The blame game drives the exact same bureaucratization process, but faster, because all of the most capable and powerful players have a personal incentive to create insulating processes / excuses that prevent them from winding up holding the bag. Everyone in this thread at time of writing is gleefully indulging in wishful thinking about finally being able to hold the team underperformer accountable, but these expectations are unrealistic. Highly productive individuals do not tend to win the blame game because their inclinations are the exact opposite of the winning strategy. The winning strategy is not to be productive, it's to maximize safety margin, which means minimizing responsibility and maximizing barriers to anyone who might ask anything of you. Bureaucracy goes up, not down, and anyone who tries to be productive in this environment gets punished for it.
"Blaming the system" doesn't prevent bureaucracy from accumulating, obviously, but it does prevent it from accumulating in this particular way and for this particular reason.
I'm never going back to that kind of culture, it's soul crushing.
In modern corporate blameless culture, nobody takes the blame. Now this has its own variety of issues, it’s not perfect. But if you look at blame culture, then exactly like OP said, you have to stop building and start protecting. You know who has time for that? The underperforming lazy employee.
Some people want to be holding the bag, if the bag is full of money. All risk no reward won't attract accountable people.
If screwing up my job meant getting fired with a $5M golden parachute, I would be more than happy to be assigned individual blame!
If, as an accountable leader, you realise that someone ignored the processes and protections, you still have the right to hold them accountable for that. If someone is being lazy, it’s your job to identify that and fire that person.
I won’t pretend it’s easy, and I fully appreciate organisations struggle to make that happen for the reasons you and the article raise.
However, the broader problem I have with blame-focus is that it only applies to Individual Contributor roles. I’ve never heard of middle management being held accountable for any actions whatsoever. And obviously not for less “egregious” misconduct like toxicity, workload, favoritism, etc. Heck middle managers can be completely ignorant of their reports’ actual work and survive for decades.
In my experience at FAANG, the worst of managers will get reassigned to a different team, and maybe have their promotion delayed. Occasionally, I’ve seen VPs get put on nearly a year of gardening leave after major misconduct like sexual harassment - and then they leave and become a C level at a smaller company. And of course, CEOs are fired only for complete mismanagement and company failure - and that’s a very high bar and can take forever until shareholders loudly complain.
Basically, my point is that you can only blame the actual workers at the end of the chain - everyone else along the way is easily shielded and escapes blame.
I didn’t think you were advocating for the situation that occurs. I was merely proposing that “blameless” processes are possibly mis-assigned blame (heh) for company cultures that become centred around ducking accountability.
Everyone's time is finite. Would you rather spend a few years to make high five figures slogging through a failure of mid 6s succeeding? It's the same mental calculation but with more 0s in to the left of the decimal.
Ye. You quickly learn that with Scrum. Pad alot and report the amount of hours estimated at an even pace. Make the burn down line straight.
People doing actual work have a big disadvantage versus those that put their time into manipulating the setup, if the bosses are oblivious. It is really frustrating as a newgrad until you realize how it is done.