"Engineering Management Thought of the Week" Jeff Glass

Is there a difference – heck yea! There is a difference in both how you communicate to others (i.e., how you tell your employees they are responsible for a problem that has occurred or for a future issue) and in how you think about them for yourself. So what is the difference between blame and responsibility?

•  responsibility is empowering, blame is discouraging
•  responsibility looks forward, blame looks backward, and most importantly,
•  responsibility acknowledges that external factors may mean success is simply not possible whereas blame implies that if you had done something differently, it would have succeeded.

To expand a bit on this last point, I cannot stress enough how managing an organization or a group within an organization is too complex to assume that good people are always successful. Even if you assign responsibility for a failed result, it is different than assigning blame. The external environment changes too quickly and in too many ways for anyone to always be assured of success. Ask the best managers you know about the failures they have been involved in – it is highly unlikely they will be able to say “I have not had any”. Good people, doing the right things, the right way can still end up with a failed result. Again, the environment changes too quickly and in too many unforeseen ways to ensure success all the time. This why I like the business phrase:

“Never confuse process with outcome”

Reward good process, even if it leads to a failure or your people will never take risks, including calculated risks with great potential. Likewise, a good outcome can come more from luck than good process so beware of getting too excited about a lucky win.

Even world class leaders of businesses have failures. Most of these folks have been spectacular throughout their careers to get to the pinnacle of these companies (Fortune 500 CEO’s have essentially competed with thousands of people during their career to get to their positions!). Examples of brilliant managers who have “failed” include: Bob Nardelli from Home Depot, Hank McKinnell from Pfizer, Carly Fiorina from Hewlett-Packard and Richard Grasso from the New York Stock Exchange. All of these managers were extolled for their accomplishments before their very visible and public failures. And what about those we still think of us as extremely successful. Steve Jobs dropped out of college, was fired from the company he started and went through a significant period of failed strategies at NExT before it found a profitable niche.
My wife tells me this distinction between blame and responsibility is particularly important for women leaders. Women tend to take the blame for things more readily than men. I have heard this from coaches who have led both male and female sports teams too. When something goes wrong, men tend to point to their team mates as the problem whereas women tend to apologize for their own actions. Of course, it is not possible to characterize gender differences except in a very general “on average” way but this still may be of some use as a manager.
The bottom line: As a manager and leader, readily take and assign responsibility, not blame.