In our ever-competitive world of get things done, ?better, faster, smarter,? I have noticed two very distinctive approaches to the evaluation of a project outcome. In some organizations, managers will look at issues, and ask, ?Whose fault is it?? Others will look at issues and ask, ?How will we fix it??
The former is a symptom of a ?Blame & Shame? mentality that some organizations employ. Staff are usually motivated by trying to avoid the consequences of a negative outcome. An employee hears the phone ring, feels a pit in his stomach and wonders, ?Oh no ? what?s wrong now?? Or when a problem is discovered, the first thing the discoverer wants to know is, ?Who is responsible??
In the latter, employees are encouraged, with some guidance one would hope, to take a risk on a new way of doing a task, or given the opportunity to learn something new to complete projects. In the Set Up for Success method, a project is designed with a foundation of being successful. Issues are expected plans are made to deal with them, or allow time to deal with them.
Blame & Shame is an unhealthy way to run an organization. Employees tend to do only enough work to stay out of trouble. Certainly, responsibility must be taken for the failure of individual tasks. But mistakes will happen. We don?t all need to feel like we need to run and hide every time we put the wrong cover sheet on our TPS Report (from the movie Office Space, if you didn?t catch that).
This could also be thought of as the ?Glass Is Half Full? vs. ?Glass Is Half Empty? debate, but with a twist: This isn?t just personality-based. This is based on an organization?s culture, and it perpetuates from the top down.
Comments welcome!