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Training people teaches them what to do. Educating people helps them think so they can figure out what to do. And when you want to build a culture, you need to bring the right kind of what we call tools or principles or workshops and worksheets and the kind of support so they’d learn how to do it. And I’ll give you one, that is a common problem for cultures today when things go wrong.

Whenever there’s a mistake and the customer may complain or you just realize that something didn’t go the way it was supposed to go, and the fear that exists in many parts of the world and in many industries, because people are concerned for their job or they’re concerned about getting, you know, called out and it produces this kind of behavior- “It wasn’t me.” And so you see this finger pointing or this anxiety about, you know, put your head down, hopefully it goes by and you’re not the one that’s being accused. So that’s blame. Or people get embarrassed. They know they were part of what caused that problem to happen. You know, “I can’t believe it.” You know, “I hang my head in shame.”

The problem with blame and shame is that they don’t make anything better. In fact, they make things worse. Because if you’re blaming the other department, or you’re blaming the other shift, or you’re blaming the tech, you know, whatever it is you’re blaming, it can get those other people upset. And if you’re hanging out saying, “Well, I’ll blame myself instead” and then you’re in shame. That doesn’t put anyone in a good condition to actually make an improvement. And so then what happens is people say, “Okay, look, let’s have a truce. I don’t blame you. You don’t blame me. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t my fault. It was the technology’s fault.” It was the policies fault. It was the economy’s fault. And then they come up with excuses. Of course, the problem with excuses is that it also doesn’t produce any positive change.

So what would be above blame, shame and excuses? We call that TPR and what it stands for is take personal responsibility. But in the organizations that we bring this tool to, TPR, it’s basically a framework that says, “Okay, where is blame going on around here?” Let’s be honest. Let’s identify it. Where do we hear it? What does it sound like? Okay, good. Let’s stop that. Let’s go up to the next level. Shame. What do people get embarrassed about? What is it that stops you from giving it your best? Because you’re a little concerned you might not get it right. And then where do we all hear the excuses, the justifications, the rationalizations?

When you get an entire culture that understands, blame, shame, excuses, then you can help them all step over that, recognize it, agree, not to step over that, and TPR. Take personal responsibility. That’s just one example of what we call a fundamental principle of continuously uplifting service, of looking for and finding ways to create value, add value and build new value. So people who go to the website or go to LinkedIn or go to YouTube, you’ll see me talking about this with real stories, with real companies in real situations. And, you know, we put that all out there so that other organizations and other leaders can say, “Let’s bring tools like that into our organization too and build a better culture.”