Dear Founder

Dear Founder,

I know how it feels when you’re angry that something didn’t go right. You may even feel justified in pointing fingers at the person or people you believe let you down. Or, you may even think it would be appropriate to publicly shame them for disappointing you and the company.

I understand that what they did was bad—maybe very bad—and now it’s causing you all sorts of problems. Instinctually you want to blame someone. However, you can’t be so quick to blame them or act on that feeling of blame. Maybe this sounds like a small thing, but this is a real issue that can derail executives and leaders.

This was a lesson I learned early on. I remember playing American Legion Baseball when I was eighteen years old. We were a very good team and made it to the state championships. I adored our coach who was very funny and inspirational most of the time. Yet, I will never forget his speech when we were eliminated after losing our first two games in the state finals: “I guess you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.” His rant was clearly not a very inspirational way to end what was a good season that could have been great. It taught me that losing sucks, but there is still a way to be gracious about it and get inspired by the experience. Instead of inspiration and hope for the future, our coach delivered bitterness and blame.

Now, as a senior executive and board member, I’ve seen a number of executives throw other people under the bus. This action almost always ends up looking bad for the executive who does it—not the team member who made the mistake. The executive should be a good enough manager to know the importance of reflecting on the problem, owning up to their piece of the accountability, and focusing on the learning. I keep an eye out for executives who are quick to blame others, and I try to coach them on correcting this flaw.

You will never build credibility with your whole team when you don’t go into these situations with a “beginner’s mind.” Instead of quickly jumping into the blame game, look at everything as if it’s the first time you saw it. Ask yourself:

• What happened here?

• What did we miss?

• How could I have helped to see this earlier and help fix it faster?

• How likely is this to happen again?

Build a culture of openness and learning for your teams. Have employees be tougher on themselves than anyone else. Such behavior typically happens when you create a transparent AND supportive culture where mistakes are generally used as learning experiences and everyone is encouraged to be brutally honest about how they are doing.

When something doesn’t go well, dive deep into why and focus on the learnings—instead of the blaming. For example, during a postmortem from a system outage, are you looking for gaps in process and execution to shore them up in order to avoid a recurrence, or are you quick to fire someone who made a mistake? (Of course, as I’ve said before, if you have employees or leaders who aren’t learners or high achievers, you must let them go. Allow them to be mediocre somewhere else. Or, perhaps they will become stars in a different environment.)

Your environment should enable learning, practice forgiveness, and foster inspiration. There’s an old, but true, adage: When you point a finger, three point back at you. It is so much better to take more ownership of an issue even if you sometimes don’t feel it is warranted. I remember we had a big outage at eBay a few years into my tenure. In the past, Meg Whitman had terminated other executives, in the middle of a crisis, for similar problems. However, this time she was working with a new team and we had made a lot of progress and had earned her trust. We knew we had to deliver and she knew she had to as well. She worked very closely with us through the outage and she told us how proud she was of the progress we had made. Instead of feeling that she blamed us and instead of worrying about losing our jobs, we were inspired to fix the problem and to not let Meg or our customers down.

No one does their best work when they feel that they are on the edge. No one will take chances or strive to be better when they live in fear. So, instead of seeking revenge by throwing someone under the bus, transform that urge into preventing the situation the next time around and inspire everyone to do better.

All the best,

Maynard