Guilt and responsibility in team leadership
Have you ever messed up so much that you felt like your head was going to hell in a handbasket?
Years ago I worked on a project where we created a desktop application for disabled people.
One winter evening we were releasing a new version with a bunch of new goodies and numerous bug fixes. It was a cozy winter evening when office air was filled with a smell of clementines, girls were putting Christmas decorations everywhere and fluffy snowflakes whirled in lantern lights outside the windows. In those evenings you want to hold a cup of warm tea in both hands and think about Christmas presents. Our present to many people who didn’t have another option to communicate but our program was the release of a new version. We had this sweet feeling of things done and were proud of our efforts. That evening the whole team stayed in the office longer to meet our foreign colleagues who traveled 3 000 km to celebrate the release. Dinner in the restaurant is ordered, city tours for the next day are planned. Excitement, joy and agitation sounded with laughter and jokes.
Two hours later there was no trace of a festive atmosphere. It turned out that after updating our users faced such severe issues that it was impossible to use the application. For many of them it meant not being able to call for help or ask for a glass of water. By the moment our colleagues came into the office everything had already been clear. We could have avoided those failures in different stages. But we just missed them during coding, code review and testing.
The clementine’s smell suddenly seemed irritating and the feeling of celebration was quickly replaced with anticipation of huge troubles. My palms were sweaty and one eye twitched nervously when we all gathered in a meeting room. Our CEO looked at us for several seconds and said calmly and confidently: “We’ve just released the product with critical bugs that impacted thousands of people all over the world. Let’s fix all of those right now and release a hotfix as soon as possible!” Then he distributed the tasks among us and we started working. The next day we released a version with all the issues fixed and went to a bar. Two days later we had a 5 hours brainstorm finding out all the ways to avoid such situations further.
Do I have to mention the discussion with finger-pointing never happened?
Instead of increasing the guilt among us our leader managed to create an atmosphere for responsibility. He didn’t spend time blaming people but made us stick together and focus on what we could do in the situation we had.
The psychological dance of guilt and responsibility.
The feeling of guilt is toxic, it paralyzes and takes all the action power away. The guilt is strongly related to the desire of either avoiding the punishment or getting it. In the first case blaming others comes into the foreground and becomes the main goal of those who feel guilty. In the second case the guilt is redeemed with punishment, those who felt guilty feel relief now and don’t see the need of doing anything else. The guilt is aiming for the past and the feeling itself is destructive.
Responsibility, on the contrary, is aiming for the future. It’s related to action planning and implementation. The responsible person is aware of what has happened, but isn’t stuck in it and seeks for solutions instead of looking for other people to blame.
Making your team feel guilty is easy but spreading blaming type of management brings teams into the day when there is no trust, low efficiency and passiveness among team members.
Rising responsibility inside the team is a long term investment that will pay off with high productivity and loyalty. Only true leaders who are capable of distinguishing their own guilt and responsibility feelings are able to create such an atmosphere among colleagues and in the whole organization.
Do you feel more responsible now?
