Sunday, July 19, 2009

Blame storming – one of the signs of weak management

Weak management manifests itself when companies find themselves under pressure. Blame storming is one of those signs. Defined as meeting where people admire the problem, describe how things got that way and were to place blame and responsibility. I first heard the term watching a commercial for Comcast, a U.S. based communications company.

Blame storming is an obvious tongue-in-cheek version of brainstorming. However instead of an open-ended discussion to generate new ideas a blame storm is a closed-ended focus on figuring out how to make them selves look good by making others look bad.

Weak managers flock to blame storming. It provides them with a way to retain responsibility while shifting accountability to others. That is the essence of weak management, perpetuation of their own position in the face of challenging economic times. You know that blame storming is active when you find managers defending themselves by taking the following actions:

• Calling performance review meetings that have the tone of inquisition
• Sending their teams off to gather information to justify their operations,
• Redefining the scope of their work to focus on their successes, even redefined success
• Shifting lower performing responsibilities out of their organization

Weak managers separate their own circumstances from those of the company, the customers and the stakeholders. Blame storming fills that gap and gives energy to weak managers as they keep the debate internally focused rather than figuring out how to create value in the marketplace.

Combating blame storming can seem difficult. Weak managers want to keep their focus on what happened and who should be responsible. This happens at a time when the company needs to keep their energy concentrated on the marketplace, what needs to happen and how you will work together to make it happen.

Strong managers will overcome blame storming through a combination of transparency, focus on performance and an eye on the customers and the future. Using this combination, strong managers need to push past weaker peers, and in some cases superiors to give the enterprise the thing that it needs most – results in the marketplace.

“We are where we are.” This simple statement is perhaps the most powerful statement against a blame storm. In one phrase it tells your people to move forward

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