The Internal Leadership Series

When Responsibility Becomes Blame

I've always considered myself someone who takes responsibility.

If something hasn't gone well, I want to understand my part in it. What could I have done differently? Was there something I missed? Is there something I need to learn?

I see the same instinct in many of the people I work with. They care about doing things well and are prepared to look at themselves when things don't go to plan. On the face of it, that sounds like exactly what we mean when we talk about taking ownership.

But I've become increasingly aware of how easily that responsibility can tip into blame.

The difference isn't always obvious because both involve looking at ourselves. The distinction I've found useful is noticing what we're looking for when we do.

Blame tends to look for an answer. Responsibility looks for a useful question.

When something goes wrong, our brains naturally want an explanation. We want to know why it happened and who was responsible. Sometimes that search takes us towards another person or circumstances outside of our control, but for those of us who naturally take responsibility, it can just as easily bring us back to ourselves.

Why didn't I see this coming?

Why did I react like that?

Why didn't I handle it better?

The difficulty with those questions is that our minds are very good at providing answers.

I should have noticed.

I wasn't clear enough.

I should have known better.

And suddenly something that began as reflection has become a judgement about what we should have done.

I've noticed this in coaching conversations when someone starts describing a situation they wish they'd handled differently. Before long, they have produced an impressive list of all the things they could or should have done better. They could have communicated sooner, spotted what was happening, asked a different question or anticipated how somebody would respond.

Sometimes they're right. There may be something useful to learn.

But there is a point where I find myself wanting to interrupt the search for everything they could have done and ask a different question:

What was genuinely yours to lead?

That changes the conversation and or me, that's the fine line between responsibility and blame.

Blame wants to establish fault. Responsibility wants to understand our contribution and decide what we want to do with that understanding.

One closes the enquiry once it has found an answer. The other keeps us curious enough to find our agency.

I've become particularly conscious of this in the questions I use, both with myself and with other people.

A question such as "Why did I do that?" can very quickly turn into an investigation of what is wrong with me. "What was happening for me in that moment?" opens a different conversation.

"Why didn't I see this coming?" invites hindsight to become judgement. "What do I understand now that I didn't understand then?" gives me something I can use.

And instead of asking "Whose fault was this?", I can ask "What was my contribution, what belonged to somebody else and what is mine to lead now?"

This doesn't make responsibility comfortable.

Sometimes the answer is that I got something wrong. I may need to apologise, change my behaviour, have a conversation I've been avoiding or accept that one of my choices contributed to an outcome I didn't want.

Self-kindness doesn't remove that responsibility. I think it makes it easier to take.

If I'm trying to prove that I'm wrong, inadequate or should have known better, much of my emotional energy goes into defending or criticising myself. If I'm trying to understand what happened and what I can learn from it, I have somewhere to go next.

That's why I no longer think the purpose of reflection is to find the answer.

Answers are not the answer.

An answer can explain what happened, but it can also bring our thinking to an end. A useful question keeps the possibility of growth open.

What happened?

What was mine to lead?

What do I know now?

What will I do next?

Those questions bring me back to responsibility without asking me to carry everything.

And that, for me, is where responsibility becomes agency.

Leadership always happens twice, first internally and then externally. How we speak to ourselves when something goes wrong influences what we learn from it and how we respond next.

Blame asks us to find an answer to what went wrong.

Responsibility leaves us with a more useful question:

What am I responsible for now?