Does Your Company Play the Blame Game?

Conversely, unsuccessful (becoming unsuccessful) companies single out and blame individual people. An obsevation is that organizations that do not embrace process improvement (the proberbial "This is the way we have always done it") is stifling, frustrating and un-incentivizing to creative minded, idea-filled employees. It's as if there is a ban or disease on cultural diversity and forward thinking.

Improvement revolution! Creative minded individuals/teams must persist in their quest to "improve processes". Replace the word "blame" to "learn from". Replace the phrase "...is responsible for" to "...taught us to".

Think (imagine and feel) outside the box!

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/75141

Our company blames individuals for mistakes!!

Seems like Carnival Cruise Lines does.......

(Perhaps deservedly though)

Obviously the captain will get what he is do for abandoning ship and passengers after the wreck occurred, but assigning him blame for the wreck itself is exactly what the OP is speaking out against. Even in this catastrophic case our first thought should not be, "What idiot ran a cruise ship into a rock!" Instead it should be, "Why on earth didn't this extremely massive and expensive machine not have an automatic collision detection/avoidance system?"

The captain's statement that the rocks were not shown on his chart was correct. In other words, according to his operating procedure, there was nothing for him to hit on the course that he plotted. This proves that the process that Carnival uses has room for error regardless of the skill of the operator, but the media is blaming the captain instead of blaming the process.

Firing this captain will not guarantee that this same mistake will not occur in the future. The big question is, will Carnival spend capitol on machine upgrades to prevent future collisions, or will they place all blame on the captain and "modify procedures" as their corrective action?

Our policy generally is "fix problems, not blame". We focus on "what is wrong", not "who is wrong". If we are managing our employees with respect and proper training, we find that practically everyone really wants to do a good job. To assume that anything that goes wrong within their direct responsibility is automatically their fault is both ridiculous and counterproductive.

In fact, most often the cause of the problem is beyond what they can control (without providing them with a greater capability, like training or better process or inspection equipment or better parts, etc.). That is not to say that "someone" can never be the cause of a problem (inattention, mistake or just plain human error). In that case, unless it is infrequent and they can provide what they can do so that it does not happen again, they may just not be suited for that particular job (in which case management has failed again).

Every company where I've worked that blamed workers instead of processes has gone out of business. In each of those cases, management (especially top management) refused to take responsibility for problems. Sometimes we tried to correlate problems to individuals only to determine if training was required. But the work environment was too toxic so all we could get was CYA and protectionism. On the other hand I've worked with several racing teams that did focus on process problems instead of blaming individuals. Those teams were pretty successful within their budgets. But the fundamental difference: companies pay their employees vs. racing teams with volunteer labor. It appears that companies with long-range plans to stay in business and retain valuable talent should be supporting their workers - not tearing them down.