Pushing Back in Leadership: When Confidence Slips into Hubris

I should say at the outset that I have been fortunate. Every inspection of a school I have taught in or led has returned a positive verdict. I write, therefore, not from the memory of bruising judgements against my own work, but as someone who has sat in plenty of rooms where the verdict has gone the other way. And what I have noticed, often enough to call it a pattern, is that the first instinct of a leader on the receiving end of bad news is rarely to reflect; it is to push back, or as a head I used to work with used to say “to come out swinging”.

Pushback has a place, of course. Poor process deserves to be challenged, flawed evidence interrogated, unfair treatment resisted. But when pushing back becomes the default posture rather than an occasional one, when it operates as reflex rather than judgement, confidence has slipped into hubris (from the Greek  ὕβρις, meaning insolent pride, often in combination with dangerous overconfidence and complacency).

Psychologically, it offers relief. It restores agency at the moment when the ground seems to be moving beyond one’s own control. It hopes to reassure followers that their leader is alert, strong, and unwilling to be pushed around. In high-stakes environments, used sparingly, that posture can stabilise the morale of a jittery team.

The trouble is when it becomes the modus operandi. Once criticism is framed as threat, defensiveness can often compound. Over time, the instinct to push back sets in: the leader who always rebuts becomes the leader who can never be criticised.

But leadership is not simply the management of instinct. It is the disciplined regulation of it.

Jim Collins described the leaders of enduring organisations as combining personal humility with professional will. The phrase has been quoted to exhaustion, but it is useful precisely because the two traits are often treated as opposites. They are not. Without the humility, will curdles into self-regard. Without the will, humility fails to deliver.

Hubris is what happens when the will survives and the humility does not.

The ancient Greeks understood this well. Hubris was not arrogance alone; it was the refusal to recognise one’s limits. Heroes fell not because they were challenged, but because they believed challenge itself was the problem.

Modern leadership thinking consistently reframes humility as a strength: the willingness to hold one’s own leadership up for examination as readily as one holds up anyone else’s.

In practice, this changes the question a leader asks when criticised. The defensive question is: how do we rebut this? The humble question is: what does this reveal? The first protects the narrative. The second protects the institution.

It is worth noticing that the second is also, by far, the harder to ask in public.

In schools and other complex organisations, minor failings often become disproportionate battlegrounds. A compliance gap. A record-keeping lapse. Leaders will argue, sometimes rightly, that such issues obscure the larger truth of what the school is doing well.

The argument is usually half correct. The smaller things do not define an institution. But they do test whether leaders believe standards apply most sharply to themselves. That test is what colleagues are watching. It is also, more often than leaders realise, what inspectors are watching.

When leaders frame every criticism as technical, external, or disproportionate, they may buy themselves room to manoeuvre but lose credibility. Over time, staff learn that reflection is performative. In these circumstances accountability becomes something to manage, not embody.

I have sat with leaders who, in a meeting going clearly against them, found the composure to say something simple and true. The room changed. Not because the criticism was softened (it was not), but because a different conversation became possible.

A leader who says, calmly and without theatre, “This should not have happened, and it is on me,” does more than defuse the moment. They model the thing they spend their professional life asking of others. And in schools especially, where we ask young people to learn from their mistakes every day, the gap between what adults demand and what they demonstrate is noticed faster than we think.

Ronald Heifetz calls this capacity adaptive: the ability of a system to learn without panic or denial. It is not built through policy or away-days. It is built through the small, daily choice to treat criticism as information rather than injury.

Pushing back will always have its place. But when it becomes the reflex rather than the exception, it is worth pausing to notice what is being protected. The institution? Or the self?

Hubris tells leaders that the problem is always out there. The discipline of leadership is to keep asking, honestly, whether some of it is in here.

The best leaders I have watched receive difficult news did not “come out swinging”. They asked, first, what they had missed.

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán