Right for the wrong reasons

Scott Berkun has a great post about taking responsibility for success and failure.  He says:

"...we sometimes excuse our own failures by blaming circumstance (”But I did everything I could”), but fail to give those around us the same generosity (”I don’t care why it happened: it’s your fault.”). This kind of inconsistency is poison: it’s impossible to to build trust when people are rewarded for making excuses and patted on the back for pointing fingers.

If you’re a leader, and you do this yourself you’re setting an evil tone for others to follow. (When was the last time you distributed credit you didn’t deserve? Or took blame away from those who did not deserve it?) If you’re able to raise the bar on how people deal with these situations, they’ll spend more time working and waste less time stealing credit and dodging blame."

Link

Comments

[Rachel]

I really appreciate this post b/c I work with people who are like this and it's very frustrating. Especially for someone like me who works my butt off for very little credit. I just have to get my credit from God I guess b/c man really doesn't care about anything but how you help their bottom line.

[Dave]

The nice thing about following Christ is that I no longer work for "man", I work for God, He may still have me employed at a place that may under appreciate how hard I work, but when you work hard even when no one is watching, it really doesn't go un-noticed. God notices and He stands up and says Good job, my faithfull servant. As far as I am concerned, I would rather hear an atta boy from God any day as compared to an atta boy from just a man.