The Blame Game
Imagine, if you will, that a child of your acquaintance (a son, a daughter, a niece, a nephew) has taken up the sport of netball. They have been training with their school team for a while and now it’s time for their first match. You dutifully turn up at the side of the court, umbrella in hand as it will probably, maybe even inevitably, rain, and watch your kid’s team get thrashed by that of the neighbouring school.
As the exhausted and disappointed children head back to the changing rooms to shower, you start to talk with the other grown ups about what went wrong. One comments that the other side were really playing as a team - they knew where each other were on the pitch and could throw the ball into empty space with the confidence that their team-mate would appear and catch it. Shots were quick, efficient and devastatingly accurate. And our team, spirited though they were, tired significantly towards the end, whilst the opposition seemed as if they’d barely broken a sweat.
Talk turns to the coach (read: member of the PE department that has been strong-armed into staying late on a Wednesday). One parent comments that they don’t really seem to know what they’re doing. Another says that the focus on fitness isn’t strong enough - there should be more drills, intervals, sprints so the kids can maintain pace even at the end of the match. But, as you walk back towards the sports block to meet your child, you have another, perhaps more obvious thought. The other team was simply intrinsically better than ours. Part of that is the raw ingredients - their shooters were both three to four inches taller, and their Centre was clearly a natural born sprinter given the speed that she moved at. But also, you know a bit about that other school. They’re much bigger, for a start, and have a heavy focus on excellence in sport. They probably have multiple netball teams and train twice a week rather than once, because they have the space and resources to do so. So, if we were to ask who was to blame for this afternoon’s loss, the answer could well be - nobody.
As some of you might have noticed, we have recently had a World Cup. I am nervous even writing these words as it is a subject that I know so incredibly little about, but I do know that in England’s case, football did not, in fact, come home. We did, however, come third - which, to my ignorant eye, seems great. Third! We’re on the podium! There were 48 teams in the world cup - this means that we were in the top 7% of all the teams! However, whilst I would never knowingly read an article about football, I did manage to catch a few headlines immediately after our semi-final defeat and, much like our hypothetical parents at the school netball court, the talk had clearly turned to who was to blame, with some seeming to round on England manager Thomas Tuchel. I know nothing of Tuchel or of who might be responsible for us being the third best team in the World Cup, but it did give me pause to think about the notion of accountability.
Part of the deal of being a leader is that the buck stops with you. You take responsibility for what happens in your organisation - the good, the bad and the ugly. This is such an important part of the job and is the trade off for a desirable title and a salary that is likely to be higher than those that you’re working with. High standards are also incredibly important - good leaders want their organisations to be the best that they could possibly be, just as Thomas Tuchel probably wanted his side to win the World Cup. But you cannot simply will something into being. I might want my dance company’s new ballet to garner five star reviews and become a modern classic that’s performed around the world to great acclaim - but, ultimately, this isn’t something I can control. I can put a group of brilliant creatives in a room together, ensure that the artistic process is rigorous, promote it to all the right people and then see what happens. Four stars and a national tour isn’t failure - but, if we start overstating the powers that leaders have, we may begin to see it as such.
There is an archetype that I think many of us find appealing of the leader as saviour. The person that turns a company round, takes it from haemorrhaging money to floating on the stock exchange, or from producing average art that not many people see to bold, brilliant work that captures the headlines and the donors’ money in one swoop. And it’s true, leadership can make a huge difference and it’s not impossible that these things can happen - indeed they have happened and will again. But this mythology of the leader as a superhero can blind us to other, deeper truths that no one person can fix - perhaps our company is haemorrhaging money because we sell a product that consumers simply no longer want, and coming to an elegant end is the most appropriate thing to do. Perhaps part of the reason the artistic work isn’t as bold and brilliant as we want it to be is that we don’t have enough structural support for freelance writers and directors within the sector as a whole, meaning much exciting talent is lost as artists discover that their chosen career may not ever pay them a living wage. These are not problems that any one individual can solve alone.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that we have a new PM in number 10 - the King of the North, who has charged down to Westminster to sort out the mess that we find ourselves in. However, whatever each of us thinks of Andy Burnham, we in the UK have changed Prime Ministers 6 times in the last 10 years. Perhaps our problems might be slightly larger than “that idiot at the top’s no good”.
To go back to our hypothetical netball team - the question they must ask themselves is this: how much do we care about winning our netball league? One response to their defeat is for the school to decide that they really care: up the number of training sessions, buy in a dedicated netball coach, start being more proactive in recruiting the kids that have experienced sudden growth spurts. Another response is to accept that, whilst the team could be better than they are, they are unlikely to reach the heady heights of league champions without considerable extra time and resources that are better deployed elsewhere (or, potentially, are non-existent). Either answer is fine - what’s important is determining what a good outcome looks like for us, today, with all the constraints and opportunities that are present at this particular moment in time. Be ambitious, of course, but remember: you cannot manifest an outcome based on belief alone - so, as the saying goes, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.