7 Costs of Blame
Posted by John G. Miller on April 25, 2013
An executive at a medical products distribution organization told me, “So, yeah, we’ve got some problems, like our field salespeople calling our headquarters the ‘sales prevention club’!”
Hey, a new acronym—the SPC!
If we didn’t have the home
office getting in our way, we could make more sales!
Blame can also take on the dangerous form of
culprit-seeking questions like:
“Who dropped the
ball?”
“Who made the
mistake?”
“Who made that stupid
decision?”
“Who hired these
people?!?”
No matter the form, let’s be clear: Blame is
bad, blame is costly. Let’s make a list …
The Costs of Blame:
-
Destroys morale
-
Reduces creativity
-
Lowers productivity
-
Increases fear
-
Drives wedges between colleagues
-
Breaks down teams
And, The Big One, which is a quote from our new (free) QBQ! App:
Hind-sighting = blame. And blame solves no problems.
When we did our “gentle
rewrite” of the QBQ! book, we added some FAQs.
Here’s one and how we answered it. I think this Q&A sums it all
up:
Q: If we can’t use the word
“Who,” then how can we have a discussion of what went wrong?
A: There should be conversation around problems
and how they occurred, but “whodunit” questions are almost never about solving
problems. They’re about finding a culprit. “Who made the mistake?” implies that
the entire story behind the problem is what one person did in that moment, but
that’s almost never the full story. Yes, they did it, but what motivated them to
do it? What was the situation at the time? What had they been told? How were
they trained? Were they being managed well? When problems are explored in a
healthy fashion, good questions are asked. We call them QBQs:
“How can I help improve our processes?”
or “What can I do to discover what contributed to this?” are far better
questions than, “Who did it?!”Blame. Easy to engage in, commonplace, costly—and there’s no defending it.
The solution is practicing PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY.
It’s just as simple as that!
For Comment and Discussion:
In your opinion, what others costs of blame are there? Is there blame going on in your organization? What’s it costing … you?
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19 responses to 7 Costs of Blame
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John G. Miller
"The Accountability Guy"Author - Keynote Speaker
Connect With QBQ!
You can point your finger at the White House,
Or the houses high up on the hills.
You can point your finger anywhere you want,
But BLAME won’t pay your bills.
I learned a valuable lesson in the process of my very short time with that organization: fix the problem and don’t just fail the person. Certainly people need to be addressed about their actions. However, as a leader I need to do that privately and focus on moving us forward as a team.
Thanks for the ‘gentle’ reminder.