Comments on: Why Leaders Never Assign Blame

By: J. Timothy King

J. Timothy King — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 19:25:20 +0000

Thanks for the great comments. I’m going to talk about these in a follow-up post.

-TimK

By: Bryan C Fleming

Bryan C Fleming — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:55:31 +0000

Personal Growth Carnival October 24th

I really like the titles of the posts this week. We’re not doing categories this week but the posts are broken up into groups for easier reading. I’m going to go back to categories next week. They just work better. Enjoy the articles.

Tracy Coen ….

By: Personal Development Carnival: 10-22-06 Edition - Balanced Life Center

Personal Development Carnival: 10-22-06 Edition - Balanced Life Center — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 06:17:06 +0000

[...] Why Leaders Never Assign Blame posted at J. Timothy King’s Blog – Taking responsibility gets problems solved. Tim writes about the pitfalls of assigning blame. [...]

By: Mikeyk

Mikeyk — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 11:59:42 +0000

Agree completely – and one of the first things I remember my dad telling me was that it didn’t matter who had created the mess in the living – everybody had a responsiblity to clean it up, and that included the children. In other words each and every one of was collectively responsible for the tidiness of the house as a whole. If you saw a mess you cleaned up and asked questions later.

By: gman

gman — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:57:33 +0000

Reading your response to your daughters it occured to me, aren’t you doing the same thing? Meaning, your daughter said “My sister left it there”. She’s not passing the blame, she’s telling you why she didn’t pick it up because it’s not her mess. You want her to pick it up regardless of if it’s her mess or not but by that logic you should have picked it up yourself. It’s not your mess either so you have just as much responsibility in the matter. Arguably she’s just following your example. You didn’t pick it up because it wasn’t your mess and neither did she because it wasn’t her’s.

By: ab

ab — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 16:55:31 +0000

“”"They think punishment is linked to blame. And they fear punishment. So they try to deflect the blame as a first resort. It’s a pernicious addiction.”"”

I was thinking along these lines the other day, and wonder whether, if you had a slightly different approach, you could help break the circle?

Something like “Will you help me pick this up?” – focusing on the tidying (solution) and the person who is there (instead of ’someone’), rather than the mess (problem), and also showing by your willingness to do it (without grumbling! that it’s not a punishment or a blame thing, just a “tidy room is nicer” thing.

Also, if done cheerfully, you might even avoid the “being in an untidy room when daddy walks in leads to unpleasant chores” association…

I don’t know if it would really work out as planned, but it’s about the best resolution I could think of.