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?