The Decision Was Yours

I watched a department head make the same expensive mistake twice in six months.

Both times it was a hire that did not work out. Both times the person reported to her. Both times she had made the final call. And both times, when it fell apart, she reacted the same way. She turned on the recruiter with a round of pointed emails. She lost confidence in the people who had helped her run the search. And she started trusting the advice around her a little less than she had before.

Three reactions. Not one of them aimed at the only person who had made both decisions.

It is a tell, and it shows up in almost every leader. Most of them cannot see it in themselves. When something goes right, they look in the mirror. When something goes wrong, they look out the window. The win was their call. The loss was someone else’s execution, someone else’s information, someone else’s fault.

Most leadership advice tells you to flip the reflex. Own the failures, share the credit. Look in the mirror when it goes wrong and out the window when it goes right.

That is better. It is not the answer.

Because a leader doing that is still asking the wrong question. They are still sorting the world into fault. Whose miss was this? Who owns the failure? The direction of the finger changed, but the finger is still up.

The leaders who actually move things forward have dropped the question entirely. They do not care whose fault it is. Not because accountability does not matter, but because “whose fault” is a question about the past, and it does not tell you a single thing about what to do next. There are only two questions worth asking once something has gone wrong. What actually happened? And what do we do now, knowing what we know today?

Everything else is just deciding who to be mad at.

Now, someone reading this is already pushing back. What if the other person did drop the ball? What if the sales leader missed the number, or the vendor underdelivered, or the hire really was not good enough? Sometimes it is their performance, and you should hold them to it.

You should. This is not a case for never holding anyone accountable. It is a case for knowing the difference between accountability and blame because they look almost identical from the outside and they are opposites underneath.

Blame is about finding somewhere to put the feeling. Accountability is about fixing the business. When you ask what actually happened, you will often find a real performance problem, and then you address it directly, cleanly, as a leader. What you will also find more often than you expect, is that a capable person was handed a broken process, or bad information, or a decision that was never really theirs to make. You cannot tell the difference while you are busy being angry. Blame ends the investigation. Accountability starts it.

There is a second version of this that is harder to spot, because it does not look like blame at all. It looks like good judgment.

You have someone you trust. A lieutenant who has been right for years. A mentor you have leaned on since before this company existed. A confidant outside the business you call before every big move. Someone whose track record is so strong that when they tell you which way to go, you go. You barely examine it. Why would you? They have earned it.

That is the trap. The more someone has earned your trust, the less you scrutinize what they hand you. Trust is the exact thing that lowers your guard.

Here is something I tell people that tends to stop them. I am happy if I am right half the time. Some people believe I am right more often than that, and maybe with a given person, on a given run, I have been right every time. That is precisely when I am most dangerous to them. Because the next call is likely the one, I get wrong, and if they have stopped thinking because my record was clean, we are both going over the cliff.

No one beats the odds forever. We do not have full information. We are working with a slice of the picture, our own blind spots, and a hundred variables we cannot see. Most people wildly overestimate how often they are right, and they extend that same generosity to the people they admire. So, when a trusted voice says go, and you go without running it through your own head, you have not made a decision. You have outsourced one and kept the receipt.

Now be careful, because there is a way to hear all of this that is just as damaging. The leader who trusts no one reads this and feels vindicated. See. You cannot count on anybody.

That is not the lesson. Being wrong and being untrustworthy are not the same thing and confusing them is its own failure of judgment. Trust is a character question. It is about someone’s integrity and their intentions, whether they are honest with you, whether they have your interests in mind. Whether they happened to be right about a particular call is a different question entirely. It is about competence and odds, and everyone, including the best people you have, will land on the wrong side of it sometimes.

When a Trusted Person Turns Out to be Wrong

When a trusted person turns out to be wrong, you have not learned they cannot be trusted. You have learned they are human. If they were right fifty times and wrong the last two, the two do not erase the fifty. And you certainly cannot hold anyone to a standard of being right more often than you are, though leaders do it constantly, because someone else’s miss is so much easier to see than your own.

So let us be clear about what accountability actually means, because this is where leaders give themselves the most room to hide.

You can delegate almost everything. You can hand off authority. You can assign responsibility. You can bring in a recruiter to find the candidates, lean on HR to filter them, pull in three people to interview and weigh in. That is not just fine; it is how good decisions get made. Seek counsel. Get the information. Pressure test your thinking against people who see what you do not.

But when the person is hired and they report to you, the decision was yours. You made it. Not the recruiter, who does not work for you and never made a single hire in your company. Not HR, who filtered. Not the panel, who advised. You. And if it turns out to be the wrong call, it is on you, because you were the one accountable the entire time. That never moved.

This is the part people try to abdicate. They want the final decision to feel shared when it goes wrong and owned when it goes right. But a decision you made after seeking counsel is still a decision you made. Agreeing with good advice is a choice. You chose. And the recruiter who gets the furious email did not fail you. Your process did, or you did not follow it, or you skipped the thinking because someone you trusted made it easy not to.

I will say the quiet part aloud since I am on the other side of this. Plenty of people hire consultants, coaches, and advisors for exactly this reason, even if they would never admit it. Not only for the help. For the cover. Someone to point to if it goes wrong. A name to put on the failure that is not their own.

I understand the pull. But it does not work, and it should not. My job, and the job of anyone worth bringing in, is to sharpen the questions, challenge the assumptions, and share what we have seen before. It is to make your thinking better. It is not to make the decision, and it is not to absorb the blame when the decision you made does not pan out. The moment an advisor becomes your insurance policy against being wrong, you have stopped using them to think and started using them to hide.

So here is where it leaves you.

Own the Moment, Assess the Situation – Demonstrate Leadership Dicipline

The next time something goes wrong, and it will, watch the first move your mind makes. If it reaches for a name, a vendor, a department, a person who let you down, you are already off track. That instinct feels like leadership. It is the opposite. It ends the investigation before it starts.

The department head who made the same hire twice never asked the only questions that would have changed anything. What actually happened? What do we do now, knowing what we know today? She was too busy being angry to get curious and being angry cost her the same mistake a second time. The recruiter did not do that to her. Her process did, and her unwillingness to look at it did.

You will not get every call right. Half is a fine number. What you do not get to do is pretend the call was not yours. Seek counsel. Trust good people. Weigh the advice. Then decide, own it completely, and when it goes sideways, skip the search for someone to blame and go straight to the only work that matters. Figure out what happened. Then move forward from where you actually are.

Because the decision was yours, it always was.

 

About the Author: Howard M. Shore is the Founder and CEO of Activate Group, Inc., a business coaching and executive coaching firm helping mid-market CEOs accelerate results through stronger leadership, aligned teams, and effective operating systems. Known as a “Resultant,” he goes beyond coaching to drive measurable change. His team has created over $2 billion in documented client value. He is the author of “Your Business Is a Leaky Bucket” and “The Leader Launchpad”.