Dave Kashen talks about how leaders can address team underperformance without blame. When results miss by 10%, curiosity about the cause beats finger-pointing. Taking responsibility while diagnosing what went wrong actually drives better outcomes.
A lot of entrepreneurs I've noticed, and you know, they go, "Oh, 10%? Why is it 10%?" And they spend so much energy like trying to do a postmortem or looking backwards. And I'm not against learning from the past, but what you'll see is that a lot of like to relieve the tension of why the answer is wrong today, I'll spend a lot of time postmorteming and trying to put all the data together. And it's such a subtle thing, but there's a difference between trying to like diagnose what's happening to fix it, to improve it versus to like maybe to blame or just to even like relieve the tension of, oh, okay, well, well, this is why it's the case, so I don't have to feel so bad about it.
Yeah, well, there's nuance here, so I'm glad you brought that up because as, as you know as well as anyone, I'm certainly a fan of taking 100% responsibility for like, how did we create 10%? But again, what most teams do, to your point, is they start with This is bad and wrong that it's 10%. So now we go, who's to blame? And then, you know, leaders that think they're more evolved go, well, I'm the leader, I take the blame. And honestly, often it's like, well, I've slapped myself on the wrist, I've taken the blame, so that's it. I don't need to really think about it anymore rigorously, be curious about how we actually created 10% as a result. And it's sort of ironic that we learn less about the past when we're— when we think that the results are bad and wrong. Then if we're like, oh, 10%, okay, like we said, we wanted 20, we created 10. It is what it is.
