Your Team’s Mistakes May Start With You. Ask These 3 Questions Before Assigning Blame.

When a team makes a mistake, the first question shouldn’t be who to blame. It should be what the leader’s choices made more likely. That shift matters: people can’t report problems early if they expect the first response to be a search for a culprit.

That lesson hit me when a deadline slipped badly while I was a founder. I went looking for the person who had dropped the ball, missed the handoff or failed to raise an alarm. The room went quiet. I remember that silence more clearly than the missed date: everyone was working out how much of the truth they could safely tell me.

I now run an SBA lender and certified community development financial institution, and teach entrepreneurial leadership at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business. In both roles, I see leaders focus on whoever was nearest to a failure while overlooking the conditions that shaped it.

Start with the conditions

Many owners think accountability travels down the org chart. That gets the burden backward. A leader’s responsibility should rise with their authority. If frontline employees face consequences while senior decisions escape scrutiny, the organization is shifting risk down the chain, not building high standards.

Managers shape a large share of the conditions employees work in. Gallup says managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement; in 2025, only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged. Those figures don’t explain every workplace failure, but they underline why leaders should examine the environment they control.

I once thought identifying the person responsible was the leadership move. It can be necessary to establish who made a decision. But if that’s where you begin, people learn to polish the story before bringing it to you.

Neil Howe and others use the term “Fourth Turning” for periods of institutional strain, when trust in systems weakens and people face tests of character. In that setting, the leadership posture I call Washington Mode is restraint: hold authority without using it to push risk onto people with less power.

Ask what your decisions set in motion

After a failure, write down the conditions before you write down a person’s name. What priorities did you set? Did staffing match the work? What behavior did the incentives reward? Was the necessary information available to the person making the call? Leaders shape more of the working context than anyone else in the organization, so they own part of the environment in which a failure occurred—even when someone else made the final choice.

Think of accountability first as a way to get accurate information, and only then as a judgment. When the next problem surfaces, ask yourself these four questions out loud: What did I prioritize? Who lacked the authority or resources to act? What did we reward? Which signals did we miss?

A restaurant owner might discover that a late delivery followed from a schedule with no time set aside to receive it. A software founder might find that an outage followed a release rule employees knew no one enforced. The examples differ; the first task is the same. Name the conditions while the people involved are still willing to speak plainly.

Hold people accountable after examining the system

Looking upward doesn’t remove individual agency. Someone made a choice, and that choice still deserves scrutiny. The order matters: first look at what the leader and the system allowed, rewarded or ignored; then assess the person’s decision. Start with blame, and you make candor feel costly.

Make the distinction explicit: “Here’s what I did that made this more likely. Here’s the decision you were responsible for.” That conversation can follow a franchise’s bad weekend shift, a clinic’s billing error or a fabricator’s increase in scrap. It preserves a person’s dignity while making expectations clear. Without that balance, leaders risk producing scapegoats—or avoiding accountability altogether.

Make it easier to report the next problem

The point of owning your share of a failure is practical: the next warning should reach you sooner. When leaders acknowledge the conditions they created, employees have more reason to raise weak signals early. When leaders shift all blame outward, reporting becomes risky and problems are more likely to stay hidden. Trust grows through what leaders do after a miss, not through what they say about openness.

Build the practice before the next crisis. After a meaningful failure, hold a 10-minute debrief with the people closest to the work. You start by discussing the conditions; they follow with the choices they made. End with one change to the system and one clear expectation for the person. If people still seem guarded, leave one irritation unresolved for the moment. Their caution is useful information.

Try it this week. Choose a recent failure that still bothers you. Write four lines about the conditions you created and one about the choice that belonged to someone else. Tell that person both parts before Friday, then ask what they left out when they first described what happened. See whether the next difficult truth arrives sooner.

The silence after my missed deadline told me more than the date on the calendar. It showed me that people were unsure whether the truth had a safe place to go. Leaders can start building that place before the next mistake.

Key points: Examine the conditions before naming the person; acknowledge the leader’s share of the failure without denying the individual’s responsibility; make truth safe enough to surface.

By Christopher Myers, edited by Kara McIntyre. Published Oct. 24, 2026. Myers is CEO of B:Side Capital and B:Side Fund and a professor at W.P. Carey School of Business. He is an Entrepreneur Leadership Network® Contributor.

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