A conversation I often have with my son is about taking responsibility for bad behaviors or mistakes. Like all of us, he doesn’t like to be told he’s done something wrong. It doesn’t feel good, and he resists by making excuses or blaming something or someone else. Really anything but raising his hand and taking responsibility.
This behavior is understandable, expected really, in eleven-year-olds. It starts to become really problematic when this behavior is displayed by adult co-workers, however. Working in a place where no one takes responsibility can become toxic, because the inevitable outcome is a blaming, which leads to resentment, which creates a very poor culture indeed.
Telling my son to take responsibility over and over didn’t seem to have much of an impact. I guess he didn’t really see what was in it for him. It made his parents feel better, but why would HE want to do it when it felt so much better to make excuses? I started looking for an argument that a child could understand; something that could help motivate him to take ownership and strive to do better in the future.
Now, before giving him criticism I’ve started asking him, “do you want to feel better, or do you want to BE better?” This makes him stop and think. Even at his age he knows that being good is the goal, so he has started accepting my feedback more easily, as long as it’s given in a constructive and non-judgmental way. Slowly, he’s starting to see feedback the way I do: compliments are candy and criticisms are veggies.
Candy and Vegetables
Compliments feel good in the moment, but they don’t do a thing for you. What’s the value? What’s the takeaway? When you’ve been told that you’ve done a good job, there’s nothing that you can do better next time. Just like candy, you get no benefit from being told what a good job you did other than a happy feeling.
Criticism, on the other hand, doesn’t feel good. We naturally resist it, try to find some way to deflect, nullify, or ignore it all together. But the truth is criticism is the way that we can get better, either through self-criticism or criticism from those who’ve observed our behavior. Learning from our mistakes is only possible if we’re aware and honest with ourselves that a mistake was made. Criticism makes us better, stronger, and wiser.
Just like learning to eat your veggies, one can become better at accepting criticism and we can help others become better at accepting it as well. To paraphrase Gordon Gecko, “Criticism is good,” and it needs to be seen in this light. Here are a few of the things that I’ve noticed make criticism easier for myself to accept, and have seemed to work for others:
Be Positive
Just because something went wrong, doesn’t mean that the tone of the feedback needs to be negative. In the end, we can focus on punishing a mistake or we can focus on the better, more glorious future in which this mistake is no longer made. Tone makes a world of difference when delivering criticism.
Focus on the Behavior
One of the biggest problems with giving criticism is all of the unnecessary, unhelpful things that get thrown in along with it. The most helpful feedback in the world isn’t going to get through if the point is lost amid personal attacks, and hindsight. The only thing that truly matters is that the cause of the mistake is understood and it can be avoided in the future. That’s it!! Everything else is besides the point, and clouds the issue.
Model Responsibility
Nothing else matters, if you as the leader don’t show the team how it should work. If you find yourself in a culture of blame-shifting, be the change. Actively seek out opportunities to own mistakes, loudly and publicly take responsibility, and let everyone know what went wrong and how things will be different going forward. For team members to see that owning a mistake doesn’t entail being blamed, that, in the case of a genuine mistake, there are no real consequences, and that this is how leaders behave, it can make a world of difference.
A Better Way
A team where there’s no responsibility is a dangerous place. Mistakes may be hidden for fear of the associated blame, investigation into root causes might be poorly done for fear of what might be found, and there can be no trust because you know your teammate will pin the blame on you if anything goes wrong. In this situation mistakes are still going to happen, there’s just very little chance that anyone will learn from them.
Creating a culture where there is no fear of blame doesn’t mean a culture where mistakes are OK. No one wants to make mistakes, and if you make it easy and safe to learn from them, then they’ll become less frequent not more. Your people will feel more secure without the threat of blame hanging over their every action, the team will grow as they learn from their experience instead of hiding it, and genuine trust will form as criticism can then be seen as a beneficial action by a helpful colleague instead of an attempt to tear you down.
Learning to give and receive constructive criticism is one of the most beneficial, and least observed, leadership skills that I know. If done properly, it can mean the difference between leading through respect, and leading through fear.
