Learning To Improve Past Blame

What have you learned, how do you improve

Are you looking back or moving forward.

Blame is pointless, it feels good, but it gets you nowhere. Accountability is vital if you want to improve.

Blame

Someone screwed up, it happens. We are all human. If you are leading a team that you think will never make a mistake, you are either the most optimistic person in the world or one with a limited grip on reality.

A mistake was made, it feels natural to want to figure out who was at fault. Finding what caused the issue seems like a positive leadership step.

Blame assumes that someone maliciously caused the outcome. They wanted it to fail and went out of their way for it to cause as much harm as it could.

Therefore, blame is an activity that is trying to assign fault to allow for retribution. Someone should suffer for the mistake. You are trying to regain control.

Making someone pay for a mistake doesn’t lead to better outcomes in the future, just an increased amount of fear that someone might go wrong in the future and that they will get punished.

The team doesn’t work to create great outcomes, they work to avoid making mistakes.

Accountability

Your team know when they make a mistake or are involved in a situation with an unproductive outcome.

Blaming them and having them have to admit their failures is treating your team like they are children. If you treat people like children then they will start acting like children.

But you don’t have children on your team, you have hard-working people that do their best and things happen.

If you don’t have hard-working people on your team then you need to go back to who you are recruiting and stop worrying about any of this.

After a mistake or issue is raised, you want to figure out how it came to pass so that it won’t happen in the future.

See how there was no blame assigned there, but how do we learn so that we can improve.

Look Forward, Not Back

Mistakes will happen, but looking back will not get you to your destination.

Focus your efforts on moving forward towards your goal. Those efforts should contain retrospectives on performance and analysis of decisions and assumptions.

All of these efforts are to improve your ability to perform in the future.

To help your team achieve their goals the game is not to be the best at telling people how they screwed up, it is to be the best at helping people improve.

---