Episode 152: How to Create a No Blame Culture in Your Firm

In this week's episode of The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants & Bookkeepers, discover what the “No Blame” culture is all about and how implementing it in your organization can be a total game-changer. 

Want to scale your firm with better leadership? Listen now!

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Transcript

Intro

Wize Mentoring 0:02

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers , a show about accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and the many stories , lessons, and tips from their experience of transitioning from a time- poor practice to a business that runs without them . I hope you enjoy and subscribe .

Brenton Ward 0:23

This concept of playing the ball and not the men has come from the no-blame culture that you instilled in your firm and the firms that you coached .

Ed Chan 0:33

Yeah , sure , Brenton . So what I might do is just to explain the no-blame culture, and then we can go to the slide . And then go to the slide . I often see accounting firms blaming people , for you know problems that occur , and often they don't know they're doing it , it's just through frustration , so it's either in their face or their body language , or you know , when there's a mistake made and the problem with that kind of way of managing people , and look , none of us were taught to manage

What is the 'No Blame' Culture? 

Ed Chan 1:16

and we're all taught to do the work . So we went to uni , we came out of uni , we got taught to do the , the work , and then somehow we ended up as a manager and and then we're expected to manage people , but we were never taught to manage people and and and hence we you know make me included make a lot of mistakes in trying to progress our career , and one of the biggest mistakes that managers make is blaming people for mistakes . And I know it's really difficult because if a mistake's made , there's a domino effect all the way down the line, and it's extremely frustrating .

Ed Chan 1:59

However , your role as a manager is to get the best out of your people , so it's about productivity , and production is the only focus that you should be paying attention to . And if you say something or you use body language that upsets someone and it affects their productivity because they got upset , then really you haven't done your job , because your job is to get the most productivity out of the individual . And if that individual got upset and couldn't produce as much or went home , still went home , then there's no productivity at all out of that person . So the first thing is, you know , if you create a blame culture , the productivity will drop . It would also create another environment in which nobody will come to you with the problem . So they may know the problem , but they'll hide it . They'll hide it because they might get blamed for it . And the problem with that , of course , is that if you don't know that there's a problem and you can't fix it , then it's going to create a bigger problem later on . Yeah , so you want to create a friendly environment , a safe environment , an environment where you know's open and , uh , they people want to come to you , to talk to you and to get some um , you know , um to help fix the problem . So

The importance of focusing on the problem

Ed Chan 3:34

, the no blame culture is extremely important , so that it goes from just your body language to your language that you use to everything .

Ed Chan 3:46

As a leader and as a manager , you've got to have a real poker face, and you've always got to be upbeat, and you never , never , never play the man , but always play the ball .

Ed Chan 3:59

So focus on the problem , focus on fixing the problem , focus on finding solutions to the problem , irrespective of how the problem was created or who created the problem and it's not easy to do , I know's uh , very , very , very hard to do , especially since we're you know , we're all people . We all have feelings, and we react differently to different circumstances . But as a manager , you have to be very calm, and you have to focus on the facts, and you have to focus on finding solutions and not blame . And if you can create an environment where it's open and solution-focused and people are looking for solutions rather than looking for problems . Then you're going to have an abundant environment rather than a scarcity environment . You won't have this environment where it's very , very tense in the organisation and it's stressful and that's created by the managers , because employees don't leave companies . They leave their managers because employees don't leave companies; they leave their managers .

Brenton Ward 5:16

And often, this is a really important one , that we hear that line here and there , but I mean , when you boil it down to the culture that's created internally , it definitely is all around how we manage and how we lead our team . People don't leave companies , they lead their managers .

Reasons why you should create a friendly environment 

Ed Chan 5:35

Yes , and the same person can do so well under manager A and really badly under manager B , and it's the same person , and yet they're so much more productive under A than under B , and the only difference is the way the manager is managing the individual . And yet I come back to what I said earlier . You know , we come out of uni , we get experience doing the work and then some of us are put into a management role and we've never been taught how to manage .

How managing people affects work productivity

Ed Chan 6:09

And yet this is the area that gets the most scalability , the most leverage, and the most productivity: how to manage your people . And your people in our industry fall under the cost of goods sold .

Ed Chan 6:25

And you look at point, your costs in an organisation , the biggest cost is your cost of goods sold and that's our people . So it's extremely important that you know we manage them well , because if you , if you're buying , um , some commodity to sell , if you buy , if you're selling calculators , you know . You know that if you buy it for two dollars , you know it's going to cost you two dollars . But our is that cost of goods sold is based on how productive our people are , and that's akin to a situation where the calculator you're buying one day costs you $2 , next day costs you $3 , and next day costs you $1.50 . That individual is or how well led they are , or how well they're being empowered to do the work and how productive they are . So it's such an important area that a lot of accounting firms don't put much emphasis on it and they don't put the training and the time into their leaders , into their manager , client managers , the training and the time into their leaders , into their management .

Brenton Ward 7:36

And just on that point and one of the things we wanted to point out , there's quite an in-depth video , but we'll touch on the concept itself here . As everyone can see on the left-hand side here , this is what's called the maturity continuum , which is straight from Dr Stephen Covey's book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People . So you can see the seven habits listed there . But one of the things we do job, point out here is a lot of this comes down to becoming a better leader . If we don't focus on our private victories and on bettering ourselves as a leader , we're not going to be able to move through that continuum to a point where we can have those public victories and we can work with others to form that interdependence where you say that , synergizing with other people , the one plus one equals five . Can you possibly touch on that journey a little bit for us ?

Ed Chan 8:27

Yes ,

Tips for becoming a better leader 

Ed Chan 8:28

absolutely . And it comes back to the ideal team structure is to get complementary skills working together and you'll get that synergy . You'll get that . One plus one is five , and it starts with this Dr Stephen Covey's slide here . And at the bottom , there you can see it's called dependence and at the bottom , there you can see it's called dependence . Dependence is when you're a junior , you're learning the job and you're dependent on everybody around you to teach you how to do things , and so you've got to master that first . So there's a journey that you go through , and the one in the middle is called independent . So once you've learned how to do something , then you're independent of anybody else that's around you .

Ed Chan 9:17

But leadership is really about interdependence is the third level up , and once you get to interdependence , that's when you're a true leader , and leadership is about a public victory . Yes , it's also about understanding the people around you , and fundamental to that is some of those things that he's got in there seek to understand . Uh , before being understood , and seeing it from the point of view of the you, that you're leading , not from your own point of view and and leaders are very , very good at that because they have to lead people , and the best way to get the best out of people is to understand you know what buttons to press with them , and not everyone can do that . Most people see things from their own point of view and they do things to . It's called self-interest , if you like . Most people survive on self-interest and that's below the interdependence level .

Ed Chan 10:24

But if you want wizementoring . com/p odcast good manager , you've got to transcend from independence to interdependence . Independence is where you're working on your own and you're quite experienced , and you're quite experienced to work on your own . But that's not leadership . Leadership is interdependence , where you know you're understanding the people around you and you're bringing them with you and taking them . You know you're understanding the people around you and you're bringing them with you and taking them .

Wize Mentoring 10:56

You head over to wisementoringcom forward slash podcast to download a free copy of the Accountant's 20-Hour Workweek Playbook . We've included a link in the show notes below . See you on the next episode .