Blame vs. ownership

Listen to how your team talks about a mistake, and you’ll be able to determine the culture that you have without the need for a survey.

‘That’s not my area’, ‘nobody told me’, ‘I wasn’t copied in,’ ‘the system did it’ are the reflexes of people who’ve learned that admitting fault can be expensive. 

Compare that with ‘here’s what I got wrong’ or ‘I should have flagged that sooner’, and you’re hearing a team that trusts that the response to their vulnerability will be a follow-up question, or an opportunity for learning, not a hunt for who to blame.

The language used is the symptom of how mistakes have been handled before and what happened the last time someone owned up to something in that room. Punish honesty once, publicly, and you’ll train an entire team to speak in a passive voice (or not at all) for years.

I’ve seen it in reports too - that same passive voice creeping into project updates and incident sheets, where ‘errors occurred’ replaces ‘we got this wrong’.

I always listen for this in the first meeting with a new client. The words people use when under mild pressure tell me more about the culture than the diagnostic that I run.

If everyone’s admitting or explaining rather than deflecting onto others, I already know I’m dealing with a team that’s done some of the hard work itself, is willing to own the issues they face and therefore has a much stronger foundation for success, than the blame culture ever will.