar behaviour from the same leader for several years. I said nothing. I carried on with the rehearsal and tried to do the job. What I remember most clearly is that other colleagues noticed. They came to check whether I was all right because they could see something that, at the time, I had almost stopped seeing myself. I had become used to being treated that way. When the leader eventually left the organisation, I was one of the first people to stand up and give them a generous round of applause. Only afterwards, with distance from the relationship, did I begin to understand how much my confidence had been affected. There is something deeply uncomfortable about recognising that behaviour can become so normal that we stop questioning it, and that sometimes the people around us recognise what is happening before we are prepared to acknowledge it ourselves.
It would be easy to write about embarrassment entirely from the position of the person who has experienced it, but leadership rarely allows us the comfort of staying on one side of an argument. Nearly twenty years ago, I was delivering a presentation to a large group of people and wanted to demonstrate the power of conformity. I arranged beforehand for several people involved in the presentation to deliberately choose an incorrect answer, while leaving one person unaware of what I had planned. The idea was to see whether that person would follow the crowd despite believing the answer was wrong. As a social experiment, it probably demonstrated exactly what I wanted it to demonstrate. As a way of treating another person, it was wrong. When the individual realised that they had unknowingly been used as part of a public demonstration, they were understandably upset. I had placed someone in a vulnerable position without their consent because I was more interested in making an effective point than considering how the experience might feel from their perspective. I apologised because there was nothing else to do. They were right and I was wrong. The person has not forgotten what happened, and neither have I. Almost two decades later, I still think about that incident whenever I involve other people in public demonstrations or activities, because it taught me to put myself in the position of the person being involved rather than simply considering whether the activity will work.
That experience also taught me something about the limitations of good intentions. Most workplace embarrassment is probably not caused by people deliberately setting out to humiliate someone. It happens because people speak too quickly, use sarcasm without considering how it will land, correct someone publicly when the conversation could have happened privately, make a joke that feels very different to the person receiving it or simply fail to recognise that other people experience social situations differently. Culture adds another layer of complexity. Years ago, when I was living in Germany, I discovered that wishing someone a happy birthday before the actual day could be considered uncomfortable or inappropriate by some people because of cultural beliefs and traditions that I had not previously encountered. Something I considered friendly could be received very differently by someone else. Working internationally has repeatedly reminded me that humour, embarrassment, respect and acceptable social behaviour are not universal. People bring different histories, personalities, expectations and cultural norms into the workplace, and leadership requires enough curiosity to recognise that our interpretation of a situation is not automatically the correct one. We cannot remove every awkward moment from working life, but we can become far more thoughtful about how easily they happen.
Seniority complicates this further because the longer I have worked in leadership, the less frequently I have found myself in situations where I am likely to be publicly embarrassed. That is not necessarily because I have become more emotionally resilient or socially skilled. It is partly because senior leaders are protected by their position. People are less likely to interrupt them, publicly correct them, laugh at their mistakes or place them in situations where they feel exposed. Other people sometimes notice inappropriate comments made towards me before I have even registered them myself, but generally I am not placed in vulnerable professional situations as often as I might have been earlier in my career. That should make senior leaders more conscious of embarrassment, not less. The danger is that we gradually forget what vulnerability feels like while retaining considerable power to create it for other people. A senior leader may think they are making a quick joke, offering robust feedback or correcting an obvious mistake, while the person receiving it is standing in front of colleagues wondering whether their credibility has just been damaged. Power does not simply change who is allowed to make decisions. It changes how words are experienced.
Perhaps the clearest indication of emotional health is what happens afterwards. People will make mistakes. I have embarrassed others, been embarrassed myself, misjudged situations and spoken without thinking carefully enough about the consequences. A psychologically safe workplace cannot be one where nobody ever gets anything wrong because such a place does not exist. What matters is whether people are able to recognise the impact of their behaviour without immediately defending themselves. One of the most damaging things a leader can do after embarrassing someone is spend considerable time explaining why their behaviour was understandable before eventually offering an apology. I have seen leaders privately justify what they have done, blame the other person, minimise the impact and explain why anyone in their position would have reacted similarly, only to apologise later when they realise that an apology is expected. The words may be correct, but the people who heard the earlier conversation already know what the leader really thinks. An apology loses much of its value when it is preceded by a defence of the behaviour that caused the harm.
There are times when leadership requires far fewer words. If I have embarrassed someone, I do not need to explain my intentions until they understand that I am fundamentally a good person who made a reasonable mistake. I need to recognise what happened, accept responsibility and apologise. Sometimes that means saying, quite simply, that I noticed my behaviour embarrassed someone, that I should not have handled the situation that way and that I am sorry. The harder part comes afterwards because an apology does not erase the original moment. The person I embarrassed nearly twenty years ago still remembers what happened, just as I remember being belittled during that rehearsal. Repair is possible, trust can be rebuilt and people can move forward, but we should not confuse forgiveness with forgetting. The responsibility of the person who caused the embarrassment is not to demand that everyone moves on quickly. It is to learn enough from the experience that their future behaviour provides evidence that the apology meant something.
There is also a point where repeated embarrassment stops being a collection of unfortunate mistakes. Workplace bullying exists, and repeated belittling, humiliation and the erosion of someone’s confidence should not be explained away as personality differences, strong leadership or a demanding organisational culture. Looking back, I have wondered whether some of the behaviour I experienced during my own career crossed that line. I also have to remain sufficiently self aware to ensure that my own authority never creates similar experiences for someone else. Good intentions are not enough, which is why organisations need clear anti bullying procedures, whistleblowing arrangements and complaints policies that people genuinely trust. Policies alone will never create a healthy culture, but they matter because people cannot always resolve repeated harmful behaviour through an informal conversation, particularly when there is a significant imbalance of power. A workplace that encourages people to speak up but provides no credible way of challenging those with authority is not psychologically safe. It is simply optimistic.
Perhaps the most important lesson I have learned is that emotionally healthy workplaces allow people to recover. They recognise that awkward moments, misunderstandings and mistakes are inevitable, but they do not require people to pretend that nothing happened. They allow someone who has been embarrassed to retain their dignity, and they allow someone who has caused embarrassment to take responsibility, change their behaviour and rebuild trust. That requires maturity on both sides, because there is a difference between accountability and permanent condemnation. I would not want the worst leadership mistake I made twenty years ago to define everything I have done since, but neither would I want to pretend that it did not matter simply because I apologised. Growth depends on our ability to hold both ideas at the same time: people can cause harm and still learn, and people can forgive without forgetting what the experience taught them.
Failure often comes with a natural ending. The project finishes, the decision is reversed, the target is missed and eventually attention moves somewhere else. Embarrassment has no such timetable. It can quietly change how people participate, how confidently they speak and whether they are willing to place themselves in vulnerable situations again. I know this because I have experienced it from both sides. I have stayed silent while being belittled because I had become accustomed to it, and I have been responsible for creating a public situation that someone else still remembers almost twenty years later. Neither experience is particularly comfortable to write about, but perhaps that is the point. Leadership reflection is of limited value if we only examine the moments that make us look good. The quieter responsibility is to notice the moments when someone has been made to feel smaller, especially when we are the person responsible, and to have enough emotional maturity to stop defending, start listening and do what we can to repair the damage. Because the moment may be brief for us, but we do not get to decide how long someone else carries it.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.