Accountability is an essential part of any organization. Everyone involved—from leadership to the line worker to the safety professional—needs to uphold their responsibilities for a business to run smoothly and, more importantly, to make sure no one gets hurt. One of the most common ways people try to uphold accountability is through blame, by pointing a finger at a person or people they believe to be responsible for a negative outcome with the intention of avoiding a repeat incident. By using the threat of punishment, the idea is to keep everyone in line by disincentivizing mistakes. But, as you’ve probably heard, that’s not an effective way to curate a strong safety culture.

There is a widespread understanding that blame doesn’t work that way. The second principle of HOP insists “blame fixes nothing.” A no-blame mindset is a key leadership skill for improving safety culture and, as stated in a research paper published in Annals of Family Medicine, “…fear of blame is a recognized barrier in all safety-critical industries that seek to use the analysis of incidents as a method for improvement.”

That makes sense—if you’re worried about being blamed, you may be less likely to use stop-work authority or report an incident. People who are afraid of blame and its consequences become less communicative, reducing transparency in an organization and inevitably amplifying the human factors at play within a workforce.

Of course, the instinct to blame comes naturally, so don’t blame yourself for thinking that pointing the finger might have kept folks in line despite the mounting evidence. It’s the knee-jerk nature of blame that has gotten it all tangled up with the idea of accountability. But the fact is: blame and accountability are two separate concepts that can be decoupled, as long as you understand where one starts and the other begins.

The blame game

Whether you’re blaming yourself for stubbing your toe at home or chastizing a co-worker who was involved in a minor slip at work, pointing to a person and their actions feels like finding the root cause of an injury. But people aren’t hazards. We are all participants in a system, and our actions are influenced by internal factors and thoughts that we often have very little control over.

As safety expert Danny Smith illustrates in his new webinar, Saving Your Safety Culture With No-Blame Accountability, blame is counterintuitive if your goal is to improve as an organization. He frames blame as a tactic that “points us away from those learning opportunities that we all have; it takes us down a different path from our desired outcomes.”

By narrowing our focus as we fixate on what went wrong, how it went wrong and who did it, blame cuts off an opportunity to see the bigger picture. And all the stuff we don’t see—systems and internal factors—remains unaddressed. Meanwhile, enforcing rules through punishment might even make those holistic variables worse, causing frustration, fear and a culture of secrecy to take hold.

Accountability serves outcomes, not consequences

While accountability is often framed as the outcome of blame, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Accountability is really the commitment to achieving established goals and outcomes. Those goals can be production-based, safety-based or community-based, and they all bring with them a set of expectations—what needs to get done and who needs to do it.

Maintaining focus on that outcome is the goal of accountability, even in the face of incidents. As Smith outlines in his presentation, the key to staying on the path of accountability is setting the blame tactic aside and replacing it with:

• Acknowledgement that incidents happen and that they may shift our expectations.
• Reorientation toward your goal once expectations shift.

A useful way to understand this concept is by comparing it to travelling with GPS. When a collision occurs on the road ahead of you, your device acknowledges the incident and calculates the next best route to get to your destination. What your device doesn’t do is ridicule the parties involved or stubbornly continue on the original path. As Smith says in his presentation: “Despite things that happen—and they will happen—we need to stay focused on our goal.”

When looked at this way, it’s easy to see that blame is counterproductive to accountability, since it makes reorientation so difficult. As an alternative to blame, Smith lays out some strategies that can maintain accountability without pointing fingers based on open communication, transparency, safety and a commitment to outcomes. One strategy, which Smith calls an “accountability map,” is an easy-to-implement chart that replaces blame with easy-to-access information about how issues are being handled.

Removing blame from your work culture can be a challenge, but it’s one worth pursuing. Learn more about detecting blame in your organization and strategies for eliminating it by watching the webinar Saving Your Safety Culture With No-Blame Accountability.