May 2010 Feature

Monthly Lessons in Leadership from the Daily News

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Top Kill "Blamestorming" in Your Organization

Holding people accountable without killing teamwork

As this is being written, British Petroleum (BP) is attempting to “top kill” the fractured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, 36 days after it ruptured and started gushing at least 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the Gulf and Atlantic Ocean. The disaster has now become our nation’s worst environmental crisis, surpassing the rupture of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker in 1989.

Fractured leadership worsens oil disaster

Emergencies have a way of exposing a group’s strengths and weaknesses, and the disaster in the Gulf is showing the world that today’s Team USA is a dysfunctional collection of individual entities, not a cohesive team. When the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, it marked the end of 11 lives and the beginning of an epic environmental emergency that is a microcosm of our leadership faults as a nation. Unfortunately, our leaders’ responses have been characterized by finger-pointing, not mobilization.

As in many disasters, individual acts of courage, ingenuity, and heroism are certainly taking place on the scene. But the success of these individual efforts depends upon the leaders’ willingness and ability to marshal diverse resources and focus human effort in a productive way. The “Greatest Generation,” those who grew up during The Great Depression, who fought worldwide tyranny as one country, who built our nation’s infrastructure with back-breaking hard work and a can-do attitude, and who landed a man on the moon and returned him safely to the earth by the end of a decade (John F. Kennedy, 1961), would be ashamed of us all.

The high art of finding fault

Our nation is not responding as a team but as a collection of disjointed groups with our own agenda, each finding fault with the other in a storm of blame. In fact, the term “blamestorming” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009 as a description of what happens in smaller work teams when a “scapegoat” needs to be found. But its large-scale definition is being written in 2010.

Within a few days of the disaster’s origin, business executives at BP, Transocean, and Halliburton were shifting blame to one another, and the President of the United States characterized our government’s involvement by swearing to hold his “foot on the throat” of BP to hold them accountable. The first official scapegoat, Elizabeth Birnbaum, the director of the U.S. Minerals Management Service (the federal agency which oversees offshore drilling), was fired just hours before a White House news conference on May 27. All this posturing and politics while the oil still spewed.

What the oil spew has to do with you

Where does accountability end and blamestorming begin? As a leader, what can you do in your organization to properly hold people accountable without escalating the process into dysfunctional blamestorming?

1. Start long before the emergency breaks. Teams with a clear, shared understanding of their mission and vision, roles and responsibilities, and processes and procedures will prevent disasters and respond to them more quickly. The leader’s job is to cultivate a culture and infrastructure that makes it easier and more compelling for people to work together.
2. Lead by example. When problems do occur, focus everyone on finding solutions until it is resolved. People who fear for their job security or have a political agenda will distract you from this course of action. But if you want to stop other people from pointing fingers, then you have to stop pointing fingers yourself.
3. Reward problem-solving behaviors and extinguish blaming. Psychlogist Joan Bendall notes, "Behaviors that are reinforced continue, and those that are not, are extinguished." Leaders who participate in blamestorming are propagating that culture by reinforcing that this behavior is approved. Those who don't participate, escalate, or tolerate it, serve to extinguish it.
4. Despite your lawyer’s advice, take the blame yourself. If something happens “on your watch,” you are ultimately responsible anyway, so start there. In addition to being the right thing to do, it depowers the “witch hunt,” earns much-needed equity, and allows your people to solve the problem faster.
5. Once the problem is solved, there will be plenty of time to conduct an after-action review to prevent the problem (and ones like it) from happening again. The 9-11 Commission did an admirable job of peeling back the layers of a complex problem and recommending solutions. People and agencies were held accountable in the proper context and at the proper time.
6. Recognize the difference between misdeeds and mistakes. Administer the right discipline when the occurrence was a misdeed, and help the individual and entire team learn from any errors that were honest mistakes. If mistakes are punished, the message is clear that people should play it safe at all times and take steps to “cover their assets.” If misdeeds are let go without consequences, then leaders breed a culture that lacks discipline, standards, and ethics.
7. Do not harp on the guilty parties. People are watching closely how leaders treat people at every moment and registering that this is how they will be treated. Humiliating the guilty parties by making an example of them, repeating their offense publicly, finding scapegoats, or using hyperbole, only demoralizes the rest of the organization.

As a leader, you can’t wait for emergencies to expose your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Their success depends on what you do in advance. And when problems do occur, your job is to “top kill” blamestorming before it gets started, hold people accountable in a responsible way, and maintain effective teamwork in your organization for the short- and long-term. It’s not easy, but it’s your job.