HRpedia: 'Blamestorming'
The fine art of making sure the brown stuff doesn't stick to you
You attended the brainstorm when it was made, weathered the shitstorm when it failed, and now you’re part of the blamestorm to decide where the blame lightning should strike.
We’re fond of meteorological phrasing in the UK, so blamestorm is another welcome addition to our ever expanding repertoire. Whether reading a business forecast or waiting for stormy market conditions to blow over, we just love relating things to the weather.
Now we have a whole new kind of cloud to look out for, and avoid.
A blamestorm in action can crop up in a number of ways. It should be several people, and they may either all be colluding together to throw somebody under a bus, or they may be arguing amongst themselves whose fault something is. Possibly with some shouting and finger pointing thrown in the midst.
Neither is good for HR, because both are essentially cooking up a convenient lie, and rather than looking forward at how to address the situation, whatever it might be, it is a kind of rearguard action to cover their own arses.
Blamestorming is popular for two reasons. The first is because most people are desperate for a scapegoat for any mistake, and second is because most people are desperate for that scapegoat not to be them.
If a single root cause for a problem is found, that simplifies the matter. It removes any need for painful self-assessment or self-criticality, and neatly packages away why something went wrong as “that guy”.
On the whole, publicly blaming anybody for anything rarely does much good than spreading a negative culture where people become defensive and less willing to own up to their own mistakes. Focusing on the negatives rather than looking ahead to positives tends to lead to a toxic working environment.
Being held up as an example of failure is probably the worst thing to do to anybody in a business, especially in front of lots of people, and should really only exist when that person is certain to be fired. Even then, it isn’t a hugely nice thing to do and should be avoided where possible.
We could have invented ‘recognition showers’, ‘optimism gales’ or “productivity fogs” but instead we got blamestorms. Probably because it rhymes well with brainstorm. Go figure.
If you think you see a blamestorm forming, be sure to blow it away with an optimism gale. You never know, it might catch on!
*whoosh*
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