Step 1: Harness the power of narrative inquiry
Mindset Shift: Investigate the stories we tell ourselves.
Action: Listen to the narratives that shape your perceptions, especially those that lead to blame. Narrative inquiry encourages leaders to examine the stories they construct about success, failure and responsibility. Recognising how these narratives influence their leadership style helps you modify them to your advantage.
Practice: Conduct narrative reflection sessions, either solo or with a coach, to uncover and dissect the stories you tell yourself about your team’s actions and their outcomes. Rewrite these narratives from a perspective that emphasises learning and collective growth.

Step 2: Cultivate emotional finesse
Mindset Shift: Fine-tune your emotional intelligence.
Action: Develop a nuanced understanding of your emotions, especially in moments of stress or failure. Emotional finesse — the ability to specifically identify and distinguish between different feelings — can help leaders respond to challenges more thoughtfully and less reactively.
Practice: Keep an emotional journal in the aftermath of challenging situations. Aim to describe your feelings with as much specificity as possible, exploring the subtle distinctions between emotions and their triggers. This practice encourages a deeper self-awareness and reduces knee-jerk reactions of blame.

Step 3: Implement restorative justice principles
Mindset Shift: From punishment to restoration.
Action: When mistakes happen, focus on the restoration of relationships and community rather than on assigning blame or meting out punishment. Restorative justice principles encourage dialogue, understanding and mutual agreement on how to move forward.
Practice: Facilitate restorative circles with your team to discuss the aftermath of mistakes. Focus these discussions on understanding the impact, repairing harm and collectively finding pathways to prevent future occurrences.

Step 4: Engage in radical transparency
Mindset Shift: Embrace vulnerability as strength.
Action: Model transparency by sharing your thought processes, doubts and decision-making struggles with your team. This openness can dismantle blame and build trust.
Practice: Regularly hold “transparent leadership” sessions where you share challenges you’re facing, decisions you’re struggling with and mistakes you’ve made. Encourage your team to ask questions and offer insights, building a culture of mutual support and accountability.

Step 5: Inquisitive questioning
Mindset Shift: Seek to understand before being understood.
Action: Before jumping to conclusions or assigning blame, employ inquisitive questioning to uncover the issue at hand. This method promotes critical thinking and open dialogue, leading to a deeper understanding of problems and creating a culture of curiosity and shared learning.
Practice: In team meetings or one-on-ones, adopt a questioning approach that challenges assumptions and explores underlying causes. Questions like “What led us to this outcome?” and “How can we collectively address this challenge?” shift the focus from blame to understanding and improvement.

A new paradigm for leadership
The decision to relinquish blame and genuinely embrace accountability are challenging and deeply rewarding. Leaders venture into uncharted territories of self-exploration, emotional mastery and communal healing. By adopting these uncommon steps, leaders create an environment where accountability emerges naturally from trust and collective purpose.

This path is not for the faint of heart, yet it is precisely what conscious leadership demands in an era that calls for authenticity, resilience and commitment to growth. As leaders practise these leadership methods, they transform their teams, setting the stage for a legacy defined by wisdom, integrity and a deep-seated respect for the human spirit.

Recommended reading:

These selections offer deeper insights into creating a culture of responsibility, innovation and empathy in leadership, moving well beyond the traditional paradigms.

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes—But Some Do by Matthew Syed
Syed explores the dichotomy between industries that learn from failures and those that don’t, emphasising the importance of a culture that moves beyond blame to genuinely understand and learn from mistakes. This book offers a fresh perspective on how leaders can foster an environment that encourages growth from failure rather than fearing it.

An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
This book introduces the concept of Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs), where personal growth is woven into the structures of the company’s operations. It challenges leaders to rethink accountability, embedding personal development and transparency into the core of organisational culture, thus moving beyond blame to mutual growth.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
Combining Benjamin Zander’s experiences as a conductor and Rosamund Stone Zander’s psychotherapy insights, this book presents a set of practices for breaking away from old patterns of leadership. It’s about shifting mindsets from a scarcity and blame framework to one of possibility and opportunity, offering a unique approach of a leadership that empowers and uplifts.

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse
Carse’s philosophical exploration distinguishes between finite games, played to win, and infinite games, played for the sake of continuing the play. Applied to leadership, it encourages leaders to view challenges, accountability, and growth as part of an infinite game, focusing on long-term possibilities rather than short-term blame or victories.