Leadership Without Excuses: How to Create Accountability and High-Performance (Instead of Just Talking About It)

CHAPTER 12BANISH THE FANTASIES AND FETISHES THAT LEAD TO FINGERPOINTING

Narcissistic romanticism in the workplace is embarrassing and cringe inducing. More important, when it goes unchecked, it leads to fingerpointing and excuse making. Here are four common fantasies in which you cannot allow yourself or your people to indulge—if you want to have a disciplined culture where accountability and performance are consistently high.

Good Crop, Bad Crop

Who deserves the credit when things go well? Who deserves the blame when they don’t? A phenomenon social scientists call self-serving bias makes it easy for us to answer “me” and “not me,” respectively.^1,2 Self-serving bias refers to our tendency to take credit for successes but to chalk up failures ...