Are you a blamer? - London Braver Conference 2018

When something goes wrong, it’s so easy to jump to wondering what it is that someone else did to screw things up for you. At work with valued colleagues, at home with loved ones. Blame is easy to throw and is corrosive to relationships and trust, as one of the standout talks at the Marketing Society Braver conference showed.

​A detective superintendent at the Metropolitan Police, Tor Garnett talked about blame. She explained that whilst people may think that casting blame or having a witch hunt is important for accountability, in fact it is the exact opposite. Casting blame is a way of shifting responsibility away from ourselves.
 
Lots of people have a problem with anger at work. When something goes wrong it can leave them feeling furious, helpless, unable to turn back the clock.  And frequently there’s nothing to do with that anger.  You can turn it on yourself, which some people do, which leaves you bitter or depressed. Or you can find someone to direct it at which gets rid of it in the form of blame.
 
Garnett has worked hard to create a programme to shift the culture of the Met from finger pointing to taking collective responsibility. She pointed out that, in essence, the Met are in fact professional blamers. It's their job to catch wrong doers and lock them up. And they’re good at it. But less good perhaps at helping people, less good at empathising. Her experiment in creating a more balanced approach has yielded excellent results.

It was a brave move on the part of the Met. A brave initiative from Garnett. At the start of this segment of her talk she asked how many people in the audience were blamers. Only a few hands went up. Were most of us thinking that it’s not us who are blamers, it's everyone else?

As Brené Brown pointed out in the video Garnett showed, so many of us when something goes wrong immediately wonder whose fault it is and shirk any blame but therefore also any responsibility. Also blaming can be fun. Especially when you gang up, confident that you and your tribe have done nothing wrong but everyone else has. Brown says: “Blame has an inverse relationship with accountability... it is just a way of discharging anger”.

Success has many parents, mistakes are often orphans, yet in the process of casting blame and shirking responsibility, time is lost and lessons go unlearned.  

This piece is written by Sue Unerman. Visit her blog here.