Blame Others for What You Don’t Like. | Take Personal Responsibility for Fixing Things.

An excerpt from Culture Shift

Today’s accelerating rate of change is like a breeder reactor for problems. That’s just the nature of progress. But as people watch one problem give birth to several more, they start searching for somebody to blame.

Badmouthing the bosses becomes a favorite pastime. Pointing fingers becomes the most popular form of exercise. The growing number of problems proves nothing, but is offered as hard evidence that the changes are wrong or that the changes are being managed poorly. Of course, none of this has a crying chance of slowing down change or reducing the rate of problems. All it does is create a culture of blame.

Blaming comes easy. Complaining is a cakewalk. But the culture needs encouragers instead of complainers, fixers rather than blamers. Blaming uses up a lot of energy, but doesn’t provide any real relief. Rather than lighten anyone’s load, it just creates additional burdens.

Often blaming is employed as a defensive tactic. Pointing your finger at another person diverts attention from yourself. Accuse someone else of taking the wrong action, and that sort of gives you grounds for expecting them to fix things you don’t like. Overall, blaming is a devious way of delegating responsibility. Rather than offer solid help to resolve problems, you put the monkey on someone else’s back.

Identifying problems is fine. Just make sure you package topnotch solutions with your complaints. Come up with constructive ideas of your own instead of waiting for somebody else to fix things. Get busy doing what you can do instead of second-guessing somebody else’s efforts. “Monday morning quarterbacking” gives some people the notion that they’re contributing something meaningful, but really it’s just a cheap, backhanded way of throwing more blame.

There are more than enough problems to go around, so take your share of the responsibility for fixing things. Push for a culture of personal accountability.