Who's to blame?

Too often we let other people catch our mistakes instead of recognizing them and learning from them. When this happens we enter into the blame game. In the blame game nobody wins and everybody loses.   

How do you avoid the blame game?

Admitting when you have made a mistake and growing and learning from it allows you to be humble. Admitting a mistake and learning nothing from it is just plain stupid.

How to learn from your mistakes

First assess what really happened without any emotion. Write out the problem and remove any judging, blaming or emphatic words. Here are two examples of the same story.

Judging words

I was running really late for work because the elevator in my building has been slow for the past three weeks. When I finally got out of the lobby an idiot was parked in the loading zone and I had to go all the way around him. By the time I got to the bus stop I had missed the bus. The city has such a poor schedule that I had to wait another 15 minutes for the next bus. My boss is a real stickler for timeliness so even though I was only 15 minutes late, he made me work the extra time- even though I would have done it anyway.

Descriptive words

At 8:30 I left my apartment for work. The elevator took 5 minutes to arrive on my floor. When I left the building I walked around a parked car. The time was 8:40, I know this because my bus was leaving and it arrives at 8:40. I boarded the next bus at 8:55. I arrived at work at 9:15. I worked until 5:15 at my manager’s request.

When you remove all the judging, blaming and emphatic words it becomes easier to see what the real problem was and learn from it. Unfortunately many of us have grown up on a healthy diet of blaming others (I blame reality tv J ) and it becomes hard to see where our responsibility lies. Once you can see your responsibility in the problem you can often find the solution and the learning opportunity.

In this case the employees should have gone to his boss and admitted that he had not left enough time to get to the bus stop. Accepting his responsibility the employee would have learned the lesson and probably offered up the remedy instead of the supervisor having to mention it.

 

Sara Rylott

Ready2fly