So many businesses create a blame culture where they look for the person who made the error as opposed to identifying the factors that caused the error to be made.
They forget to learn from mistake as they are so keen to shoot the culprit before you can learn.
The corporate blame game causes conservatism, resentment and builds a rotten culture.
So, do managers really believe that someone deliberately made a mistake?
Does a golfer deliberately miss a putt, or a penalty taker deliberately hit the shot over the goal? No, they try their best but sometimes they fail. The key is they analyse what went wrong, they address the issues, retrain, and retry.
Trust must come from the top, there must be trickle down trust. Leadership needs to trust people to do the right thing, trust them to not make mistakes on purpose and most importantly trusty them to learn from mistakes.
People need to be empowered to learn, they need managers who coach and not micromanage.
Be careful not to confuse trust with absentee management. We still need to manage people but manage them within agreed boundaries, manage them with the aim to grow them, to develop them to help them excel. Empower them, trust them. Remember if you can’t trust your people, it’s a recruitment issue not a management problem.
by Richard Wright
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