The Blame Game

By Craig Price

People say they don’t want to play the “Blame Game,” yet most people actively participate in it. When people use the corporate speak of “accountability” they’re really talking about blame.

Blame, wrongly placed, is never good. The company can’t seem to get the invoicing right, pricing is always screwed up and totals are incorrectly added up? Fire the mail guy. He’s the one that allowed the invoice to leave the building!

Blame allows you to properly discover weaknesses and constant failings with a person.

If I’m working on a team and one person consistently is late, doing shoddy work, or not doing work at all, do I blame the entire team? I hope I wouldn’t. I identify the weak link and either fix the issues or replace the team member.

The true problem with blame is that most people would rather place blame on other people instead of fixing the problem at hand. They spend precious time showing the deficiencies of another instead of showing their own strengths in overcoming issues. They would much rather set up a wall of excuses and blame to defend the arrows that inevitably will be aimed at them when this fiasco is over.

Different situations depend on how and when you deal with blame. Properly distributing blame at the right moment is a key ingredient in ongoing success.

Blame when the fire is out, not while the house is burning down. Standing around blaming people in the midst of a crisis is a poor allocation of resources. Wow. That sounded almost corporate! You need to be putting water on the problem, not hosing down your people. Save what you can from a bad situation, rip victory from the jaws of defeat, dream the impossible dream…wait, now I’m quoting show tunes. Fix your problems first and then worry about what went wrong.

Sometimes you need to blame immediately, so you can take the matches away from the pyromaniac who consistently is playing with them. If Steve is consistently screwing everything up while you’re trying to fix them, he needs to be eliminated. He needs to be removed as part of the problem.

Then there are times you need to take one for the team. No one likes to be blamed. This is kind of the point. As a leader, we end up doing things we may not like to do, but it’s what is best for everyone. Blame can be good in one aspect, it does identify the problem, yet if it causes stress and even more problems because of the stress, we as leaders need to jump on the blame grenade sometimes. Too many people helped in creating the problem, so blaming won’t do anything but stir up resentment. Just suck it up, take the hit and let everyone move on.