How valuable is ‘mea culpa’ when changing?
by Miki SaxonImage credit: eocs CC license
What does change really entail? Should the focus be doing things differently from this point forward or does it require admitting publicly that the previous approach was flawed?
I get asked this more often than you’d think. It seems as if many people feel that the mea culpa is as important, if not more so, than the new behavior.
I vehemently disagree.
It’s actually far easier to talk about a fault than to actually change it, especially when the cause is rooted in your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).
I wrote about this last fall at Leadership Turn. Changing manager’s minds and the comments are a good example of why I don’t believe that mea culpa matters.
As I said then, ‘When admitting the change is tantamount to saying “I was wrong” you’ll find few people jumping up and down to do it.’
Change is difficult enough without the added burden of ‘you/they are right and I’m wrong’. The admission accomplishes nothing more than opening the door to ‘I told you so’—four words that aren’t high on anyone’s motivational phrase list.
What do you think?
Your comments-priceless
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July 8th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I agree. Looking at the Masonic institution we’ve made a great many mistakes with how we have attempted to gain and maintain members. We keep saying, “What we did was wrong. What’re we’re doing doesn’t seem much better.” But we keep just re-hashing the fact that we have a problem…not what we’re going to do to allieviate the problem or remove the problem.
Focus on the correction; not the error.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Hi Luke, You’re right, but the problem with focusing on the error is that doing so means you have to change and people hate change. Lamenting the problem passes for activity and doesn’t require real change.