The Blame Game Is Costing You.
“If You Want to Feel Better, Blame Others. If You Want to Get Better, Blame Yourself.”
There’s a conversation that happens in businesses across South Africa every single day. It happens at board tables, in offices, over coffee, and occasionally at the bar on a Friday afternoon. It sounds something like this:
“It’s the economy.” “It’s Eskom.” “It’s the rand.” “It’s the government.” “It’s my staff.” “It’s my clients.” “It’s the competition undercutting me.” “It’s the bank not supporting us.”
Some of those things are even true. South Africa’s business environment is genuinely difficult. Load-shedding did real damage to real businesses. Interest rates did squeeze real margins. The Rand’s volatility did create real input-cost pressure. These are facts, not excuses.
But here is the other fact – the one that’s a lot less comfortable to sit with:
Two businesses can face exactly the same external conditions and produce completely different results. The difference is never the environment. It’s always the leader.
When the storm arrives and one business adapts while another struggles, the gap between them is not luck or location or timing. It’s leadership. Specifically, it’s the difference between a leader who owns their outcomes and one who has found – consciously or not – that blame is easier than accountability.
This article is not about making you feel bad. It’s about something far more useful: making you better.
The Comfort of Blame
Blame is seductive. It is psychologically satisfying in a way that accountability simply isn’t. When something goes wrong and we can point to an external cause – Eskom, the government, the municipality, the economy, the staff member who let us down – we get immediate relief. The story makes sense. We are the protagonist in a world that is conspiring against us. We are doing our best under impossible circumstances.
And the audience for that story is always sympathetic. Because everyone else is telling the same story.
Here’s what blame actually costs you, as a Business Owner and Leader:
- It removes your power.
If the problem is outside you, the solution is also outside you – and you’re stuck waiting for the economy to improve, the government to sort itself out, or your staff to magically become better.
- It stops your growth.
You cannot learn from a problem you have attributed to someone else. The lesson is always lost.
- It spreads.
When you model blame from the top, your team learns to do the same. Now nobody in the business owns anything. The culture becomes one of excuses – and an excuse culture never builds anything worth building.
- It feels honest but isn’t.
Blame is a half-truth at best. Yes, external factors exist. No, they do not explain everything. The half you’re leaving out is the half you could actually do something about.
“When the storm clouds gather and financial difficulties loom, companies often point accusing fingers at external factors – yet it can’t be ignored that other companies prepared for that likelihood and survived.” — Frank Knight, CEO, Debtsource
When well-known South African brands hit hard times and publicly blame load-shedding or interest rates, the same analysis always emerges: other businesses in the same conditions found a way through. The external environment was identical. The leadership response was not.
The Harder, More Useful Truth
Blaming yourself – real accountability, not self-flagellation – is a fundamentally different act. It is the act of a leader who has decided that their sphere of influence matters more than their list of grievances. It is uncomfortable. It requires honesty in the one direction most of us find most difficult: inward.
But it is the only path to genuine improvement.
Research from McKinsey & Company has shown that organisations with a strong accountability culture – where leaders own outcomes rather than outsourcing blame – demonstrate both faster growth and higher profitability than their peers.
Harvard Business Review data points in the same direction: high-accountability organisations outperform low-accountability ones by a factor of 2.5 in financial terms.
This is not a motivational poster. It is a competitive reality.
The Business Owners and Leaders who are genuinely growing – in any economic climate – share a particular habit of mind. When something doesn’t work, their first question is not “Who did this to me?” It’s “What did I miss? What could I have done differently? What does this tell me about how I need to change?”
That is not weakness. That is the most powerful leadership posture available to you.
“You cannot learn from a problem you have attributed to someone else.”
What This Actually Looks Like in a Business
Let’s make this concrete, because accountability without specificity is just another motivational concept.
Your top performer just resigned
Blame version: They got a better offer. The market is crazy. You can’t compete with what the big companies pay. Nothing you could have done.
Accountability version: Was I giving them enough growth? Enough recognition? Enough challenge? When did I last have a real conversation with them about where they wanted to go? Did I see the signs and choose not to act on them?
Your revenue is down
Blame version: It’s the economy. Clients are cutting back. Nobody is spending. The rand is killing us on imports.
Accountability version: Did I diversify my client base? Did I build recurring revenue when the market was good? Did I have the tough pricing conversation a year ago when I should have? Did I cut the underperforming product line or hold onto it too long?
Your team isn’t performing
Blame version: They just don’t care. The work ethic isn’t there. You can’t find good people anymore.
