Does Your Workplace Have a ‘Blame Machine?’
It’s all Bitsy Finnigan’s fault. Bitsy Finnigan was a childhood neighbor kid who would come over to our house and wreck things. Not big things like the automatic garage door, but smaller things. Like a patch of carpet where she once wiped her boogers. Or the freshly-baked cheesecake that had been sitting pristinely on the kitchen counter.
Perhaps tapping into that vast store of intelligence that told her it was a good idea to wipe boogers in the neighbor’s carpet, Bitsy had an even better idea. She decided to plow her finger through the middle of the cheesecake.
I remember this well. And not just because it’s hard to forget the image of a once-pristine cheesecake with an abyss ripped through the middle of it. But because I got blamed for it.
“How could you?! Are you possessed by the devil?! What a horrible thing to do!”
While I highly doubt my parents asked if I were possessed by the devil (at least over the cheesecake incident), whatever admonishment I had received was fast, ugly and painful. All for something that I didn’t even do!
Freakin’ Bitsy Finnigan.
The cheesecake incident stuck with me — hard. It also set up a red flag in my brain that makes me hyper-aware of this thing I call, “The Blame Machine.” The Blame Machine is a piece of highly inefficient and detrimental equipment that gets installed in many a workplace.
The sole purpose of this machine is – you guessed it – to find someone to blame. It will spew blame left, right, up, down, sideways, and sometimes even through walls. It doesn’t matter if the person to blame is the one who is actually at fault. As long as it eventually finds a target, The Blame Machine is happy.
Finding the target is part of the fun, as the machine tends to whir along in its greatest glory when blame is being tossed around like a hot potato.
Like how Shopify said it was PayPal’s fault that the payment gateway of a new website I was working on wasn’t capturing the payments properly – and PayPal insisted it was Shopify’s fault.
Or how the wolf mug seller tells you it’s the delivery carrier’s fault your package was never delivered. While the delivery carrier says the seller never gave them the package in the first place.
Never mind anyone trying to help fix the mess. Just pass the buck and keep on churning. Churn, churn, churn.
The Blame Machine is even more exhilarating when you’re working directly with it on a daily basis, especially in a place where there’s a solid chance that you’ll be the eventual target.
Such was the case with a long-ago assistant editor job I had, acting as the middleman between an editor and design department that didn’t like each other one bit. The editor would catch a mistake on the printed-out newspaper page proof, which I would then run over to the design department so they could fix it.
Just asking them to fix it wasn’t good enough. I was instructed to stand there peering over their shoulder as they made the edit on their computer screen. I then had to wait for them to print out a whole new proof sheet and run it back to the editor to prove the error had been corrected.
This would go on page after page, paragraph after paragraph, comma splice after comma splice – until all six newspapers were good to go.
And guess what? Mistakes would still make their way into final print anyway. That’s when The Blame Machine would kick in with a vengeance. Editor man would spend more time trying to figure out who to blame than actually fixing any problems.
And guess what again? In more cases than not, that blame would land squarely on me. Freakin’ Bitsy Finnigan.
So when you’re faced with The Blame Machine, the first thing to realize is you’re not alone. There are plenty of dysfunctional workplaces where one or more Blame Machines may be merrily humming along in full gear.
The second thing to realize is that we can take steps to shut those dang things down. This starts by switching the focus from “Who can we blame?” to “How can we fix it?”
Even if things can’t be 100% fixed, there may be a way to rectify the situation and make things at least a little less horrible.
Our next step is to stand up for ourselves. Yes, we’ll admit when we’re wrong. We’ll even look at what we did wrong so we don’t repeat the same mistakes. Taking responsibility for our actions has become a long-lost art. Just ask delivery carriers and wolf-mug sellers.
Admitting when you’re wrong is the stand-up thing to do. But so is refusing to let others use us as their doormat, punching bag or ongoing blame receptacle when things are not our fault. Been there. Done that. All it did was make me regularly research “Bitsy Finnigan obituary” with hopeful anticipation.
So yes, we’ll help you fix whatever mistakes were made. But that doesn’t mean you can heap on the accusations if it’s not our fault for making it. As noted, the end goal is to correct the wrong and move forward – not spend hours hunting down a blame target.
Our energy is precious, so let’s use it for making things better, not worse. One of the biggest ways to make things better is to pull the plug on the useless Blame Machine.
Another is to forgive ourselves for our mistakes. Forgive others who have wrongly blamed us. And perhaps one day down the line, even extend that forgiveness to Bitsy Finnigan.
==
Ryn Gargulinski is an award-winning author, artist and Reiki master who, believe it or not, still loves cheesecake. Check out her life story: “How to Get Through Hell on Earth without Drinking a Keg or Kicking a Garden Gnome.” Get your copy or learn more at RynskiLife.com.
