Summary: Lead without Blame: Building Resilient Learning Teams by Diana Larsen and Tricia Broderick

• Lead without Blame makes the case for building psychologically safe, learning-oriented cultures that empower teams to course-correct rather than cover up failures.
• Read this book if you want actionable tactics for fostering resilient, high-trust teams ready to take on today’s complex challenges.

Recommendation

Playing the blame game or shaming workers who make mistakes doesn’t solve workplace problems, it creates them. Employees who feel accused or embarrassed become fearful and resentful – or they quit – instead of trying to solve problems. Agile expert Diana Larsen and leadership adviser Tricia Broderick provide a blame- and shame-free approach leaders can use to address issues and move people ahead without acrimony or recrimination. They explain how to put three powerful team motivators – “purpose, autonomy and a team’s shared co-intelligence” – to work. They delve into ways you can minimize conflict and power plays while fostering your team’s learning, resilience and results.

Take-Aways

• Never blame or shame your team members.
• Blaming and shaming damage workers’ motivation and inspire apathy.
• Leaders who blame and shame workers are using fallacious reasoning.
• Learning leaders motivate their teams with three essential factors: “purpose, autonomy and co-intelligence.”
• “Learning leaders” foster learning among their teams.
• Effective teams develop resilience.
• Resilient teams embrace conflict.
• Resilient teams are inclusive.
• Resilient teams minimize “power dynamics.”

Summary

Never blame or shame your team members.

Many leaders believe that when employees make mistakes or their projects go wrong, they need to blame and shame their team to get people to improve and work extra hard to avoid future mistakes. This isn’t only wrongheaded, it’s spiteful – and it doesn’t work.

Leaders who engage in finding fault almost always prompt self-destructive and self-defeating behavior among their teams. Be aware that when mistakes happen or a deadline is missed, some process, system or external factor could be at fault, and rather than being to blame, your team may have been striving to make the best of a thorny situation.

“Faultfinding is a popular sport. It gives the illusion of making things better, but it rarely leads to real improvement.”

When bosses blame and shame their team members, most become fearful about making new mistakes. As a result, they are overly cautious with their work, afraid to innovate or take any risks – and that’s a recipe for future trouble. When a manager accuses or embarrasses employees, they go out of their way to avoid future negative attention. This makes them unwilling to take chances or try new solutions.

Blaming and shaming damage workers’ motivation and inspire apathy.

Leaders and team members should establish a mutual policy that doesn’t allow blaming or shaming, both of which make bad situations deteriorate and exacerbate existing team problems.

“People begin to internalize blame in the form of shame. Shame leads to lower engagement and confidence.”

Exactly what would no blaming and shaming mean in practice? First, it would keep leaders from depressing, demoralizing and de-energizing their teams with unrelenting criticism. Such tactics can make employees feel bad about themselves, inhibit their productivity or even drive some people to quit.

Second, team leaders also wouldn’t blame themselves when their teams hit a roadblock; they could just focus on fixing it. When blame is off the table, fairness can come to the fore and teams can work on solving their problems.

Leaders who blame and shame workers are using fallacious reasoning.

The leadership blame and shame cycle is typical for many organizations, and most likely stems from these commonly held fallacies:

• Fallacy 1: Everything can and should be more efficient – The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the practice of systematizing all standard, repeatable tasks to achieve predictable production outputs. However, some managers try to standardize knowledge workers’ output, which isn’t possible. Employees generally gain, share and produce knowledge through various on-the-job intellectual activities that managers can’t systematize or control, even by insisting on measurable production.
• Fallacy 2: Everything hinges on shareholder value and profitability – When this attitude prevails, shareholders get everything, and stakeholders (workers, clients, suppliers and community members) get little or nothing. This shortsighted mindset focuses on next quarter’s profits, not on establishing long-term value. It can lead to mindless cost-cutting instead of investments in improvements that enhance revenue over time. Inevitably, this mindset imposes severe production and operational costs. As a result, the blame game goes into overdrive, and everyone feels under attack.
• Fallacy 3: Everything is a “project” – In many organizations, the success of projects outranks the delivery of value. This is exactly backward. Companies with their priorities in order focus on delivering value to their customers, not on meeting irrelevant internal goals that don’t matter to clients.
• Fallacy 4: Every leader must have all the answers – The old command-and-control leadership style assumes the boss knows everything; this might work for mindless tasks, but not beyond that level. In such settings, workers know exactly what to do, and managers monitor them to make sure they accomplish their jobs on spec and on time. However, this approach is useless with knowledge workers whose objectives don’t fit a fixed template. These workers need the flexibility to accomplish their goals. A supervisor who orders them to work within a rigid format just looks foolish. When it comes to knowledge work, no one can guarantee results.

Learning leaders motivate their teams with three essential factors: “purpose, autonomy and co-intelligence.”

The success of high-performance teams stems from the combination of three powerful motivators: purpose, autonomy and co-intelligence, which is defined as the sum of the abilities, know-how and career-derived knowledge of everyone on a team.

“We are not the first people to illuminate three primary motivators for humans. However, we’ve adjusted them for team learning and resiliency. We have expanded the individual mastery motivator into the essential team motivator of co-intelligence.”

By themselves, these three motivators – or even combinations of any two of them – don’t lead to maximum results. You need all three. Consider:

• If you combine purpose and autonomy without co-intelligence, you get poor quality.
• If you combine purpose and co-intelligence, but you don’t give people autonomy, you get roadblocks.
• If you combine co-intelligence and autonomy, but you have no purpose, people embrace activities that lack meaningful intent.

