Giving Credit and Taking Responsibility in a Team
Whether we succeed or fail, it helps to know how to best represent our team in front of upper management or clients.
Speaking from personal experience, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of putting our colleagues on a pedestal when they succeed, think less of them when they fail, or otherwise unwittingly participate in creating and sustaining what I like to call “office politics”.
I actively try to counteract this phenomenon by giving as much credit as possible to my colleagues, while framing as a team effort those contributions I could otherwise claim to be mine alone.
Conversely, I try to have a teammate’s back when they make a mistake, while taking personal responsibility when I myself screw up.
📑 Examples
Whenever I’ve done something by myself I try to say this:
🔴 When I make a mistake → “I made a mistake”
🔵 When I accomplish something → “We accomplished this”
What about a specific colleague of ours — let’s call them Alex:
🔴 When Alex makes a mistake → “We made a mistake”
🔵 When Alex accomplishes something → “Alex accomplished this”
Finally, if we happen to be the team lead we could say something like this:
🔴 When the team makes a mistake → “I made a mistake”
🔵 When the team accomplishes something → “They accomplished this”
🤔 What good does this do?
Whether it comes from inside or outside the team, blame erodes trust. Some people will subconsciously blame others for failures, even when they say they don’t.
To minimize this affecting our colleagues, we can try to take all negatives upon ourselves — especially in a leadership position, both our team and our managers will respect the fact we’re taking responsibility for failures instead of throwing someone else under the bus.
Similarly, they’ll respect the fact we give others (but not ourselves) credit — we all subconsciously know a team’s success is also the leader’s success anyway, we might as well be humble about it 😉
👣 Further steps
In addition to owning the mistakes we make, it’s also important to transition from blame to responsibility — blame is in the past, while responsibility is in the present.
To do this, we can also outline the next steps we’ll take to either amend the issue, or prevent it from happening again.
Saying sorry is not enough — make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Finally, while covering for other people’s mistakes in front of management or clients is commendable, giving our team feedback in private is crucial — after all failure is only valuable when we learn from it!
💭 Your thoughts?
Anything else you’d like to add? Has someone had your back when you made a mistake? Or gave you credit when they didn’t have to? Did this make a difference for your team?
Let me know in the comments 👇
