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Participating in team sports is supposed to teach children valuable lessons about life … for example, that losing isn’t the end of the world, only the end of the game. That opponents aren’t enemies is another one.

It appears the New Orleans Saints didn’t get the email. Its players established a bounty system (I’d say “allegedly” except that nobody seems to be denying that it happened), funding a pool that paid players to injure targeted opponents.

Call it managing for results. Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams administered the program. Coach Sean Payton and general manager Mickey Loomis knew of it and did nothing to stop it. Why would they? It helped win games.

Or, call it criminal behavior that won’t be prosecuted: While paying someone to deliberately injure someone else is inarguably a felony, the experts expect prosecutors to defer to the NFL’s jurisdiction.

Imagine you’re NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. It’s your jurisdiction. What’s your first question?

It’s “who did what?” Who, that is, is to blame for this mess. When, as a leader and manager, you learn your organization has engaged in criminal activities, or activities you’ve defined as unacceptable through a policy manual, values statement, or other equivalent vehicle, you need to know whodunit. And you need to deal with them appropriately to make sure they don’t engage your organization in illegal or unethical activities again.

For criminal or unethical behavior, assigning blame … accurately … is essential.

When something else goes wrong, though, your first question should be Goodell’s second question: What characteristic of our organization led to the bad thing happening?

Goodell has ascribed it to culture, but I wonder, because when you count the total value of winning playoff games … including endorsements … there’s serious money at stake.

Regardless, this, and not who’s to blame, should be your first question when something goes wrong because when those in leadership roles ask who’s at fault, they’re making both a logical error and a tactical mistake.

The tactical error: Establishing a game of Whac-A-Mole, where the smart employees keep their heads down, and those who don’t … those who poke their heads out to help fix the situation … end up receiving blows to their noggins.

The logical error is that they’re assuming the conclusion. There are plenty of ways something can go wrong. Those who ask whose fault it is blind themselves to other explanations while fostering a culture of blame.

Last week’s column pointed out the enormous costs of this culture … where the habit is to ask who’s at fault instead of what when wrong. To change it, as is the case with most other changes in culture, what’s needed is a change in leader behavior.

In this case, the solution is literally formulaic: Success = aI + bE + cL. As is usual, a, b, and c are weighting factors. I, E, and L stand for idea, execution, and luck. Success comes from an idea that can work, strong execution, and good luck (or avoiding bad luck) too.

To get rid of a culture of blame, start with the formula whenever something goes wrong. Make it everyone’s habit.

If the idea wasn’t sound, ask whether there was a reasonable way to have discovered this before investing in it. The answer isn’t always yes. Presumably, Apple applied the same evaluation process to both the iPad and Apple TV. Whatever might have prevented Apple TV probably would have stopped development of the iPad, too. Bad trade-off.

If the problem was in execution, there is a possibility that someone screwed up, and if so, that whoever it was didn’t just make a mistake but is a chronic screw-up. It’s possible.

It’s more likely the problem lies in the organization’s systems, processes, or culture. Improving these would pay big dividends.

Even if the source of the problem was a bad employee, termination won’t fix the root cause. Something about the organization’s management practices left a chronic screw-up in place, after all. Fixing this problem would pay even bigger dividends than fixing processes and systems, and that’s assuming the screw-up isn’t screwing up because of poor leadership rather than incompetence or character flaws.

Then there’s bad luck. If that’s what happened, you need better risk management.

It might be worse, though — it might be an even more insidious problem, even harder to fix than a culture of blame: That the whole plan depended on good luck.

Regrettably, we’ll have to wait until next week to handle that little topic.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Corporate values have no value.

It isn’t the values themselves. It’s the printed statements that purport to represent the corporation’s values that are worthless.

An HR Magazine piece titled “Evaluating Values,” (Kathryn Tyler, 4/1/2011), disagrees. It endorses formal values statements, while contending they aren’t sufficient. Companies should also require managers to explain them and, even more important, should “hold employees accountable” for them as part of the performance appraisal process.

It provides an example — Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center (EIRMC) whose values are: Accountability, “EIRMC and I CARE” (don’t worry about it), Integrity, Respect, Quality, Loyalty, and Enjoyment.

It’s an information-free list. Nothing on it could be anything else, unless you think a company might list values like Keeping your head down, Deviousness, Disrespect, Sloppy work, Apathy, and Surliness instead.

It’s information free because it provides no guidance for making difficult choices.

Take quality. Here’s EIRMC’s definition:

Anticipates the needs of those served; craves new knowledge and new experience; delivers very best every day such that work makes a difference; when identifies a problem, also identifies potential solutions; constantly looks for ways to turn “good enough” into “even better.”

EIRMC is a hospital, so let’s look at a real-world challenge hospitals are facing right now: Anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists diverting anesthetics from their patients for their own use. For example, here in Minnesota, Sarah May Casareto, a nurse anesthetist, allegedly stole a patient’s Fentanyl to feed her dependency, leaving him under-anesthetized for his kidney-stone surgery. (I say allegedly because she entered an “Alford plea,” which means she claims innocence, agrees the evidence is sufficient to convict, and after three years of probation has her criminal record wiped clean.)

The surgeon removed the kidney stones anyway, while a technician held the screaming, writhing patient down. After the surgery, the technician, who spotted two syringes in Casareto’s pocket and, along with the surgeon, noticed erratic behavior on Casareto’s part, reported her, leading to her eventual termination.

All hospitals are vulnerable to impaired care-givers, EIRMC included. And yet, its definition of “quality” doesn’t even hint that surgery patients shouldn’t writhe and scream. Like most Values Statements I’ve seen, it covers feel-good topics while ignoring what matters most — in this case, that any employee spotting a serious lapse in care should escalate the matter immediately, to whatever extent necessary, with full protection from consequences and without regard to whose name is on the problem. (The plaintext version: If an employee notices that a surgeon is drunk, that employee should do something about it, without fear of repercussion.)

We in IT rarely face situations this potentially grave. If a systems administrator arrives for work with a crippling hangover, no patient will have the wrong kidney removed because of it. That doesn’t let you off the hook. Even in IT, staff can find themselves in ethically questionable situations.

There was, for example, the company that instructed programmers to write one-time patch programs that posted $1 billion a month in unaudited transactions.

No, not illegitimate. Unaudited. This was a relatively high-integrity firm as these things go. A series of decisions, made over a ten year span, each of which seemed to make sense at the time, are what made this improvisation necessary.

The assignment wasn’t illegal. It was the response to a difficult situation in which fraud played no part. Refusing it would have been career-limiting at best. But several years later, the company restated its balance sheet to the tune of several billion dollars.

To be fair, I don’t know whether this monthly practice contributed to the problem. Probably, no one does. What I do know is that the company did have a formal values statement, for all the good it did, which was none. It didn’t help the developers make the right decision, because it provided no guidance as to how the company defined “right” in circumstances like this.

Want to run an organization with strong values? My old employer, Perot Systems, showed me how it’s done. Its leaders created a “gray zone” training program, and every employee was expected to participate. It consisted of realistic, ethically confounding situations. Employees role-played them (yes, role-play — it has its place), and followed with serious, in-depth discussions about what had just happened and what should have happened.

It was a significant investment in establishing values. It did more than make the values clear. More important, it established that to the company’s leaders, values mattered, and they recognized that the right ethical choice isn’t always simple and obvious. We all got the message, for a simple reason: The program was expensive.

When a company puts its money where its mouth is, that tells employees it takes the subject seriously.

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