The Wize Way

Episode 152: How to Create a No Blame Culture in Your Firm

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 2 • Episode 152

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In this week's episode of The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants & Bookkeepers, discover what the “No Blame” culture is all about and how implementing it in your organization can be a total game-changer. 

Want to scale your firm with better leadership? Listen now!

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Wize Mentoring:

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers, a show about accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and the many stories, lessons, and tips from their experience of transitioning from a time- poor practice to a business that runs without them. I hope you enjoy and subscribe.

Brenton Ward:

This concept of playing the ball and not the men has come from the no-blame culture that you instilled in your firm and the firms that you coached.

Ed Chan:

Yeah, sure, Brenton. So what I might do is just to explain the no-blame culture, and then we can go to the slide. And then go to the slide. I often see accounting firms blaming people, for you know problems that occur, and often they don't know they're doing it, it's just through frustration, so it's either in their face or their body language, or you know, when there's a mistake made and the problem with that kind of way of managing people, and look, none of us were taught to manage and we're all taught to do the work. So we went to uni, we came out of uni, we got taught to do the, the work, and then somehow we ended up as a manager and and then we're expected to manage people, but we were never taught to manage people and and and hence we you know make me included make a lot of mistakes in trying to progress our career, and one of the biggest mistakes that managers make is blaming people for mistakes. And I know it's really difficult because if a mistake's made, there's a domino effect all the way down the line, and it's extremely frustrating.

Ed Chan:

However, your role as a manager is to get the best out of your people, so it's about productivity, and production is the only focus that you should be paying attention to. And if you say something or you use body language that upsets someone and it affects their productivity because they got upset, then really you haven't done your job, because your job is to get the most productivity out of the individual. And if that individual got upset and couldn't produce as much or went home, still went home, then there's no productivity at all out of that person. So the first thing is, you know, if you create a blame culture, the productivity will drop. It would also create another environment in which nobody will come to you with the problem. So they may know the problem, but they'll hide it. They'll hide it because they might get blamed for it. And the problem with that, of course, is that if you don't know that there's a problem and you can't fix it, then it's going to create a bigger problem later on. Yeah, so you want to create a friendly environment, a safe environment, an environment where you know's open and, uh, they people want to come to you, to talk to you and to get some um, you know, um to help fix the problem. So, the no blame culture is extremely important, so that it goes from just your body language to your language that you use to everything.

Ed Chan:

As a leader and as a manager, you've got to have a real poker face, and you've always got to be upbeat, and you never, never, never play the man, but always play the ball.

Ed Chan:

So focus on the problem, focus on fixing the problem, focus on finding solutions to the problem, irrespective of how the problem was created or who created the problem and it's not easy to do, I know's uh, very, very, very hard to do, especially since we're you know, we're all people. We all have feelings, and we react differently to different circumstances. But as a manager, you have to be very calm, and you have to focus on the facts, and you have to focus on finding solutions and not blame. And if you can create an environment where it's open and solution-focused and people are looking for solutions rather than looking for problems. Then you're going to have an abundant environment rather than a scarcity environment. You won't have this environment where it's very, very tense in the organisation and it's stressful and that's created by the managers, because employees don't leave companies. They leave their managers because employees don't leave companies; they leave their managers.

Brenton Ward:

And often, this is a really important one, that we hear that line here and there, but I mean, when you boil it down to the culture that's created internally, it definitely is all around how we manage and how we lead our team. People don't leave companies, they lead their managers.

Ed Chan:

Yes, and the same person can do so well under manager A and really badly under manager B, and it's the same person, and yet they're so much more productive under A than under B, and the only difference is the way the manager is managing the individual. And yet I come back to what I said earlier. You know, we come out of uni, we get experience doing the work and then some of us are put into a management role and we've never been taught how to manage. And yet this is the area that gets the most scalability, the most leverage, and the most productivity: how to manage your people. And your people in our industry fall under the cost of goods sold.

Ed Chan:

And you look at point, your costs in an organisation, the biggest cost is your cost of goods sold and that's our people. So it's extremely important that you know we manage them well, because if you, if you're buying, um, some commodity to sell, if you buy, if you're selling calculators, you know. You know that if you buy it for two dollars, you know it's going to cost you two dollars. But our is that cost of goods sold is based on how productive our people are, and that's akin to a situation where the calculator you're buying one day costs you $2, next day costs you $3, and next day costs you $1.50. That individual is or how well led they are, or how well they're being empowered to do the work and how productive they are. So it's such an important area that a lot of accounting firms don't put much emphasis on it and they don't put the training and the time into their leaders, into their manager, client managers, the training and the time into their leaders, into their management.

Brenton Ward:

And just on that point and one of the things we wanted to point out, there's quite an in-depth video, but we'll touch on the concept itself here. As everyone can see on the left-hand side here, this is what's called the maturity continuum, which is straight from Dr Stephen Covey's book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. So you can see the seven habits listed there. But one of the things we do job, point out here is a lot of this comes down to becoming a better leader. If we don't focus on our private victories and on bettering ourselves as a leader, we're not going to be able to move through that continuum to a point where we can have those public victories and we can work with others to form that interdependence where you say that, synergizing with other people, the one plus one equals five. Can you possibly touch on that journey a little bit for us?

Ed Chan:

Yes, absolutely. And it comes back to the ideal team structure is to get complementary skills working together and you'll get that synergy. You'll get that. One plus one is five, and it starts with this Dr Stephen Covey's slide here. And at the bottom, there you can see it's called dependence and at the bottom, there you can see it's called dependence. Dependence is when you're a junior, you're learning the job and you're dependent on everybody around you to teach you how to do things, and so you've got to master that first. So there's a journey that you go through, and the one in the middle is called independent. So once you've learned how to do something, then you're independent of anybody else that's around you.

Ed Chan:

But leadership is really about interdependence is the third level up, and once you get to interdependence, that's when you're a true leader, and leadership is about a public victory. Yes, it's also about understanding the people around you, and fundamental to that is some of those things that he's got in there seek to understand. Uh, before being understood, and seeing it from the point of view of the you, that you're leading, not from your own point of view and and leaders are very, very good at that because they have to lead people, and the best way to get the best out of people is to understand you know what buttons to press with them, and not everyone can do that. Most people see things from their own point of view and they do things to. It's called self-interest, if you like. Most people survive on self-interest and that's below the interdependence level.

Ed Chan:

But if you want wizementoring. com/p odcast good manager, you've got to transcend from independence to interdependence. Independence is where you're working on your own and you're quite experienced, and you're quite experienced to work on your own. But that's not leadership. Leadership is interdependence, where you know you're understanding the people around you and you're bringing them with you and taking them. You know you're understanding the people around you and you're bringing them with you and taking them.

Wize Mentoring:

You head over to wisementoringcom forward slash podcast to download a free copy of the Accountant's 20-Hour Workweek Playbook. We've included a link in the show notes below. See you on the next episode.