When Things Go Wrong, Who Is Really to Blame? (Podcast)

What’s our first instinct when we miss a delivery, manufacturing quality takes a tumble or employee engagement begins to wobble?

Finger-pointing. Finding a shop-floor worker to cast blame upon. Firing the alleged perpetrator.

The problem is that individual workers are rarely to blame, say Dr. Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer, hosts of the Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement podcast. The more likely responsible culprit is a broken system, they assert.

“And the people who oversee the system are the leaders, the executives, the ones that are making the decisions, not the workers,” Dyer points out.

In this episode, Saleh and Dyer delve into the paradox of holding front-line workers responsible for problems over which they have no control. Dyer shares an example from his General Electric days in which a series of issues brought production to a halt and resulted in lost revenue. The issues—delayed preventive maintenance and lack of spare parts, among them—were outside the control of the workers and in the camp of the very managers who were looking for someone to blame.

In a similar vein, Saleh shared an example in which he was brought in to “fix” a team that was missing deadlines, not collaborating and otherwise losing momentum. Reverse engineering of the issue revealed an incentive plan that rewarded individual success over team success, Saleh said.

In both examples, the hosts note, poorly designed systems rather than individuals created the issues. The fix, therefore, is to improve the system.

“Every organization is perfectly designed for the output they're producing today. And if it's a toxic environment, they're perfectly designed for a toxic environment. And if it's not meeting certain revenue goals, they're perfectly designed for not meeting those revenue goals,” Saleh says. “Nothing is a fluke. All the behaviors that you're seeing out of the system is a result of that system.”

In this episode, Saleh and Dyer also discuss:

• the importance of understanding what is meant by "system."
• leadership’s responsibility and role in creating and perpetrating a problematic system.
• how to fix a system that is not driving the desired behaviors.

“We're not saying that leaders can't be passionate. They can be even angry to a point, but it's redirecting that passion and that anger toward the elements of the system that are broken, not towards the people,” Dyer concludes.