What do the words “accountability” and “responsibility” mean?

Anyone can be accountable when things are going well, and everyone wants to take responsibility when the organization gets a big win. What separates good leaders from toxic leaders is what they do when things are going poorly.

Good leaders take the blame. Bad leaders put it on someone else.

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This is Part 4 of a 7-part series on how toxic leadership behaviors manifest in the workplace, what is going on emotionally for the leader engaging in the behavior, and how they affect team performance. See the links below for the other sections:

1.      Introduction

2.      Dishonesty

3.      Bullying

4.      Scapegoating

5.      Micromanagement

6.      Conflict Avoidance

7.      Favoritism

Scapegoating in the Workplace

Fundamentally, scapegoating is shifting responsibility for something that has gone wrong to another target, inside or outside the organization. It is the opposite of being accountable.

Obvious cases of scapegoating are easy to imagine:

• Openly throwing a subordinate under the bus in a meeting (“the project failed because John didn’t deliver on time”), when the leader set impossible deadlines to begin with
• Blaming another department (“marketing didn’t get us enough leads”)
• Pointing to the economy or market conditions for bad outcomes like layoffs, when operational or execution issues were the true cause

However, scapegoating, or deflection of blame and corresponding abdication of responsibility, can be more subtle than this. Consider these examples:

• Leading questions that imply fault (“why didn’t your team prevent this”), instead of focusing the conversation on problem-solving (“where did the process break down?”)
• Reframing failure as someone else’s scope (“that was under Operations, not my department”)
• Hiding in the crowd 1: CC’ing upper management on every minor issue (“well you knew about it, you were cc’ed on that email”)
• Hiding in the crowd 2: Excessive decision-by-committee (“well, the committee approved it.” This works because who is boss supposed to fire or reprimand, everyone on the committee?)

Blame behaviors fall on a continuum, from healthy accountability to subtle deflection to outright throwing people under the bus. Sometimes leaders start on the noble end of the spectrum and descend into villain behavior over time.

Why?

Why Leaders Do It, and What Happens Next

Acceptance or deflection of blame ultimately comes down self-worth and esteem. This has an internal and an external dimension.

If being a clutch player who always makes the game-winning play is the basis of my identity and self-worth, when the ball is put in my hands and I miss what would have been the game-winning shot, that puts my identity under threat. If my internal self-worth is very strong, I can accept many losses before the evidence starts to chip away at my identity. If my internal self-worth is fragile, it can’t handle many setbacks. In order to protect a fragile sense of self-worth, I may seek to find other things or people to blame.

Likewise, the respect and esteem I receive from others may also depend on an established reputation of some kind. If I have a reputation as a trader that always makes the right market call, I may seek to shift blame elsewhere in the event of a trading loss in order to preserve the respect I get from others.

The underlying emotions here are a mixture of fear (loss of identity, respect) and shame. Shame is the feeling that something about me is unworthy or broken. It’s the idea that the mistake I made says something fundamentally negative about me. The more a leader ties their value to being flawless or invincible or even just “smart”, the more intolerable mistakes become, and the greater pressure they will feel to shift blame.

But once a leader starts to do this, the culture follows. Everyone else starts to play the blame game and stops taking responsibility. Performance drops, and the real issues don’t get fixed.

Playing Defense, Not Offense

People subconsciously adopt the behaviors of those around them, especially those in higher positions of authority. In an environment where the leader refuses accountability and shifts blame, everyone will focus on “Covering Your Ass.”

This is the type of environment where senior leaders are inundated with cc’s and no decision can be made without weeks of committee deliberation. It’s an environment where nobody is willing to stand up and say, “This was my decision, I made it, and I will accept the praise or the blame for the success or failure of my decision.”

In contrast to the fear-based behavior of playing defense, blame-shifting can also spark anger. Anger is often sparked by violations of personal boundaries and things that feel unfair or unjust—like being blamed for something that I didn’t do. People—employees—who are angry will find some way to vent their anger. Needless to say, this is a dangerous situation for both the leader and the organization.

Finally, in the case of blame being shifted onto external scapegoats, the biggest problem is that the true problem isn’t identified and therefore isn’t fixed. If a leader blames the market environment for poor corporate performance when in fact the culprit is the company’s flawed strategy, then the strategy doesn’t get changed and corporate performance continues to deteriorate. This is a classic case where the leader’s incentives may be misaligned with the rest of the organization—shareholders want the company’s value to increase, employees want to keep their jobs, but the leader might want to preserve their reputation or hang on to their job a while longer (at least until people figure out the leader is the problem).

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Next week, we’ll dive into our fourth destructive leadership behavior: micromanagement.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Inquiry

When have I deflected blame onto another person or external environmental situation, when I know that I was responsible?

When do I feel tempted to blame others, rather than accepting responsibility for my mistakes?

In these situations, what am I afraid of?

2)      Inquiry 2

How do I feel when I get blamed for things I didn’t do?

How do I feel when someone else blames an external environmental situation for something that I know was their fault?

Does my opinion of them go up, or go down? Why?

3)      Change

What would it be like to take responsibility for something that I have historically blamed on outside factors?

Can I try doing that, in the smallest way possible?

This does not have to be in a work environment. It is perhaps most powerful when we take responsibility for our personal habits and daily actions.