Manager likes to find out who's to blame

[Ceci03]

I hate her attitude. If she finds an error she's immediately on teams saying "who did this"
Or she tags you and asks leasing questions until you realize there's an error. She accused me today and she was right I had signed off something and there was a mistake. However I couldn't have made that mistake hard to explain but anyway I just took it on the chin and apologized. I had signed off so it was my responsibility. Another member of my team is a young guy about 22 and I find it so irritating as he is always the first to say "it wasn't me".
Anyway a big error has come to light and I know it was him. He's already said to me it couldn't be him as he was on annual leave on that day but it's more complicated than that. I'm dreading the morning when the manager finds out about the mistake she is going to ask me how did this happen. I've already sent her a detailed email with the corrections and a sorry this happened but didn't take responsibility . Thing is I hate throwing anyone under the bus. I think we all make mistakes etc and the team should stand by one another. I found another error made by a new girl who will be mortified. If the manager asks me I want to say I don't believe in blaming any one individual but that the team will do better in the future. I dont want to name names. I think I'm going to say it to her if she starts asking who is to blame. Wwyd

cover your butt and tell her who worked on the project and was responsible for what parts and who signed off. If it’s you who signed it, it IS your fault.

i think my response would depend on the other people in the team, would they defend you in the same way?

Bloody hell that is a lot of mistakes happening at your work! Maybe you need to revisit your approach to training or recruitment?

No the other team members have been known to throw me under the bust at the first opportunity. Yeh I know that's why I did take responsibility today. I should have double checked before I signed off. This current thing though I definitely did not do. I've sorted it out though. If she starts blaming me tomorrow I'm going to say it wasn't me. I find it hard to name names though. Just don't really agree with it and she is very aggressive in her teams messages and does it all in public on the main teams chat. Things like who is responsible for this how did this happen this must never happen again and her fav I don't understand how this happened please explain.

It's honestly not a lot of mistakes in the scheme of things . We deal with a huge amount of numbers and mistakes happen we are human. But I've actually come up with a new process for double checking to avoid it happening or to cut down on the number of times it does. They never seem to check each others work which is something I've always done in previous jobs.

Maybe you could introduce retrospective meetings which is a no blame way of understanding what happened and what contributed to it.
Then the manager gets their need meet to understand the situation, but everyone else gets to safely contribute to it.
They can be a bit time consuming at first, but over time the culture will change and they will be quick and easy (and less time will be wasted fretting about who will be blamed)

Sounds like it's only the manager there doing their job properly

I don't see what is so wrong in wanting to understand exactly what happened and making sure it doesn't keep occurring.

The small team I lead do exactly that. They are fantastic but yes, everyone does make mistakes. We are not afraid to own it and work out how we can safeguard against something similar happening in the future.

My wider organisation does not care though, it's just an attitude of 'well we tried, and we'll probably make exactly the same mistake next week and someone else can fix it'. It's very frustrating.

Oh I worked for a manager like this, and it created a toxic culture where everyone was afraid of here and ready to lay blame on anyone. I'd start looking for another job

I don't agree with you view, at all. All these mistakes need assessing: there's something wrong with your processes, and worse still your checking system isn't picking up the mistakes. That needs addressing. And yes it is important to look at who is making these mistakes and why. As it is all 3 of you have made a mistake.

Yes I e suggested we have a review meeting when things are calmer and we have put different processes in place which I tho k will help catch these mistakes. I'm scared this morning I hate confrontation. If ahe blames me for this latest one I think I'm going to have to speak up and say who was responsible. I think we are all scared of her. I agree about looking at seeing how it happened but I don't think blaming individuals helps really just makes you scared and more likely to say "it wasn't me"

I'd start looking for another job, is what I'd do. And when I found it, I'd tell the toxic manager why.

Management is so weird. You get promoted to management because you're good at whatever you were doing before. So now you're no longer doing what you're so good at, but a completely different job that you didn't need to be good at to get. That's why there are so many shit managers. Do we even need most of them?

Iv been in this culture. Its all to do with tone of how its done. Instead of blaming and asking who did this, manager could easily say this mistake has happened please could x resolve it. Then have catch up once a week to see if processes need chnage to catch mistakes

What's the point of having a sign off process if the person signing off isn't responsible for identifying errors?

I would be really fucked off as a manager if there were continuous mistakes and everyone said oh we don't know what went wrong, "mistakes happen", must be just one of those things - let's draw a line and move on.

You need to look for another job. Nothing is worth this much anxiety.

As adults, you all need to move past feeling "scared" and accept responsibility. What is going wrong with your collaborative work processes and training that this keeps happening? Agree that this must be becoming increasingly frustrating for your manager

Actually I agree with this. If you are all continuously making mistakes then yes something needs to be investigated.

Your manager is ultimately responsible if you/your team don’t have the training / support / time to work without mistakes.

there should be a culture where it can be discussed properly without tension. Sadly many managers don’t have the skills to do that and instead use shame and blame. Leads to high turnover and more mistakes 🤷‍♀️

Your manager needs to read up on “Just safety culture”. It doesn’t sound like your industry is safety-critical (At least I hope not!) but the principles can be applied in any work environment. Naming, shaming and blaming is not going to achieve what is required and she needs to stop the public finger-pointing, but it does sound like she wants to improve the processes.

I agree with you, OP. A blame culture is not nice and just pits people against each other. I don't like throwing people under the bus either, as I wouldn't like it done to me. We are humans after all, we will all make mistakes from time to time. Shouldn't be that scared to own up to them if they happen as that just delays fixing it.

I disagree with PP too - if everyone is making mistakes, the manager is at fault. They are the one who oversee the team and all their work. Yes they need to investigate, but there is ways of doing it. And it's their responsibility to ensure processes are changed and altered to prevent mistakes.

It sounds as though she's doing her job by addressing mistakes and taking steps to ensure the same mistake won't happen again.

How is she supposed to do this if she doesn't know the chain of events that led to the mistake?

This was my first thought. Surely the whole reason you have someone check and sign off it to minimise mistakes yet it sounds like you're all making lots of errors even with a signing off process.

Could she word it better and be less abrupt, probably but she's also probably utterly fed up of all these errors being made and getting brushed off.

I like to give credit where it's due and pass constructive criticism to the right person, not the group. 2 sides of the same coin.

So if someone did a good job, I'd love for them to be acknowledged as much as I would if someone didn't. Fair is fair. It's not throwing anyone under the bus if the former isn't considered the same. I definitely wouldn't want anyone or group taking the blame for my own mistakes - that's a b**ch move.

I was just about to say she needs some lessons in building a ‘just culture’ and the benefits of that.

blame has a negative impact on morale, retention, productivity, innovation

she sounds like a dreadful manager. Be brave and lead by example.

mistakes are very rarely malicious on a humans part and mostly because of imperfect processes, pressure, inadequate trainings. That should be the focus of these reviews - how to improve the structure.

As much as I think she shouldn’t be aggressive, I do think she’s right in understand what happened and who made the error. I really do not agree that someone should be responsible to sign off and not responsible if they do it wrong.