By Steve Moran
It was a passing comment — perhaps even a throw-away comment — where someone mentioned accountability. At the time it didn’t even register in my conscious mind.
But then it perked to the surface and would not go away. Here is how it surfaced:
When things go wrong, whose fault is it? Who is accountable?
Blame
There are two ways to think about fault and accountability. The first is blame. Blame is easy; it is the purview of lawsuits and politics. It is almost never helpful in business. The big problem with blame is that it makes problem-solving massively harder.
A better way is for organizations to ask who is responsible for making it better.
Accountability With Purpose
We have right now in senior living lots of challenges/opportunities:
- Occupancy
- Recruiting
- High staff turnover
- Subpar financial performance
- Reputational problems
- Leadership problems
- Lead generation problems
When we blame others, the economy, circumstances, politicians, other team members, the competition, regulators … blah, blah, blah … for our problems, it feels pretty good because it is someone else’s fault but not mine!
The problem with this approach is that nothing ever gets better.
Blame Casting
The better way is to say “no” to blame casting, instead asking who is responsible for — accountable for — making it better. Ultimately that is always the leaders at the top. When leaders at the top own accountability, they are in a position to ask: “What do I need to do to make these areas of opportunity better?”
Sometimes the answer will be relatively easy, but most of the time it will take hard work and multiple stakeholders who are ultimately willing to own both the problem and the responsibility for finding answers to that question.
When leaders and their teams own problems with a solution mindset, problems — even big problems — become solvable.
