Blame and responsibility - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Blame and responsibility - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Another topic that came up at the conference was the issue of blame and responsibility. How do you react, when a situation is all your fault? Or when somebody accuses you of it? We talked about it, and a thought came to me: There are a few differences between blame and responsibility. Blame is looking back, responsibility is looking forward. If I blame you, its about something thats already happened. If I give you responsibility for something, that means the outcome is still uncertain. Blame means youre essentially powerless. Its done, its in the past, all you can do now is argue about whether or not its your fault. Responsibility means you have the power to change things. But perhaps the most important difference to me, is that blame can be divided, whereas responsibility cant. If something bad happens, it can be 50% my fault and 50% yours. If we have a shared responsibility for something, we both have 100% responsibility. Acting as if you can pass around shares of responsibility has some weird consequeces. In my thinking, 10 people working on the same project all have 100% responsibility. This reminds me of a story I heard once, of the CEO of a danish company who went around in the organization taking the blame. Whenever there was a conflict or a crisis, hed step in and say Its my fault, leaving his people free to work out solutions. He took the blame, they got the responsibility. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related