Accountability and Blame: Breaking up For Good

UPDATE: Please check the date and time for this webinar. 

Accountability is the foundation of the relationship between a leader, the team and individual team members. Creating accountability is a fundamental and ongoing leadership practice. To hold someone accountable after a failure is to reexamine the accountability relationship, how organization systems have supported or failed it, and how to restructure it for success. That blame—an ego-defense to fear, anger, or shame—has been equated with accountability is simply evidence of a failure of leadership in organizations.

Safety, quality, and other leaders focused on operational excellence must become the champions of effective accountability and work to break up the association between accountability and blame for good. This means throwing out some ideas that have served us in the past but keep us from moving forward.

Topics to be discussed:

· Why we need to throw away Reason’s culpability model and its derivatives for good.

· How might we build an accountability model that emphasizes the role of leadership and the influence of the organizational system?

· Why the stranglehold of blame on performance means that leaders need to develop emotional management skills and make them a key tool for leadership.

· The role of the safety and quality professional in driving a change in leadership practice.

About the presenter: Martha Acosta, Ed.D., Senior Moderator, Corporate Learning, Harvard Business Publishing

Martha has been called the “Godmother of HOP” by Todd Conklin in reference to their work together at Los Alamos National Laboratory and her influence on the safety movement. Martha is an internationally regarded expert in human and organizational learning and performance. In her role as Senior Moderator for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning subsidiary, she has led thousands of managers and executives on transformative leadership journeys. Martha also speaks, writes and researches the emotional and cognitive aspects of safety and leadership.