Being a leader is not only about structural position, but also about responsibility to build cooperating team along with productive work ethic in it. It needs mutual respect and support for each of the members in the company. Yet that would be rather challenging when we see our team members blaming each other, especially when things go wrong. Blaming usually even stimulates more conflicts to happen and makes its person feels alienated from the team unity.
In order to create a productive work ethic we have to stop blaming habit and start to take responsibility. Blaming and declining responsibility are the characteristics of a victim. Fred Kofman in his book titled Conscious Business explains a lot about how a person can have the victim mentality and how to overcome it.
The victim always searches for a way to protect himself from a blame. The easiest way to do that is by pointing his finger at other people’s mistakes. Since it is usually more comfortable to be an innocent one rather than being a responsible person
The desire to look good to others makes the victim cannot be seen as part of the problem. As an example, when he is late for a meeting he uses the traffic as an alibi. On the other day when he is not able to finish his report on time, he easily blames other people in his team for not providing data based on the schedule.
Being a victim is comfortable because we can cover our incompetence so that we can look more capable than we really are. Yet being a victim is bad for us and also for other team members. We make ourselves get used to having no capability in solving the problem. Everything seems cannot be influenced out of his capacity to control.
The opposite of being the victim is becoming the player. The player pays attention to the factor he can influence. The victim always stays away from being part of the problem, while the player sees that if he can be part of the solution, you have to see yourself as part of the problem.
Putting ourselves as part of the problem will ignite the sense of player in us to seek solution for the existing problem. For example, when he was late for a meeting, he would own the responsibility that was his contribution for not leaving his home earlier so that he could anticipate the traffic or when his report did not go well, he knew that there was a part of his negligence for not reminding his partner.
We can break out the victim mentality to be the player mentality. We should change our point of view from third person to first person. Using first person point of view will push us to own personal accountability.
The player uses word like “I” to address specific circumstances. For examples, “I did not back up the file”, “I missed my train”, “I forgot to remind my partner”, “I did not let you know that I will be late for the meeting”. Even when there are some unexpected conditions happen we can still face it like a player do. Instead of focusing on the event, we can admit that we do not anticipate the event. For examples, “I did not anticipate the weather”, “I did not buy the insurance before the accident”.
When we already train ourselves to admit that we have the portion of responsibility in our challenge, next we should ask ourselves how we can contribute in responding to complete the challenge. It will be the next step of making a conducive environment to solve the problem.
a player is not a guarantee that we can solve all of our challenges but it will train ourselves to be a person with value and integrity. It is the way of life that we choose and it is the way of raising our team integrity that we fight for. Becoming the person who always owns the responsibility is a way of life that makes things better and a way to help solving problems in our community.