Why Accountability and Blame Are Not the Same
How many times have you sat in a meeting and heard a leader ask "How did this happen?" but the real tone was "Whose fault is this?"
I know I have experienced this on numerous occasions and, even if I had nothing to do with why the project failed, I wanted to crawl underneath the desk to a quiet, safe space where no one could see me. It is so uncomfortable to sit and wait for someone to be shamed.
These types of leaders would say that holding someone responsible is accountability, but I could never understand how shaming or tearing someone down helped. Psychological safety, isn't just a buzz word. As my friend Kasia Grabda wrote "workplace PTSD is a real thing."
I have written about psychological safety before (you can read that here), and we know the importance of creating a safe environment for people to thrive. The blame game is an ignition for a toxic work culture. When we move with fear, instead of empathy, the sustainability of the business suffers.
I know I'm not the only one that has heard the term "accountability" thrown around and gotten shivers. There is a significant difference when it comes to blame and accountability. And when we speak of #kindculture, accountability is the way to go.
What is blame culture? My unofficial definition of blame culture is a productivity killer that cost businesses in great talent, employee loyalty, customer engagement and hard dollars. Blame culture produces nothing more than a toxic work environment.
A more eloquent definition by www.oxford-review.com says "a blame culture refers to an environment where people, or groups/teams of people, are frequently singled out and blamed, criticized and fault is apportioned for mistakes and errors."
No matter how you want to define it, blame culture only provides negative outcomes to an organization. When blame is how you define "accountability" your business will have more hidden issues, zero accountability and maybe the most damaging of all - lost creativity and innovation. People will be afraid to try any thing for fear of retribution and retaliation, if it doesn't work out.
But that is not all, the Oxford Review notes that a blame culture reduces levels of job satisfaction, engagement and work productivity and most certainly guarantees high turnover and low performance. When we focus on blame, we lose site of the broken areas of a process and the ability to prevent the issue from reoccurring.
With accountability, we are curious. We want to drive towards what in the process failed and what we need to do differently to ensure an outcome we want in the future.
In a kind culture we know we have to take accountability for our actions and we care enough about our colleagues, customers and success of the business to identify what went wrong, what role we may have played and we work to fix it.
Here are four ways you can move from blame to accountability in your next meeting.
- Establish a safe zone. People have to be confident they can share without fear of retaliation or punitive actions. As a leader, you have to set the tone for how the team will communicate, establishing early that blame will not be part of the discussion and all viewpoints will be heard.
- Start with me. Next time something has gone wrong on a project, start by asking your team "What could I have done differently to have changed this outcome?" As a leader, when you begin with your own accountability it shifts the energy of the meeting, places the group at ease and creates a space for constructive dialogue.
- Be curious and assume nothing. When working through where a process broke down - because we focus on the process and not an individual when solving problems - don't come believing you know what happened. In my experience, problems vary rarely are the result of a single issue, there are always a number of drivers that have contributed.
- Focus on the path forward. While it is important to get an understanding of what happened, the goal should be how to work to ensure the error doesn't occur again. Don't waste time belaboring what happened. Determine the root causes and move forward with how to fix them.
