Dear Founder,
I know what if feels like when you’re angry that something didn’t go right. You may even feel justified in pointing fingers at the person or people you believe let you down. Or, you may even think it would be appropriate to publicly shame them for letting you, and the company, down.
I understand that what they did was bad—maybe very bad—and it’s now causing you all sorts of problems. Instinctually you want to blame someone. HOWEVER, you can’t be so quick to blame them or act on that feeling of blame. Maybe this sounds like a small thing, but this is a real issue that can derail executives and leaders.
I learned this early on. I remember playing American legion baseball when I was 18 years old. We were a very good team and made it to the state championships. I adored our coach who was very funny and inspirational most of the time. But I will never forget his speech at the end, when we lost our first two games in the state finals and were eliminated: “I guess you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.” It was not a very inspirational way to end what was a good season that could have been great. It taught me that losing sucks, but there is still a way to be gracious about it and get inspired by the experience. Instead of inspiration and hope for the future, our coach delivered bitterness and blame.
Now, as a senior executive and board member, I’ve seen a number of executives throw other people under the bus. This almost always ends up looking bad for the executive who does it—not the team member who made the mistake. The executive should be a good enough manager to know the importance of reflecting on the problem, owning up to their piece of the accountability, and focusing on the learning. I keep an eye out for executives who are quick to blame others and try to coach them to correct this flaw.
You will never end up building credibility with your whole team when you don’t go into these situations with a beginner’s mind. Instead of being quick to assign the blame game, look at everything as if it’s the first time you saw it. Ask yourself:
- What happened here?
- What did we miss?
- How could I have helped to see this earlier and help fix it faster?
- How likely is this to happen again?
You should build with your team a culture around openness and learning. Have employees be tougher on themselves than anyone else. This generally happens when you build a transparent AND supportive culture where mistakes are generally used as learning experiences and everyone is encouraged to be brutally honest about how they are doing.
When something doesn’t go well, deep dive into why and focus on the learnings—instead of the blaming. For example, during a post mortem from a system outage, are you looking for gaps in process and execution to shore them up in order to avoid a recurrence, or are you quick to fire someone who made a mistake? (Of course, as I’ve said before, if you have employees or leaders who aren’t learners or high achievers, you must let them go. Allow them to be mediocre somewhere else. Or, perhaps they will become stars in a different environment.)
As for your environment, make sure it is a world that enables learning, practices forgiveness and fosters inspiration. There’s an old but true adage: When you point a finger there are four pointing back at you. It is so much better to take MORE ownership of an issue even if you sometimes don’t feel it is warranted. I remember we had a big outage at eBay a few years into my tenure. In the past, Meg had terminated other executives, in the middle of the crisis, for similar problems. But this time she was working with a new team and we had made a lot of progress and had earned her trust. We knew we had to deliver and she knew she had to as well. She worked very closely with us through the outage and she told us how proud she was of the progress we had made. Instead of feeling that she blamed us and instead of worrying about losing our jobs, we were inspired to fix the problem and not let Meg or our customers down.
No one does their best work when they feel they are on the edge. No one will take chances or strive to be better when they live in fear. So, instead of seeking revenge by throwing someone under the bus, recycle that urge into preventing the situation the next time and inspiring everyone to do better.
All the best,
Maynard