Does anyone have any good exercises on 'No Blame Culture'?
I am currently developing a training session for an internal reporting system that is used to report breaches of procedures.
Unfortunately as the breaches are logged to the department that created the problem people feel that they are blamed for the incident.
These breaches are logged to the department repsponsible as they will be the ones that can best identify any changes to prevent re-occurance.
How can I get delegates to view this process in a more positive light?
Many thanks
Becky Lutley
3 Responses
“Who said we’ve got a blame culture!?”
Don’t forget this fantasitc one-liner!
The Blame culture is a symptom not the disease
Becky
The blame culture is not a thing that we can change on its own, it is more a symptom of the way that we feel.
If we want to remove the blame culture we have to allow people to feel differently about what they do.
We can do this by allowing people to feel responsible for what they do.
When that happens a failure or a mistake stops being seen as an opportunity to apportion blame and starts to be an opportunity to learn something that prevents the same mistake happening again.
To make this change requires time to allow people to understand and change their expectations.
I have done this on site by creating the environment that allows people to change but I have no idea how in a training session you can overcome the ingrained behavior that has been reinforced throughout a lifetime of work.
Peter
Emotional Intelligence
Have a look at some articles about Emotional Intelligence. Lots of them recommend giving feedback by using “I” phrases rather than “you” or “person’s name” phrases. In other words when there have been breaches of procedure, they are recorded as “I was sorry to see that …..” rather than “Robert failed to ….” or “You failed to”. The Emotional Intelligence experts say that”I” phrases create less resentment. You can create training exercises around this phrasing.