Understanding how bureaucracy develops

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.