I returned to work last week from a short vacation.
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When I logged back in, I quickly saw there had been some problems while I was away. Some code that processes authentication requests was running extremely slow.
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As I read through the thread, I realized this was code I had worked on😳
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And for the rest of the week, even though my team had solved the problem quickly and prevented an outage, I kept apologizing over and over. I was casting blame on myself.
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This week's article dives into the differences between taking responsibility vs. blaming ourselves for errors (big and small).
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Team-Building Exercise

This week's Team-Building Exercise is about helping your team avoid the trap of self-blame. Look for ways to encourage someone out of a "blame spiral" where, like me, they apologize profusely and ignore the progress or learnings that came from the error.
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Navigating the different emotions and factors that come into play when recognizing a failure can be difficult. You can't just say, "Don't worry about it." You have to acknowledge the failure and address it while moving beyond it.
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One way I've found to help redirect attention away from the person and toward the learning is to reframe things in light of the team and not one person.
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When they say, "I broke XYZ," I remind them that the code went through a code review and, therefore, other engineers missed the same bug during the review.
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I remind them that our code has automated tests that didn't catch the bug either.
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I remind them that we tend to prefer shipping quickly in some cases rather than having perfect code, and there is accepted risk when we do.
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Then, we have to keep the focus on learning. What can we improve to avoid this bug (and ones like it) in the future? What tests do we need to write? What could we have done differently?
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In either case, creating a culture of encouragement and a focus on continual improvement is the basis for creating a safe and blameless culture.
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Find a teammate to encourage in either a failure or a job well done this week.

Here are some more resources from me to help you build better teams!​

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