Employers – Being Consistent & Blame Culture

This is part of a series of posts that have been inspired by the attitudes of employers over recent years. Having worked in a few places and seen how the ‘Inspiration Leadership Handbook’ is applied (or in most cases not) I feel that getting this out into the blogging is long overdue.

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As an employee, you’re trying to do the right thing normally. Based on what you’ve been asked to do by your direct boss and what you understand generally as company policy. For example, if there is a company process to go through before releasing a deliverable generally I as an employee will follow this.

But this time your boss needs it really quick, for whatever reason and you’re asked to bypass this process. Normally with the verbal command ‘Ship it!’

The employee feel uncomfortable, stuck between a rock and hard place – do they say NO to their boss? Or do they break the company process?

Normally the boss wins as he or she is there bearing down on you. So you do it. Then sometime later guess what – something’s gone wrong with it in some way, it’s not right at all and awkward questions are asked.

“Why was the process not followed – it would have picked this up!” Or something of a similar tune id uttered. The employee looks over to their boos and it’s at this point that the measure of how good or bad that boss is becomes apparent.

Sometimes they fess up – good boss, but sometimes they lay the blame on the employee. The poor soul has no backup, no proof and the only thing they can do now is either try and argue and probably lose or accept the blame. After the meeting a quiet thank you is sometimes uttered when big boss is out of ear shot. Whether or not you get the thank you, watch this guy, he or she is trouble with a capital T. Either it’s time to move on or time to make a stand, but seriously don’t take this kind of shit.

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Company processes and policies exist for a reason, so any manager should NEVER ask their staff to take short cuts, it’s not reasonable and it’s not professional. Consistency will make sure that they know the boundaries, in a way it’s like dealing with dog or children. They’ll behave better when they know what to do.

As for blame culture, if employers haven’t learned by now that any blame culture in any company is toxic then it’s about time they did. Why are they toxic – simple, blame cultures only ever work one way and that’s shit!

 

Simon 🙂

 

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