Scapegoating

“CYA emails”. “Per my last email” openings. Shadow BCC emails (BCCing the boss to keep them ‘aware’). Updates and status meetings with jargon-filled nonsense. Consultant firewalls. “Committees” that effectively delay action and default to the ‘safest’ incremental actions, but masquerade as addressing the issues. We all know it when we see it.

In modern-day American business life, scapegoating is far more prevalent than most realize because it manifests in such subtle ways. It is fair to say an entire culture has developed, accelerating since Covid, built around preserving conditions for scapegoating at the moment something goes wrong.

Real leaders, ethical people, responsible employees, don't have a record of self-righteous CYA emails, they have a record of actions, rolling up their sleeves, doing their part, doing the right thing. The opposite record (complacency, quiet finger-pointing, committee meetings that do nothing) maintains the option for blame-shifting when challenges arise.

None of this use of human energy advances organizations or gets any jobs done. These are worse than just annoying habits of self-preservation. This culture LOWERS MORALE in insidious ways because, when allowed to persist, it broadcasts to everyone that avoiding accountability is tolerated and maybe even protective to one’s status.

Leaders need to change the culture fast or watch their incumbent and competitive positions get wiped away. Competitive nimble organizations cannot afford this approach so they will take bolder actions and the correct ones.

The U.S. military is a great example of operational and cultural excellence that preserves accountability up and down the ranks and specifically has protocols to discourage and prevent scapegoating (I will write separately on that).

In high-stakes environments, a paper trail isn't a strategy for protection and an email trail doesn't absolve you.

Leaders in corporate America cannot expect excellence if they do not demand action and accountability…every single time.

Today, the culture is filled with “quiet quitting”, defensive finger-pointing, blame management, blame the workers, blame compliance, blame legal, blame ops, blame sales, blame finance, blame the consultants. Is anyone accepting any responsibility?

The most insidious phenomenon of all and one that particularly strikes me as destructive: pervasive sarcastic jokes and commentary about one’s company/organization that aim to make light of the organizational 'realities'…yet actually morph into a kind of toxic, defeatist acceptance of mediocrity (or abject failures).

Organizational culture matters more than ever, in an era of increasing and equalizing leverage (tools, information access, audience reach and so forth).

Bo Viktor Nylund, Director of UNICEF Innocenti, wrote last year that scapegoating is “close to an inevitable feature of liminality – that period of transformation where you have not yet reached your destination.” What strikes me is how rarely we learn from history. It’s the same short-sightedness, over and over again.