I’m writing this following a friend, a fellow HR professional, being instructed to apologise as an outcome to a grievance. I couldn’t help feeling how utterly horrid and inhumane this course of action was.
Firstly, enforcing an apology doesn’t usually work with a child, let alone a fully-fledged adult. But also, why would you wish to create a culture of shame, humiliation and embarrassment? Surely this says more about the organisation than the issue?
It doesn’t have to be this way!
I mentioned this scenario to another fellow HR professional who exclaimed their surprise and disgust at this treatment. They now head up an HR function in an organisation which doesn’t judge or apportion blame and rarely disciplines its staff. That’s not to say issues are not dealt with, they are just deal with these situations in a kinder, more compassionate way. They care about their people and don’t attack them at the first opportunity. This, I believe, is the way forward.
Of course, unsatisfactory performance needs to be dealt with but there is another way than the traditional rapping over the knuckles. Instead, why aren’t more organisations embracing treating their people as human beings who are fallible. After all, aren’t we all?
Norfolk businesswomen Emily Groves of Norwich based Indigo Swan, an energy consultancy and Rebecca Lewis-Smith of Fountain, a digital marketing agency, started a great business podcast last year (‘Culture Awesome’). Their first episode was about ‘Black Box Thinking’ which I confess I’d never heard of before. This concept is described as “the willingness and tenacity to investigate the lessons that often exist when we fail, but which we rarely exploit.” Essentially, it is about creating systems and cultures that enable organisations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.
So, what does this mean in practice?
The book; “Black Box Thinking” by Matthew Syed explains that just like the black box is used in the airline industry to investigate everything that happened and learning from it, Black Box Thinking can be implemented to underpin a no blame culture. It requires a responsibility on the organisation to examine how things went wrong rather than apportioning blame.
In the podcast discussing this concept, Emily and Rebecca discuss embracing failure without blame, finding solutions so that nobody is overloaded and ensuring there is a clear alarm button to push if they feel they are getting that way, therefore aiming to avoid any catastrophic problems occurring. They describe it as a move away from a tick box exercise to understanding human behaviour. They discuss looking at contributing factors, removing emotion and looking at what you are trying to achieve as a business.
In terms of a Black Box Thinking process, it seems to be about learning from mistakes and if something is identified as not having gone as planned, offering a safe environment in which to raise it. Aspects like the impact on the organisation in terms of cost and time should still be considered but instead of handing out the blame and punishing people as a result, a more constructive view is taken to find ways to avoid it happening again. Some organisations measure this on a ‘severity scale’ and report to the whole company any outcome.
Correction not punishment
As an Employee Relations Consultant, I often deal with disciplinary issues. I believe that much of this could be avoided if a similar culture was in operation. Obviously if the same mistakes are happening over and over again it might be a different matter and one of inadequate performance. This is where a tolerance for failure but an intolerance for incompetence approach is needed. One-off mistakes (I’m not talking Gross Misconduct offences here) are rarely benefited by disciplinary action being taken. If anything, it causes resentment and a demoralised employee and is seen as a punitive action as opposed to corrective.
The action decided upon to resolve the grievance concerning my friend (forcing them to make a public apology) was arguably even worse than disciplinary action, as it gave no right to reply.
According to the Culture Awesome podcast, a no blame culture can be difficult for newcomers to adjust to and sometimes even approached with suspicion if they have been used to a different approach. The key to this, they say, is a safe environment, consistency to demonstrate there really are no repercussions for the individual and authenticity from the business leaders including the showing of their own vulnerability.
Could you do things differently?
Whilst I’m certainly no expert in Black Box Thinking, this concept is fascinating to me, having in my time worked in some very “blamey” environments. It strikes me that a key factor in cultivating a culture of no blame is that it needs to be lived and breathed from the top down. My challenge to business leaders, therefore, is to be open to considering a new way of doing things which allows your people to grow and learn from their mistakes without the fear of reprisals.