Accountability version: Am I clear enough about what I expect? Have I created the conditions for them to succeed? Do I give feedback regularly or only when I’m frustrated? Am I leading them, or just managing them when things go wrong?
In every case, the accountability version is harder. It requires you to look at yourself first. But it is also the only version that gives you something to work with – because you can change your behaviour. You cannot change the economy.
Why Business Owners Default to Blame – And Why It’s Not Entirely Your Fault
Something important to acknowledge: the tendency to blame is not a character flaw. It is a cognitive default – a natural human response to threat and failure. Our brains are wired to protect our self-image, and blame is one of the most efficient ways of doing that.
But there’s another, more structural reason that Business Owners and Leaders default to blame, and it’s one that doesn’t get talked about enough: they are doing it alone.
When you are the only person in the room – when every decision goes through you, when there is nobody to challenge your interpretation of events, when the only voice pushing back on your thinking is the voice in your own head – your blind spots compound over time. You stop seeing the patterns. You stop questioning your own narrative. And slowly, without meaning to, you build a story about your business that casts you as the hero and the world as the obstacle.
This is not stupidity. This is isolation – and isolation is one of the most dangerous conditions a Business Owner can operate in.
The American Society of Training and Development found that people are 65% more likely to achieve a goal after committing to another person – and 95% more likely with an ongoing accountability partner.
Read that again. Ninety-five percent. Not because the accountability partner has magic answers – but because being seen, being heard, and being held to your word changes how you operate.
The Peer Advisory Board: Where Accountability Becomes Real
This is precisely where TAB Peer Advisory Boards (PABs) do something that no book, workshop, or solo reflection can replicate.
A TAB PAB is not a support group. It is not a networking event. It is not a place where you get validation for your existing beliefs. It is – at its core – a structured environment where you are held to the highest standard available to a Business Owner and Leader: the honest, experienced, agenda-free perspective of other business owners who have nothing to gain from telling you what you want to hear.
Six to eight business owners. Non-competing sectors. Monthly half-day meetings. Facilitated by a TAB-certified coach who keeps the conversation honest and the outcomes real.
What that environment does to the blame habit:
- It makes your narrative visible
When you bring a challenge to your TAB board and you start with the external explanations – the economy, the staff, the client who pulled out – your peers will listen. And then they will ask the question you haven’t been asking yourself. “What did you do when you saw that coming?” “What have you changed in the last six months?” “What are you prepared to do differently?”
It’s not aggressive. But it is relentless – in the best possible way. Your board will not let you hide in a comfortable story.
- It builds the accountability habit over time
The commitments you make at a TAB Peer Advisory Board meeting are not aspirational. They are on record. Next month, your peers will ask what happened. This is not punitive – it is simply what accountability looks like when it’s real. Over time, the habit of owning your outcomes stops being something you do at the board meeting and starts being something you do automatically, in every decision you make.
- It shows you what ownership looks like in practice
One of the most powerful things about sitting with experienced Business Owners and Leaders from different sectors is watching how they talk about their own businesses. When a fellow board member describes a failure and talks about what they missed, what they would do differently, and what they have already changed – that is a masterclass in accountability that no workshop can replicate. You see it modelled. You absorb it. It changes how you talk about your own business.
- It removes the isolation that feeds blame
The single most consistent thing TAB Peer Advisory Board members report – across industries, across countries, across decades of the programme’s existence – is that the board removed the loneliness. Not the challenges, not the hard decisions, not the difficult market. The loneliness. And when you are no longer alone, the blame reflex loses its grip. Because you have people in your corner who will call it when they see it – and help you do better when they do.
Getting Better Starts With One Decision
The statement at the heart of this article – if you want to feel better, blame others; if you want to get better, blame yourself – is not a judgment. It is a choice. Every Business Owner and Leader faces it, every day, in a hundred small moments.
The question is not whether your external environment is hard. It probably is. South Africa is a complex, demanding, and frequently frustrating market to operate in. You are entitled to notice that.
The question is whether you have decided that your response to that environment is where your energy goes – or whether you have quietly decided that cataloguing its unfairness is close enough.
The Business Owners and Leaders who are growing, adapting, and building something meaningful in this market are not operating in better conditions. They are operating with better accountability – for their decisions, their habits, their leadership, and their results.
A TAB Peer Advisory Board will not fix your business for you. But it will put you in a room where fixing yourself – which is the only thing that ever actually fixes a business – becomes inevitable.
That room is available to you. The question is whether you are ready for it.
For your nearest Peer Advisory Board – ???
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