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Making a clear statement such as "I don't understand" also is a great signal to your coworkers. It kills confusion and builds trust: I know that if you don't un
by zaidf 14y ago
Making a clear statement such as "I don't understand" also is a great signal to your coworkers. It kills confusion and builds trust: I know that if you don't understand, you will let me know. That is much better than having someone who I have to poke to admit that they don't understand something.
Another personal favorite is stating unequivocally, loud and clear that "This was my mistake". It is tempting to just fix the mistake but even if you have fixed it, if there isn't clear declared ownership, you probably haven't addressed the root cause.
Doing this keeps you honest to yourself and also removes the awkward air where no one knows who is responsible for this mistake because no one has taken ownership. To pull this off you need an environment that won't punish mistakes by default.
There are absolutely fireable mistakes but if you do this right, the employee should volunteer to be let go because he realizes the gravity of his error.
- Evbn 14y agoWhy does it matter who is responsible for a mistake? Whence this antiquated notion that failures are to be blamed on a scapegoat?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jaggederest 14y agoMore to the point, people turn off their brains when they hear 'This was my fault'. They stop investigating further once the blame has been assigned. It's more important to do the classic 'five whys' than to assign blame. A scenario: Maybe Joe forgot to do the maintenance task. Maybe he forgot because he's been working overtime and is tired. Maybe he's been working overtime because there aren't enough sysadmins. Maybe there aren't enough sysadmins because hiring good sysadmins is difficult. If you stop with just 'Joe's fault', you miss the point - time to spend some effort on recruiting new sysadmins. Worse, you might damage Joe's morale or even alienate him through punishment, even though that only makes the root cause worse.
- zaidf 14y agoSure, the way I see that in order for the 5 whys to work, you still need to know that Joe made the immediate mistake. Now, as part of the process, you create ways to prevent that mistake. When doing that preventative analysis, the other whys should pop up and the solution may well be something beyond Joe.
- jaggederest 14y agoRight my point is that saying 'It's Joe's fault' is wrong. The blame lies beyond him. It's cool to say 'he forgot to xxx' or 'he made a mistake and yyy', but to just categorically call it his fault is wrong.
- zaidf 14y agoIf the responsibility lies beyond him, then he shouldn't say it was his fault. You only say that if it was indeed your fault or you qualify how much of it was your fault.
- klibertp 14y agoI understand this the following way: when nobody claims "ownership" of a mistake, everybody (ie. in a team) feels guilty about it, even of they had no control over what lead to this mistake. If someone says clearly that it was his mistake, everybody else may stop worrying and either concentrate on something else or help mistaken person avoid such mistakes in the future. This has nothing to do with scapegoats, but my understanding can be, of course, completely off.
- zaidf 14y agoYou are right on.
- sokoloff 14y agoAt our shop, we drive to specific "causal" or "responsible" event/party so that we know, as best we can, what actually happened. Nothing punitive about it, and every one of my best colleagues have 5 or 6 figure losses that they had a prominent role in causing. I only care who, what and how for the purpose of minimizing the chance of recurrence or to improve our response when a third-party causes a recurrence.
- zaidf 14y agoWhy does it matter who is responsible for a mistake? Because the person who makes the mistake is often in one of the finest positions to suggest ways to prevent the same and similar mistakes not just by him, but by others in the future. In all, that adds great long term value to the organization. Accepting responsibility does not mean "blame" or "scapegoating". Blame and scapegoating is something done by others in the organization and reflects on a poor culture than someone accepting responsibility. It does mean seeing a situation objectively. If Mary broke the site and she knows why, it helps no one to keep that a mystery. It helps everyone if the environment lets her come forward and say it was her mistake, this is the fix and this is how we will prevent this category of mistakes in future. In fact, in order for this to work, you have to go out of your way to make sure that "responsibility" is not used to blame or scapegoat. If it is, people responsible will stop accepting responsibility.
- Millennium 14y agoBecause the person who made the mistake is in the best position to understand how and why it happened. Responsibility and blame are entirely different things.