A CEO writes about an employee who blames others instead of taking ownership, stalling the team's progress. Lou argues that blame-centric cultures keep people stuck replaying mistakes. He proposes shifting to feedforward and Appreciative Inquiry, focusing on what worked well and what comes next, to break the cycle and build real ownership.
Chapters
I get letters all the time from different CEOs, executives who want advice, and they ask me different things. Let me give you one letter that was just written to me. So it says, "Dear Lou, I have an employee who complains about everything. Many of them really want to do well, but They refuse to take ownership of their position. It seems like all they do is blame everyone but themselves. I do my best to help them through these issues, but we're still not meeting our numbers. Signed, and he— Daze and Blame, we call them. So, so people who feel blamed all the time typically don't do that well because they can't move forward because they're always thinking about the past. When you have a situation where all employees are playing the blame game, there's no way to actually move to that next decision, to move that next part of your work. So just imagine this situation. Every single time you try to make the next move, someone says, "No, you did the move wrong before," and they have a little history book of what you've done wrong and right. Remember this in your personal relationship? Somebody said, "You did these 5 things wrong to me in the past 1 week, and therefore I'm just not talking to you again." If we keep looking in that rearview mirror, constantly, there's no way for us to just get better. So in an organizational culture like this, when we implement feedforward, we implement Appreciative Inquiry, and we talk about what have we done well and what can we do better, then the process starts to reverse itself. We begin letting go of what we were like in the past and letting go of all these blaming games that we have, and we start to get better. Slowly, we make choices on the things that we have heard we need to get better at. Making choices on how people perceive you and changing those choices is what will change your ability to succeed inside of a company. Don't think of it as behavioral change, you being— your behaviors being changed. Think of it as how other people perceive you. How they see you. Different people have different lenses, and they all have different ways of blaming themselves and others. Change those perceptions and ways they blame by taking some of their advice to get better and encouraging them to let go of how they've seen you in the past.
