Vol. 2.6 Blame-Storming

A few years ago there was a commercial on the television which showed a group of executives sitting around a conference table.  They were holding a "blame-storming" session.  Obviously something had gone terribly wrong at their company and since the executives were not going to accept any blame for their own failures, they needed a plausible scapegoat.  Thus, they were looking at employees and trying to decide who would make the best victim.  Once they decided on the best candidate,  then they needed a good story.  They needed to create a logical explanation as to why it was this employee's error and not their own...and they needed to tell the story as often as possible so everyone in the organization knew it.  

I have never forgotten that commercial, although I only saw it a couple of times.  It seems more real today than it did those couple years ago -- it was just a parody then, but today it is reality.

Hasn't blaming become part of the American way of doing business?  After a day of campaigning, each political party has their paid strategists research and come up with plausible "sound bites" to blame the other candidate or party for something that may not even be true -- if it sounds good and if it is salacious enough, they believe the voters will believe it  --  the truth does not matter.

From what I hear and experience, this is not too far removed from what happens in the workplace today.  A reader of my last blog pointed out that he does not believe this is the case everywhere -- and I am not suggesting that it does happen everywhere, but it seems to be prevalent enough to warrant being talked about.

How can employees feel part of an organization when someone in a position of power blames them for something that went wrong that was beyond the employee's control.  Maybe they were involved, but they were not he decision maker; maybe they were only involved tangentially, but the "story" that is told that so and so did  blah, blah, blah, and places them as the one responsible for the debacle.  If a leader says it enough times with enough conviction, they begin to believe their own stories and  other employees will believe it also.  Suddenly it IS the truth and that employee is in deep kimchi through no fault of their own.

Can an organization thrive when this happens?  I think not, and I hope that you think that too.  It is impossible to have a successful company, organization, or government, until we start hearing the truth, and  holding those leaders accountable for their own bad decisions.

Only when the bullying and the blame games stop, will we begin to heal and get back to the real business of government or running a company.  We need to start rebuilding the culture inside of each of these entities.  It is not an easy thing, but it is a very doable thing...and it needs to start now.