John Cox

Playing the Blame Game

Way too often in both my personal and professional life I see the ill effects of worrying about mistakes. It is not the focus that we should have in our everyday life. The test of character in a person is not the lack of mistakes that they make. The true test is in the recovery from mistakes that will indeed happen. This is particularly important when working within teams. It is extremely frustrating to me to hear excuses rather than accountability. Furthermore, it is even more frustrating to see the finger point rather than looking for the root cause of a failure.

Mistakes due to inattentiveness or negligence are performance issues and are not my focus in this article. Mistakes due to bad decisions based on bad data are just as costly, but correctable from within an organization. Mistakes can often lead back to decisions made months or years prior without notice. Mistakes due to a lack of communication process, likewise are just as costly. In all of these cases, we have to consider the fact that we are dealing with humans. Humans make mistakes, just as they sometimes show that they are greater than the sum of the parts.

With all of that in mind, here are five simple rules to live with within an organization:

1. Don't waste energy on assigning blame. It normally takes much longer to figure out who made the mistake than to understand why the mistake happened and how to correct it. Why waste the energy? Do we tend to sleep better at night know who screwed up our day? I don't, but I sure do sleep better when I know there has been resolution to problems.


2. Don't waste energy on creating excuses. Did you make a mistake? Then say to everyone involved, I messed up. Not only will it get your team to a solution quicker, but it will also build trust within your team. Trust is a key to high performance workers. You need to instill it in others and you also need to show it to others. It may sound funny, but nothing makes folks trust you more than when you show your weakness or mistakes. It makes you human.


3. When someone fesses up to a mistake, help them over come the problem. Once again, it is about trust in an organization. When you own up to a mistake, folks understand that you are human. Understand that they are as well, and move forward. It isn't who made the mistake, but rather how do WE fix it.


4. Learn from your mistakes. This is how we grow. Not learning from our mistakes is negligent to not only our organization, but ourselves as well. I figure I make at least one major mistake a week and several minor ones a day. Perhaps I misjudged the situation, or I completely forgot to document a meeting. These mistakes can and will come back and bit me in the butt, but they should only do that once.
   
5. Mistakes today are revenue tomorrow. Take a deep breath when one of your team has made that major mistake. It's amazing what we can learn from a mistake. Perhaps that mistake was off by a single assumption, but now we have a process or a widget that we can build from. Isn't that the basis of evolution?

Just some thoughts on a Friday night after sitting through a an hour long conference call listening to my peers berate one another for minor problems. Nothing got accomplished in that call, just like a good portion of the calls that I end up apart of. It is a shame, as I might have been a little more productive doing something else.