SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
Culture Shift: Overcoming the Corporate Blame Game
June 02, 2008
"If I ever find out who's responsible for all the finger-pointing and blame-shifting that goes on in this place, heads are going to roll."
By Paul Levesque
Addictive drugs provide one kind of immediate satisfaction; addictive behaviors provide another. In the workplace, as in life, the hardest addictions to break are those that don't feel like addictions at all. For example, smokers who insist "I can quit any time I want to" are among the least likely to overcome the habit: It's precisely because they cling to the belief that the only reason they go on lighting up is because they "happen to enjoy it."
When things go wrong in business, and managers feel their frustrations mounting, they often "happen to enjoy" finding out who's to blame—and laying the blame on thick. "Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging," Samuel Johnson pointed out several centuries ago. The immediate satisfaction that comes from assigning blame and punishment usually has a ripple effect: the supervisor who was blamed for something is soon looking for something to blame on his or her team leaders. They in turn will soon blame individual employees for something or other.
Playing the Blame Game
As "vicious circles" go, the Blame Game is one that's literally vicious. Its main function is not to correct or avoid organizational problems—instead, it's intended to make one person feel better by making one or more others feel worse. If allowed to spread throughout the organizational culture, the Blame Game is like a cancer that ultimately makes everyone feel terrible. All motivation to work together toward any kind of shared objective is destroyed, replaced by cross-currents of antagonism and rage. This form of cancer is terminal.
Everyone knows smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. What increases the risk of "blame cancer" in a work setting?
Perhaps unexpectedly, the answer is measurement. It's one of the key indicators I use with clients to get a full picture of their cultural health: not only "what are the key things you measure," but more to the point, "how do you use your results?"
Decades ago, when Total Quality Management (TQM) was all the rage, clients would tell me they were measuring "defects." How many defective parts per thousand, for example, were coming out of their manufacturing process? How many "shipping errors" or "billing errors" or "customer complaints" were materializing per x transactions?
Even when 98% was perfect, all eyes were on the remaining 2% "defect rate" (representing, let's say, 80 defects per measurement period). Walls were covered in process charts and graphs tracking that "unacceptable" 80. The battle cry was, "If we don't get it down to zero, heads are going to roll…"
When I would ask managers how measurement results were being used, I’d hear things like, "We do extensive root-cause analysis to find where the problem originates," or "We look for opportunities to improve employee awareness of process standards." But the workers in these same organizations used different language to describe what was going on—there were "witch hunts," searches for "whipping boys," and humiliating disciplinary actions.
In short, measures were (and often still are) used to uncover:
• What went wrong?
• Who is/are the villain(s) responsible?
• How will the villain(s) be punished?
In blame-heavy cultures, employees invest a lot of their personal energy in avoiding or deflecting blame. This is a demanding process of forever looking over your shoulder, covering your back, always having alibis and back-up explanations ready…just in case.
Turning the Blame Game Around
By comparison, in high-performance cultures aligned toward an objective everyone cares about, measurement is instead used to spotlight:
• What went right?
• Who is/are the hero(es) responsible?
• How will the hero(es) be rewarded?
In cultures where good work is monitored and celebrated, workers are free to concentrate their attention and energies on the work they were hired to do in the first place. The more energy they devote to it, they know, the better the chances their efforts will be noted and appreciated. The shift of focus is 180 degrees. In these cultural settings, the bottom-line results are typically just as strikingly different. Where the Blame Game destroys motivation, this emphasis on uncovering and recognizing good work has an energizing, motivating effect.
Take a hard look at where the measurement emphasis is in your organization—and especially how the results are used. If measurement results are not consistently providing raw fuel for recognition and celebration, you may be creating a cultural climate in which the Blame Game can—and will—flourish. And few things drive measures down as quickly as that.
 Editor's Note: Does avoiding the Blame Game mean no one is to be held accountable for anything anymore? Of course not, as Paul Levesque clarifies in this week's podcast. Find out how to make the all-important distinction between blame (that demoralizes people) and accountability (that energizes them) at www.incentivemag.com/cultureshift.
We want to hear your feedback on "Culture Shift" columns! Send comments to stacy.straczynski@nielsen.com to let us know what topics you'd like discussed in upcoming episodes of the "Culture Shift."
INCENTIVE online "Culture Shift" columnist Paul Levesque is the author of five books, including "Customer Service Made Easy" and "Motivation," both from Entrepreneur Press. He's a seminar leader and public speaker with two decades' experience as an international business consultant specializing in the connection between employee motivation and customer satisfaction.
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Incentive Index |
|
|
