adminAfter a recent experience of the latter I stepped out of my house to find my gardener anxiously awaiting news on my well being.
He was full of appropriate levels of sympathy and advice (seeing as his continued employment hinges on me being able to work).
And of course he informed me, “everyone knows that the increase in levels of sickness around is because of the Chinese.”
That drew me up short, obviously I had missed something while I was down, was there a new bird flu perhaps? He elaborated how the Chinese were responsible for the decline in my health while I listened incredulously to the level of perfectly illogical stupidity that spewed forth. It reminded me of the Jews being wrongly blamed for the Black Death. The Chinese were no more responsible for my argument with a virus than my effect on the American election result.
My gardener was unable to see that the problem with water borne diseases in the city rested with the people in the city, like him and I. Explaining to him that our failure to hold our city council to account, our failure to pay our rates bills and to put our trash in the bin, was a real issue in the health of the city would have been a waste of time.
He just was not ready to take responsibility. It is easier for my gardener to blame someone else than to take any action.
Why do we tell jokes about other nationalities? Why do we fault pick on them in generalisations?
You hear someone saying:
“Well you all know how the Tswana women are . . .” well no I don’t, I have not met all Tswana women and the ones I have met just don’t fit any of the stereotypes bandied around.
Fault picking shifts the view away from you and your own issues. To belittle someone means just that, to make him or her “be littler than us”.
What you are really saying is “at least we are not like that” but without having to take any action about your own aberrant behaviour.
It avoids responsibility and accountability. Seeing as we are all so good at avoiding responsibility I thought I would help make it easier for you by highlighting some of the best ways to shift blame that we can all use.
Committees, action groups, and investigative boards are a great way to avoid responsibility.
Set one up, do not name a head deliberately, give them a vague enough frame of reference (nice technical term that, throwing technical terms around that no one understands is also a great way to shift blame).
When they fail to deliver after consuming a nice padded budget there is no one to blame because the committee will go round in circles pointing fingers at each other.
If you cannot get on a committee or use technical jargon here are a few other ways of avoiding people blaming you for something you should have done.
Always have a scapegoat, pick on someone else in the organisation who you can blame, preferably in a different department.
Practice the shrug, shrugging your shoulders with a vacant expression on your face is a great way to ignore an issue.
It is the non verbal equivalent of “I am not the one” and is guaranteed to send people storming off in a rage, and if they are storming away from you then they are not bothering you are they.
Never pick up litter, you did not put it there, you are not the cleaner, it is not your job.
Likewise never actually mention to the person littering that the bin is five meters away, again its his litter not yours.
Practise the turnabout argument, shift the blame back to the other person like a rapist blaming the rape victim for wearing clothes that were too alluring with an “I raped her because her skirt was too short” type of excuse.
Blame the equipment, it cannot fight back. Blame Econet/Netone/Telecel, everyone has cellphone issues at some point.
Create long and arduous, bureaucratic chains of command. The more steps there are to doing something, the more likely someone else can be blamed.
Never, never, never work through a tea break or lunch break to meet a deadline, these are your God given right and must never be sacrificed, you can always blame the poor work hours though cause there is never enough time to do everything.
We laugh at all the excuses above, probably because we have met them before (or heaven forbid actually used them).
On a serious note taking responsibility has to become part of the culture of your company, and our nation, if you are to succeed.
It starts with you looking at your life and the factors that influence it. Are you responsible for the way your life is going, or are external factors always the ones to blame?
I remember greeting someone with the colloquial “How is life treating you?” and hisresponse was “Life does not treat me, I treat life.”
What a different perspective from a man who realised he was responsible for his attitude towards the circumstances he found himself in. If we all adopted it we may get a lot more done.
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