Whose mess is it anyway?

The other day my sister was talking about an embarrassing situation.  This lead to a discussion about when you draw people’s attention to problems that you have found.  What do you do?  Tell them and get involved, or just hope that someone else deals with it?

At work one often comes across problems created by others; if you can’t simply fix them, are you supposed to draw attention to them or pretend you know nothing about them.  Every organisation has a cupboard full of problems that people know about and could be fixed if only they were drawn to the right person’s attention.  The thing that usually happens is that everyone can ignore these issues and hope that someone else deals with them, and your customers end up smelling something isn’t right!

How do you create a culture where mistakes and issues are aired and dealt without wasting time apportioning blame?

“There is luxury in self reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.”  Oscar Wilde

“You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.”   Henry David Thoreau

Tags: honesty, mistakes, problems, solutions

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 14:36 and is filed under Business Change, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.