Teams that can combine purpose, autonomy and co-intelligence are powerfully motivated to excel.

“Learning leaders” foster learning among their teams.

Effective leaders are continual learners who, in turn, encourage their team members to learn all they can.

“Often, stakeholders don’t know what they don’t know about what they need.”

In Great Leaders Learn Out Loud, author and consultant Chip Bell reports that learning leaders have four meaningful traits:

1. Courage – Learning leaders openly model the desire to learn. They aren’t afraid to show their vulnerabilities, and they willingly address their shortcomings.
2. Compassion – Leaders with compassion understand that learning doesn’t always come easily to everyone. As much as possible, they make allowances for people who may have trouble assimilating new information.
3. Confidence – Learning leaders believe in their followers’ ability to discover and absorb the knowledge they need to do their jobs well.
4. Complexity – Learning leaders understand that business is often complicated, so they foster agility. Because of their awareness of complexity, they value solutions that rely on critical thinking.

Effective teams develop resilience.

Today’s leaders emphasize building resilient teams, but resilience requires trust among team members. Working together, sharing positive interactions and achieving mutual milestones can create sustainable, lasting connections.

“The four most significant resilience factors [are]: collaborative connection, embracing conflict, inclusive collaboration and minimizing power dynamics.”

Leaders who want to increase their teams’ resiliency should never rush people as they work together. Team members need sufficient opportunities to engage with one another and bond. The larger the team becomes, the more time members need to collaborate, figure things out, carefully consider all the angles and develop a viable action plan. For productive group discussions, limit interactions to no more than eight people in person and no more than six people virtually.

Resilient teams embrace conflict.

Most people see conflict as negative and avoid it whenever possible. But conflict can also be positive. For the “wisdom of the crowd” to develop within teams, some conflict must occur as the best ideas fight their way to the top.

“How we choose to handle conflict determines whether we evolve or break as a team.”

Of course, if team members don’t trust one another, conflict is more likely to have a negative impact. Trust among colleagues relies on “credibility, support and consistency.” People earn credibility when others regard them as competent. They earn support when they share their burdens, accept assistance and aid their teammates as necessary. People develop a reputation for consistency when they demonstrate reliability over the long run.

Destructive conflict can get out of hand, while positive conflict focuses on solving problems. This works only if team members can collaborate meaningfully, a skill they may need to learn. Until team members develop the ability to resolve their conflicts and collaborate productively, they will squander good ideas and fall short of solving their problems.

Resilient teams are inclusive.

Diversity, equity and inclusivity are vital workplace goals. Diversity doesn’t stop at accepting people’s differences: It calls for celebrating what makes individuals who they are, including their “race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, language, (dis)ability, age, religious commitment and political perspective.”

“Learning leaders focus intensely on resilient learning for the organization, teams and themselves.”

Equity calls for a routine atmosphere of fairness and justice at work. Equitable leaders are impartial. Inclusive teams welcome people of all backgrounds.

Resilient teams minimize “power dynamics.”

Power, though potent, is insidious. People with power have voices that resonate at work. Employees without power have no voice, and no one hears them.

An executive who exercises runaway power can interfere with a team’s autonomy and collaboration and can undermine everything learning leaders hope to build. Too often, a boss with runaway power uses “dominance, control and coercion” – tactics that foment fear among employees and wreck productivity.

“Knowledge-based tasks may not meet the original estimates – at no fault of the employee. In these cases, leaders waste time and energy when they focus on blaming. Mistakes or errors in judgment are rarely intentional.”

Instead of exerting their dominance over their workers, learning leaders exercise power through collaboration. They eschew the trappings of power and act with humility by listening to their team members before they voice their opinions. These leaders go out of their way to request their teams’ input. In voting situations, they vote last, not first.

About the Authors

Diana Larsen is a co-founder, coach, mentor and consultant at the Agile Fluency Project. Tricia Broderick is a leadership adviser and motivational speaker.

Genres

leadership, management, organizational culture, teamwork, communication, psychology, self-help, business, nonfiction, professional development

Review

In Lead without Blame, Larsen and Broderick make a compelling case for shifting from a blame-oriented to learning-oriented mindset when leading teams. Drawing on decades of experience consulting, coaching, and research, the authors provide a practical guide for leaders seeking to foster psychological safety, empower teams to learn from failures, and enable collective ownership.

The book highlights common “blame behaviors” that undermine trust and learning such as finger-pointing, avoiding responsibility, gossiping, and concealing errors. Larsen and Broderick argue that in our quest for outstanding results, blame has become the default response to setbacks. However, blame cultures create fear-based environments where people hide problems rather than solve them.

To build resilient learning teams, Larsen and Broderick advocate embracing failure as a natural part of experimentation, creating transparency about uncertainties and risks, and allowing decisions to be driven by data and learning rather than egos. They offer tips for coaching teammates through disappointments compassionately and redirecting post-mortems towards understanding rather than accusations.

While recognizing that blame is often organizational rather than individual in nature, the authors provide pragmatic steps leaders can take to shift team habits and dialogues towards collective inquiry and shared responsibility. These include modeling curiosity over criticism, setting group learning goals, welcoming dissenting voices, and incentivizing the reporting of errors so they can be addressed.

Lead without Blame presents a thoughtful roadmap for evolving team culture that any leader serious about high performance would benefit from reading. Its lessons on trust, vulnerability, and ownership have powerful implications not just for workplaces but all human collaborations.