I've always thought leaders resigning in the face of a problem, were doing a greater disservice. Bit of a cop out. Kind of like "Yeah I made a mess, but anyway - bye".
That's when you need to rise to it and resolve the problem. 'Accepting' responsibility might please hordes of blame seekers, but it's immature and short sighted. Resolving whatever the problem is would better serve the situation.
You don't hear the phrase "pour encorager les autres" very often these days, but it's one of the classic justifications for punishment: not just for the punished, but also for everyone else in a similar position. Sometimes called "skin in the game" these days. If there's no penalty for failure, there's no incentive to pay attention to the routine operations of the business.
Conversely the naval tradition of the Captain being the last person to leave a ship in distress embodies the idea of the responsibility of staying to deal with the problem. See recently the Costa Concordia incident.
Accepting responsibility and leaving is a cop-out?
That's totally opposite to my impression. She took responsibility, left and the company has now shown externally and internally that these kinds of errors have large consequences.
Also: This was not the first sign of mismanagement and bad culture at Norsk Tipping.
I get that it's sort of an accepting of responsibility if you accept we made a grave error -> the person who made (was responsible for) the grave error must be fired; I am ultimately responsible for everything -> I must be fired.
But it's not an accepting of responsibility in the sense of we made a grave error -> it must be made right. Someone getting fired doesn't help the people who were improperly notified. It likely doesn't help prevent improper notifications in the future.
Taking responsibility could mean setting up a quality control process for future changes as well as validating all current the notification strings are appropriate and accurate. And sending an apology to the affected people.
That said, it is perhaps a time for reflection when considering this:
> The company acknowledged it has experienced “a number of technical problems” over the past year.
If you're responsible and things continue to go wrong, perhaps someone else would do a better job, and the best choice is to let someone else have a try.
Yes, that makes sense, if there were many instances and really the leader could have observed that and better lead. My comment was about this approach in general, and specifically when it's just one incident resulting in someones head rolling, in what seems to be a disconnected feedback loop.
