The Basic Basics: “It’s my fault.”
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
–Harry Truman (attributed)
It’s amazing how many business arguments — with customers, with colleagues, between departments in a bureaucracy — can be short-circuited by saying “It’s my fault.”
When you take a product back to a store because it doesn’t work, you want the clerk to know that there’s a problem . . . and that it’s not your fault. So what do you find yourself saying?
- “It was like that when I took it out of the box.”
- “I was using a surge protector.”
- “All the other components work just fine.”
- “I washed it in cold water, but it still shrank.”
Why do we say these things? Because we’re being honest, but also because we’re afraid that we’ll be blamed for something we didn’t do. As any veteran of customer-service work can tell you, if you want to guarantee an argument, just tell the customer “You must have done something wrong.”
It’s the same when the people arguing are supposedly on the same team. Even in the healthiest companies, harmony can break down when people think they’ll receive blame they don’t deserve. By contrast, the world is your oyster if you say one of these:
- “It’s my fault.”
- “I blame myself.”
- “You have a right to expect better than this. I screwed up.”
- “I take responsibility for this.”
- “I don’t know yet what caused it, but I’m assuming the problem is on our end.”
- “I blew it.”
Say something like this, and all of a sudden the barriers drop. The formerly combative person on the other side of the table rushes in to repair the breach:
- “Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that it’s your fault!”
- “No, no — I’m sure we can fix it.”
- “Hey, it’s not that big a deal, we just need to replace this one thing.”
- “Don’t beat yourself up. I don’t care whose fault it is, we just need to get it right.”
The merit of saying “It’s my fault” is twofold:
- Even when it isn’t your fault, being willing to take the blame can take the pressure out of an emotionally charged situation. Joel Spolsky made this point memorably in his 2007 piece, “Seven steps to remarkable customer service” — which you should rush to read in full.
- Sometimes . . . IT IS YOUR FAULT. Sometimes, it IS you who blew it. It IS you who’s been gumming up the works. It IS your team that’s been dragging its heels.
If you’re well-practiced at saying “It could be my own fault,” you won’t dig in your heels when there is a problem, because you’ll establish an overall tone that reminds everyone — especially you — that you don’t care who takes the blame, but you do want to reach a good outcome.
“If anything goes bad, I did it.
If anything goes semi-good, we did it.
If anything goes really good, then you did it.
That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you.”
–Bear Bryant
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Photo of Harry Truman from the Library of Congress.
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11 Comments so far
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It’s hard to do. The good leaders do it, do it right, every day, every way.
I’ve read where, maybe, the alternative question especially when a leader shouldn’t take the blame is
Leader: ‘Did you do this deliberately?’.
Follower: ‘No?’
Leader: ‘Well, then I failed to create a system where this mistake wasn’t possible.’
Wisdom for the ages. Thanks.
Funny. Reading my comment I see I left the question-mark in the follower’s response. It gives a whole different perspective to that dialogue.
Indeed, Zane!
I like your formulation: leaders should take “excessive” responsibility for the environments they create.
Isn’t this true for other human relationships as well as business – being prepared to be in the wrong, and for this to be more important than being right all the time.
Julia — You’re absolutely right — it’s like other parts of life. But think of how many people have an emotional need to be right, or to be SEEN to be right, that trumps their desire to come to a better outcome overall.
One of the things that I find as I write these “Basic Basics” posts is that I say things that are both (a) so obvious that they feel silly to even point out, but (b) REALLY hard to implement consistently — for me, too! — in day-to-day life.
[...] The Basic Basics: “It’s my fault.” [...]
Customer Service should be seen by companies as an opportunity to create strong loyalties with customers. The majority of the time, if you fix a customers problem to their satisfaction (assuming its reasonable) they’ll continue coming back for your service. But let’s not leave customer service as a tool for the customers to simply go to when they have a problem, but a tool to ensure that the entire experience of the service by the customer has been of the highest quality.
Devin — You’re right on track. If you look at customer service as a burden, it’s just a cost center — something you have to have, but that you invest in grudgingly.
If you look at it as an *opportunity*, the sky’s the limit. This is why companies like Nordstrom, Zappos, and Rackspace have been able to build thriving businesses around a core of super-duper customer service.
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