It's my fault

I was out and about the other day and overheard someone say something I hadn't heard in years. A boss was asking a subordinate about an order that went wrong and his reply started with the words "It's my fault".

After their conversation was over, I spoke with the employee. I told him that if I ever started another company, I'd keep him in mind as I hadn't heard anyone take responsibility for a screw-up in 20 years or more. 

Later on, I wondered why that was true. Some of it is because many of the places we work in are low-trust environments. Admitting error puts you at a disadvantage in comparison with those of your peers who duck responsibility and blame others. The problem is that almost every environment is now a low-trust whirlpool. 

The costs of this kind of behavior are larger than than the obvious ones, low morale and promotion of weenies. It forces everyone to waste significant amounts of time covering their asses by documenting every little thing in case there's a blowup in the future.

If you ever run across someone who is willing to take responsibility for a screw-up, consider hiring them. Some skills can't be taught and being a grown-up is one of them.

A Few Ground Rules

I have already met my goal by creating this, the world's most obscure blog. It's called The Deserved Obscurity Blog and I aim to maintain that high standard. So please do *not* link to it, cite it or otherwise advertise its presence. It won't be worth clicking on frequently as I plan to only post to it when I feel I have something worth writing about.

I have pretty high standards so posting should be infrequent. I'd suggest that if you somehow stumble over this and feel a compelling need to keep track of it, that you use RSS or some equivalent that will save you clicking here and being disappointed by inactivity. I don't want to waste your valuable time.

I don't have a twitter account or a Facebook account and am interested in neither following nor being followed.  Think of this as an experiment in asocial media.

You can do your part by not encouraging bad behavior on my part. Please don't email me imploring me to write more. Willpower is apparently a finite asset and I don't want to wake up some morning to find out that I've been "checking in" somewhere in the deluded belief that anyone in the universe cares deeply about my current physical location. Or what I had for lunch... That way lies madness.

Thank you for your inattention, we now resume regularly scheduled programming.