Forgive me for getting political for a hot second. It has a business purpose. The impact of the terrible power and water outage in Texas was made worse when the Governor’s first reaction was to blame someone. And, who did he blame? The stoppage of wind and solar which was 1/10th of the power in Texas. Everything froze. Oil and gas lines and nuclear power plants froze. Why would he make a claim that was verifiably wrong? How does that help power get restored? And how does such a false narrative give anyone confidence that the existing crisis will be fixed and that steps will be taken that it won’t happen again?
It is not clear to me how blaming anyone gets a problem solved. But somehow it is a popular tactic especially among politicians dealing with extremely difficult and complex problems that are going to cost a lot of money to fix. Well, spending that kind of money is unpopular, especially if it means raising taxes to pay for the fix.
We see this short term head-scratching behavior in publicly traded companies also where the CEO knows he only has about 4 years to make the money and run. Maximize share-holder value for now and let the next guy deal with the fall out.
Can I say that this is not what I call leadership? Leadership is taking responsibility and working towards long term sustainable solutions. Texas made several decisions around their power supply to keep the prices low. They refused to connect outside of Texas to avoid federal regulation.They recommended but didn’t require the power transmitters and generators to weatherproof their systems. It worked until it didn’t work. There was a small probability but high consequence of error. At least 4 million people lost power for days in freezing weather and 22 people died. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been warned by the storms of 2011.
I wish Governor Abbot would have said, “This didn’t get set up under my watch, but I am going to take responsibility to fix it.” That would have been a really cool leadership move.
Next time you start to blame someone else, close your mouth really tightly and count to ten. There is a leadership opportunity if you just stop to consider your options.