ADMIT IT!

Every government makes mistakes from time to time. Sometimes, leaders acknowledge that a decision made in the past has gone awry and other times this news comes out through a performance audit or a press report.

But as Robert Half, the late founder of the eponymous giant recruiting firm once said, “Not admitting a mistake is a bigger mistake.”

We agree and yet we frequently see state and local governments and their leaders take that unfortunate path. Consider citizen surveys. They can be used to detect places where a mayor, governor or city council has taken a wrong turn and left frustrated residents behind. But we can’t recall ever seeing a press release from a governmental entity in which a leader is quoted as saying “We see that our citizens were outraged by the growing number of potholes in town.”

Why would any leader want to do that? We’d argue it’s because everyone makes mistakes, and admitting to them, and explaining what is to be done to fix things could be a wonderful way to build up trust in government (a commodity, which we’ve repeatedly reported, is in increasingly short supply).

What’s more, conceding a failure is a sign of courage, which can lead to greater respect on the part of voters. We’ve seen repeated cases in which politicians have denied personal wrongdoings and that’s worked to their detriment. Then, when they own up, the public can be relatively quick to forgive (and if not forgive, then at least forget).

Sometimes, of course, public leaders can be forced to confront a problem head on. In some instances, they’ll take responsibility and offer up solutions for fixing things in the future. But all too often, many are inclined to reach into a grab-bag of excuses. How many times have you read variations on the following:

• “It wasn’t my fault. It was the fault of the previous administration”

  
  

• “My department was only responsible for a tiny part of the problem, and so shouldn’t be held accountable for any of it.”

  
  

• “The other political party mucked things up so badly that there was nothing I could do.”

  
  

• “You’re only accusing me of a problem because you really don’t understand how complicated the situation was.”

Then of course, there can be an inclination to avoid admitting a problem because people can wait things out until small issues balloon into larger ones and can be entirely blamed on successors.

This is a real hazard in the world of project management, in which one official may only be in charge of a project for a limited period of time. When little problems crop up that aren’t obvious to others around the effort, it’s often relatively easy to just ignore the issues (and not admit them to the bosses) and then by the time the seeds of unsavory outcomes blossom into weeds, it’s in somebody else’s lap.

This is somewhat understandable in organizations in which a great deal of emphasis is placed on getting projects completed on time and on budget, and that can create pressure from external forces to make things look like all is going well, even when it’s not. This is particularly true when overly optimistic project managers hope that they can fix the small problems before they turn into larger ones.

As author Cecelia Ahern wrote in “The Time of My Life”, the mantra can go like this: ‘It's nobody's fault. It's not my fault. I didn't do anything wrong. I know that now. It's just the way it is. Sometimes things just don't work out. You and me, we worked for the amount of time that we worked, then we didn't anymore. . . “

Actually, that’s why so many documents make use of the passive voice, in which the subject is the recipient of an action as opposed to a sentence in which the subject actually performs one. (Compare for example the active voice: “We made mistakes,” to the passive voice “Mistakes were made.”

Sometimes this may be legitimate. This is the case when pointing a finger directly at the culprit behind a governmental boondoggle can cause more harm than it does good. But more generally it’s just an excellent way to hide fault behind a curtain of infelicitous prose.

Not only is avoidance of blame unfortunate for the government and the people who it serves, it can have a boomerang effect which hurts the obfuscator. We came across the following quote from Vanessa Denha Garmo, who is a professional leadership coach, on LinkedIn: “A state of denial can be deadly for your career,” she wrote. “I coached an executive who was losing talented team members at a rapid rate and all because he always had to be right and when he was wrong, he quickly pointed the finger at someone else and wondered why a finger-pointing culture was created within the organization.”

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