Bloody Hell! It's Blame.
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Bloody hell! It’s Blame.
Time to buckle up.
If you’ve decided your organisation requires an Adaptive Culture, but your current diagnosis comes back as a “Culture of Blame” (the lower end of a Resistant Culture), what will the road ahead look like?
Firstly, the road ahead will be rocky – very, very rocky. There is a 12% chance that this could be your organisation. It will feel like everyone is dumping on you, and it will probably have been very unpleasant already for a long time. This is your chance as a leader to break out of it – so, buckle up.
Secondly, it will require determination.
Determination to face into this problem. Many leaders who experience this have talked about it in quite physical terms, saying it’s “like getting a kick in the guts” or “feeling sick in the gut.”
Determination to hold back from blaming others. Doing this will only perpetuate the Culture of Blame or make it worse.
Determination to “stay the course”. It will often feel like 2 steps forward and 1 step back (and sometimes the reverse). If you are a board member or an executive and you have asked one of your leaders to do the hard yards to get rid of a Culture of Blame, then they will need your unstinting support from beginning to end – they will need your determination too.
Thirdly, it will require a highly visible, proactive leadership style focussed almost exclusively on:
Getting lots of simple, highly-visible quick wins in the early days (yes, the low-hanging fruit)
Getting out of your office and talking with people. This builds trust and gives you crucial information.
Opening up the Problem Pipeline and attacking long-term unresolved problems, especially the ones that generate daily operational frustrations. The temptation to use band-aids, or patches, to fix these problems will be overwhelming. Resist it as much as you can. Only go there as a last resort.
10% of your communications should be used to acknowledge issues and validate the concerns raised by others.
90% of your communication should focus on generating strong positive long-term solutions to the issues raised.
If you have been a leader in a Resistant Culture in Blame, what worked for you?
