You can see them everywhere on Saturday morning. The dads ‘coaching’ their offspring in a fanatic way, only dreaming of having a new Babe Ruth. You can hear them screaming from the sideline and shouting whenever ‘junior’ misses a hit or drops a ball. “You can do better, how is it possible?”. Just take a look at ‘junior’ and you will see that he is so embarrassed he could crawl into a hole. He just wanted to play for fun? After a while, unfortunately, you see a lot of gloves and bats sitting in the garage, gathering dust.

20 years later, this boy enters a working environment. He was raised in an environment where there wasn’t a lot of tolerance towards making errors… and now he has to be open to “improving”. He has to smile whenever someone tells him he made an error. He’s forced to acknowledge errors are counted as key statistics for each game. It’s not surprising the blaming mentality carries over to the job!

It is vital to communicate as much as possible on improvement projects.
Everyone, in every layer of the organization has to be informed about the importance of improvement projects in an appropriate language. With a clear reference to the environment of, “What’s in it for me?”, make it clear that errors are accepted as long as we learn from our mistakes without pointing the finger of blame.

And what’s the situation in your company: a learning culture or a blaming culture? How have you helped your company to avoid or overcome a blaming culture?

We are living in “fast” times with fast food, fast media… Exciting times, I agree, but o so dangerous to walk into the trap of “fast communication”.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m also a big fan and even a big user of this handy concept called “e-mail”, but you have to know when to use it and almost more important when not!

The excuse that you hear most from people that are defending e-mail as the one and only way of communicating is that it’s a much faster way to get things done. Well… of course it’s not. It just might give you the (wrong) impression that you save some time: you think of something, you create a new mail and you push the “send” button. But… who says that the addressee will open it as fast as you wrote it, if he/she ever receives it. Do not forget that the internet is packed with spam filters and spam rules to block what must be blocked… and sometimes even block what shouldn’t have been blocked.However, the three biggest disadvantages that make “e-mail” a trap is that it lacks intonation & nuance, it’s written for eternity and it’s unidirectional instead of interactive.

1. The lack of intonation & nuance: I can give you plenty of examples of the disadvantages of the lack of interaction and nuance, and I’m pretty sure that you have some cases you can think of too. The problem with e-mail is that a “No” is a very hard “No”, and of course the use of emoticons can help you to add some nuance and humor into your mails but it’s still not the same as a real conversation.
2. It’s written for eternity: The problem with a written word is that it is everlasting. The receiver can read it and read it all over again and again and… Every time he or she rereads the message it will become more and more sharp, edgy and maybe even offensive. You will never be able to reconsider your words and it will be stored in their e-mail archives until it pops up again to be used (mostly against you).
3. It’s unidirectional instead of interactive: This is one of the reasons why e-mails are such a slow way of communicating. You send your opinion, your customer sends back his remarks, you react on his reaction, your customer reacts on your reaction again… STOP! Grab a phone and make that phone call ASAP before it even gets worse.

My advice is: only use e-mail for short messages, internal memos, draft proposals and ideas to colleagues or as a written confirmation/summary of your previous “real life” conversation.

Never use e-mail as the only communication channel towards external people (and certainly never towards customers!). To solve a customer complaint? No! To close a deal? No! To ask for a favor? No!

I hope you agree with me. If not I would be happy to hear your opinion.