Mark Murphy explains how one sentence stops blame spirals: "For the next few minutes we're only going to talk about what we can control." Using it repeatedly in meetings shifts focus from external excuses to what people can actually change, building accountability through what psychologists call internal locus of control.
Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, and in this tip I'm going to show you how to instantly reduce blame and increase accountability in your organization. It's a topic I've written about a lot in various books and articles, but I'm going to give you a real simple, quick, down-and-dirty version of this. It is all predicated on a concept known as internal locus of control. In a nutshell, what that means is that people with an internal locus of control believe that they control their own success failure. They are not subject to the whims of fate. That would be an external locus of control. They believe that they have control over their future. If they work hard, they're going to succeed. Interestingly, people who have a high internal locus of control rather than an external locus of control— people with an internal locus of control, they eat healthier, they're in better shape, they struggle less with weight loss, they struggle less with quitting smoking, reducing drinking, all of that. Believing that you have control over the world in front of you is great for your health, but it also reduces blame. So what are you going to do? How do we distill this down? I'm going to distill it down into one sentence that if you teach this to every manager in your organization, you can use this in any meeting you were ever in. Anytime an employee starts to go down a blame spiral talking about, well, this new change, the CEO doesn't get get us, doesn't, uh, you know, this new technology isn't going to work, doesn't care about blah blah blah, whatever it is. Anytime you hear a conversation starting to spiral out of control, you are simply going to utter the phrase, you know what, for the next few minutes we're only going to talk about what we can control. Well, I don't control anything, you know, all these changes are being forced down our throats, there's not a darn thing I control. Listen, I want to focus only on the things we can control. I just told you there's not a thing we control here. Everything is being forced upon us. Okay, do we control our reactions? Fine, fine, one thing I control. Great, let's start there. Now, it takes this kind of patience. You have to be able to repeat this sentence a few times. If you have a meeting that is really spiraling out of control, You have to be able to repeat this line a couple of times. This is something, you know, we train managers on all the time. But if you learn, if you keep this phrase in your hip pocket on a regular basis, anytime you see a conversation spiraling out, anytime somebody starts to blame somebody else— well, you know, the people in the accounting department, they just never get their act together and they're just messing everything up for the rest of us— time out for a sec. I want to focus this conversation. I want to bring it back and talk only about the things we can control, because really talking about things we don't control is akin to griping about the weather. I don't control it. There is nothing I can do about it except maybe bring an umbrella, wear heavier coat, or wear lighter clothes, whatever it is. I control what I can control. And the thing about reducing blame and improving accountability is that It doesn't magically happen because of this one sentence. It happens because you repeat this sentence and are deadly serious about, we are not having a conversation that goes off the rails. Now, if I say that to somebody, listen, stop blaming people. I'm not having a conversation where you go into spiral again. I do not go into spiral. How dare you talk to me like that? Well, now we're in just a big old mess. But if I say, listen, I don't care what you want to talk about. I can only handle talking about what we can control. I've just put it on myself. And if I do that and I'm comfortable with repeating it, I practice it, repeating it a couple of times, I can take any conversation that's about to go bananas and bring it back down to something rational and calm and productive. Listen, if you like these kinds of management techniques Reach out to us. These are the kinds of things that we teach in our management programs all the time, whether it's on-site at your company, whether it's our online courses, whether it's custom programs or our entire library, whatever. We have a lot of different ways that we teach and train leaders and organizations. Reach out to us. You can hit the email right here or hit the contact form on our website. We would love to talk with you and talk about ways that we can help develop the leaders at your organization.
