Eels Blogs

I recently read the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership - a really good read if that's your kind of thing. 

They have a whole chapter dedicated to Responsibility and above the line / below the line behaviours. As I was listening to Moses post game and Gutho/BA in the presser yesterday it reminded me of a very important distinction that the book makes (and backs up with research) as to what is and isn't taking responsibility. 

One of the key behaviours of someone who avoids responsibility is blame - "This only happened because Tony didn't check for mistakes well enough!". But the book calls out several types of blame, and one is self blame. A lot of people view self blame as taking responsibility, but it becomes clear very quickly that it isn't, because it doesn't lead to action. I saw a LOT of this on show in our team.

Here's an example:

Person A: "I really thought we were going to make our sales targets this month, but we fell short again!"

Person B: "Yeah, it's such a shame. I blame myself, I've had a rough few weeks and I should have done better. It's not good enough, sorry!"

In the above we have Person B shutting down the conversation by taking blame, but not taking responsibility for how to fix the situation, achieve the outcome, and ensure the behaviour doesn't repeat. This is not responsible leadership, this is just as bad as blaming someone else who isn't in the room because it has the same effect - it gives a target for the anger and doesn't result in anyone actually learning or doing anything differently.

Now let's take a look at BA, Gutho and Moses. Their lines were essentially:

• It's not good enough. We didn't put in the effort.
• Embarrassing, we let ourselves down.
• We weren't hungry enough, they wanted it more.

Our Captain, our Coach and our on field Leader all did the same thing - self blame. Not one of them mentioned "here is why it happened, here is what we're going to do about it, here is how it will be different next time, here is what we learnt" - no one is taking responsibility or accountability, they're using self blame / hero blame to try and avoid it. This is a dangerous pattern that I've noticed in BA over the years and it seems to be translating directly into the players.

Of course I don't expect BA to lay out his week by week plans, but I do think as a team our leaders need to stand up and take proper accountability and responsibilty by being able (and encouraged, almost demanded) to immediately articulate what went wrong, why it went wrong, what they are going to do about it and how they intend to measure that success. This current method of self-blame gives everyone an easy out and let's the team live in a bubble where accountability just isn't a thing...not a culture you'd want to be encouraging.