THE IMPORTANCE OF TAKING OWNERSHIP WHEN IT FEELS COUNTERINTUITIVE

I’m impressed by how many senior leaders such as site managers, general managers, and CEOs make every effort to accept responsibility when incidents happen to their staff and injuries occur, regardless of whether the accident was primarily organisational failure, or the fault of the individual concerned.  

Several years ago, I was working with a nationwide manufacturing operation delivering leadership programs and during that time an operator lost a finger as a result of an accident. It was quite a sophisticated operation and there were a number of safety mechanisms, such as light beam sensors, that would permit machinery to run or turn off in adverse circumstances.  

One of the operators attempted to bypass the safety mechanism by placing an object in front of one of the light beam sensors so that he could make a quick adjustment while machinery was still running. During this procedure he came too close to the moving machinery which amounted to a contravening of operating procedures and unregulated tampering with a safety mechanism.  

The moving machinery caught his hand and crushed one of his fingers irreparably.  

I’ll never forget the site manager of the plant, an operation of several hundred people, making the statement to me that: “We are still hurting too many people”. Notice the use of the word “we”? Not only was he not directly involved in the incident, but it was clearly the fault of this individual failing to follow well communicated procedures by bypassing the safety mechanism that existed to keep him out of harm’s way.  

Despite this, the site manager uses the pronoun ‘we’, obviously willing to take as much responsibility and ownership as he could for every single incident and injury that occurred under his command. 

In any role of leadership, but especially in your first leadership position, you will be tempted to point the finger at your team members when they make mistakes and fail in their work. This is not the practice of effective leaders and destabilises the morale of the team (and their respect for you).  

One of the quote cards that I consistently have on the tables in my leadership program is from Arnold H. Glasow, which says: “Good leaders take a little bit less of their share of the credit and take a little bit more of their share of the blame.”  

Sometimes (as in the case of the aforementioned incident), some team member errors will clearly not be of your doing, but it’s a short-term gain to point the finger in an effort to distance yourself from the failure. If you can support team members who have made a mistake, you will gain their loyalty and respect (along with that of all the team). Of course, if a team member fails to learn and repeatedly makes the same mistake, that should give rise to a different kind of conversation.  

But don’t give in to the temptation to ‘throw that team member under the bus’ in a very public fashion in order to look better yourself. That’s yet another example of a short-term gain that you’ll pay for in the long run.