by Mr. Tiny Brain

Created on: January 20, 2009

Blame is as useful to business as a wet duck. Lets face it, unless a person caused damage to your company, property, image or profits on purpose; there's no point in finding out who is to blame. The only reason to even make the attempt is to try to improve the skills of the individual involved.

As human beings we're expected to occasionally not do the very best we could have. Often our performance is mediocre. Sometimes we really screw things up. If we screw up all the time you may not want to keep us around in your company. You may just need to consider what we are good at and determine whether its cost effective enough to keep me around. I may be a terrible welder but a great computer operator. Of course if the company and I knew what we were doing in the first place I would have started by working on computers instead of by doing some welding. If I'm already doing what I do best then there's still no need to look for someone to blame. Just fire me.

Companies spend a lot of time looking for people to blame. They perform root cause analysis, have meetings, one on one interviews and write reprimands into peoples files. Most of this time is just wasted. Frequently the process of assigning blame is run by those people that are actually responsible for creating the problem. Often the results are influenced as much by politics as they are by any kind of evidence.

As a business owner or manager you should only work with people that you can trust. If you can't trust an employee there's no need to keep them on. The purpose of politics is to persuade people to view events differently. There would be no politics if everyone viewed events the same way. If people in your business act politically it means that at some level they are being dishonest. They're also wasting your time and money on things that have no value. I worked at companies that produced a lot of CYA (cover your assets if you know what I mean). Customers don't buy CYA. They buy products. If your staff sends extra copies of memos just to keep files to prove they were or were not told things; they're draining your resources. The blame game is just another way to drain your company as well. The best cure for the blame game is to interject some reality. What has the error already cost your company? Can you get any of that back by blaming someone? Are you concerned that this individual or anyone else will ever intentionally do this again? Why did the incident really happen in the first place? If you can answer these questions and still find it necessary to blame someone then I'm wrong and have no business advising anyone. If I'm right I may just have pointed you in a direction that can save your company a great deal of money.

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