Interesting debate taking place over at the Harvard Business site on the idea that true leaders take responsibility when things go wrong — even if they are not personally at fault.
Former Morgan Stanley co-president Zoe Cruz recently lost her job apparently because, according to the Wall Street Journal, she was more interested in pointing fingers at colleagues than in taking responsibility for actions in the company’s recent earnings fiasco.
But HB editor Paul Michelman notes that we all know managers who built successful careers by avoiding blame when the you-know-what hit the fan.
Here’s his question to readers:
Would you have the nerve to walk into your CEO’s office and take full responsibility for a series of major mistakes that undermined your company’s annual earnings and cost your shareholders dearly?
Comments so far include:
- “The true leader stands in front and takes full responsibility for any actions of their organization. If you didn’t, how would ever build trust and respect in your people?”
- “Should organisations always hold their leaders responsible to the extent that a leader has to leave/be asked to leave in order to ’show that he takes the responsibility’? Or should an organisation honour that a leader takes responsibility … and ensure personal and organisational learning from these mistakes for the future?”
- “I bristle … when we start talking about blaming someone for such an event. When we blame, we give up the opportunity to understand the true cause of a poor decision. This often happens when a leader resigns or is fired.”
- “It is always the ultimate responsibility of the person at the top to get things right. However when things go wrong part of taking responsibility includes identifying everything (process and persons) that need to be fixed.”
How would you position your group’s failure in front of upper management?
