Ben Dattner on Credit and Blame at Work

My last post describes how several of us are blogging at BusinessWeek.com on toxic bosses.  As regular readers of this blog will know, I have devoted quite a bit of space here to the issues of credit and blame, and in particular, how leaders deal with failures and setbacks -- this story about Andy Grove has always been one of my favorites, as it shows the complex skill required.  The challenges of dealing with credit and blame go to the heart of being an effective leader: skilled leaders do what is best for their organizations, not best for themselves, when things go wrong (or go right).  Credit and blame also go to the heart of good group dynamics: effective groups share blame and credit fairly, don't become trapped in battles over who is to blame and who is a hero.  And when things go wrong -- rather than going into blamestorming mode -- they join together to solve the problem (a good example is how Southwest Airlines deals with flight delays; teams focus on fixing the problem, not finding a goat). See the cartoon below from The Talent Zoo by Gary Kopervas for a great illustration of blamestorming.

I am thinking about credit and blame this morning because I just read Ben Dattner's BusinessWeek post on The Teflon Boss, and how such "unfair blamers" do so much damage.  The post is fantastic, but even better is his powerpoint deck on Credit and Blame in the Workplace.  It provides one of the most complete and integrated treatments of this managment challenge I have ever seen, and is chock-full of specific actions that leaders can take to strike a delicate and effective balance.  And although Ben touches on research lightly in the deck, these ideas are consistent in the best research I know of on leadership, attribution of responsibility, group dynamics, and personality -- which is no surprise as Ben is well-versed in such studies, as he is a research psycholoigst by training. 

Also, don't miss Ben's other posts, especially his earlier one on narcissism.

And more generally, if you have thoughts on managing credit and blame, you might want to add a comment to Ben's inspired post.

Comments

[Kevin Rutkowski]

I recently spent two years at a large company that I often said had a culture of blame. This resulted in people spending countless hours writing e-mails to protect themselves. It was quite frustrating. (I think that you wrote about the company in Hard Facts.)

In one situation, a project manager from a different group sent an e-mail to many key managers stating that their project was running 14 days behind because the test environment that my team supported was down. We were surprised to hear this because our test team had no significant problems over that time period. We were forced to spend time doing research only to find that our test environment was down for 2 hours over the time period.

We replied to all of the managers to explain that 2 hours of downtime was to be expected for a test environment over 14 days and certainly couldn't result in a 14 day delay in any project. The project manager wrote an apology admitting that the downtime only caused 2 hours of the 14 day delay.

Oddly, the project manager didn't copy the other managers on the apology e-mail.

A tactic that we used successfully to preempt these attacks afterwards was to meet with the other teams in person on a regular basis to identify any ways that we were delaying their projects. This was time consuming and offered little real value, but it did protect our team from blame in 2 ways:
1) We were covering our butts by showing that we were proactive at preventing problems,
2) More importantly, it's much more difficult for someone to fire off unjustified blaming e-mails when they have to see those same people face-to-face on a regular basis.