Is dodging responsibility the most rational workplace strategy?

Question

One of the things I have been told many times is that people respect taking responsibility for actions and that it is a valuable trait in an employee.

Problem is, I have rarely seen this have much value. In my 15 year career employees who admitted fault at something were always taken out and shot while people who made excuses or just covered things up had good careers.

I once admitted error in a job and I regret doing it to the point that will never do it again. Yet so many people have told me that this is something they respect in their staff.

What is the truth here?

Answer 1

Taking responsibility is one of those behaviors people claim to respect, but often practically don't.

It is not because they are being dishonest. That is because respecting it and not viewing it as a sign of incompetence requires a degree of cynicism and not taking the comparables (co-workers who do not admit errors) at face value.

(Story is anonymized, so it will read a bit weird)

There used to be this developer I worked with who during meetings, would often point out an error he had made in a prior task and how it should be added to the to-do list because it would cause X problem if not fixed.

Management and I (I joined in this error for months) both thought he was not very good as there was always something that needed a fix. People eventually got very annoyed with him for making so many errors.

Why? Nobody else had bugs attached to their names. Someone else found them, reported them, and it had often been long forgotten who did the original work when the bug was assigned for repair. You only knew who created the original bug if you looked at the IDE annotations when repairing it and nobody was keeping track of that. We just used it to know who to ask if we were fixing it and management never looked at that.

This developer didn't produce more bugs. He probably produced fewer, as he was constantly reviewing code in his head and went back to check if he did something correctly even if an item had cleared all the way to prod. But the perception was that he was constantly making mistakes which were slowing down the project and eating up development time. Everyone else had their bugs spotted by someone else and added to the board that way or they were never identified. I just tended to bundle any bug fixes I identified into existing tickets. All those bugs were just considered the cost of development.

And after a while he no longer worked there and not by choice.

Superficially looking at it, he was making a ton of errors compared to everyone else. He very clearly announced his errors. Others did not identify or withheld them. But the people responsible assumed that all the information was on the table and acted accordingly. And I have witnessed this error a couple of times, although this had the most significant result for the person involved.

A common area people make this error in life is examining the success record of a company's mutual funds. People will take a look at all the funds they have and see if they did well or not. Well, fund companies just eliminate funds that do badly. If you encountered a company that showed the past performance of all funds, you might conclude that they are bad at what they do. You likely would not invest, as it wouldn't occur to you that the other companies just eliminated the bad results.

So yes, on the surface it seems like it is a respected behavior and I bet many bosses do not know they are doing this. But the problem is that many people are not open and unless managers are willing to factor in that most hide their failings and do not display them openly, you seem incompetent relative to others.

People have a bias for what they can see and it is harder for them to consider something missing..

I have never worked for a boss who doesn't believe that they would respect it. Put to them, every single one of them would say "I want people to admit their mistakes so we can fix them." I know that I would want that. But my experience has certainly been more complicated than that and I know that in the most significant case where I actually encountered it, I got it wrong for months. And I arguably knew better than management that all developers produce bugs.

It is hard to advise as it depends on the company, but understand how things are perceived and act accordingly.

There are lots of things like this, where managers genuinely want one thing, but unknowingly punish it.

Excuses don't help you, but they might keep you from being fired

I haven't ever seen excuses do well. That is very visible and obvious, so that takes things too far. Sourav Ghosh has a good answer on this. What they might do is seed enough doubt that extreme action seems like it would be too far. Politicians do it across the political spectrum for a reason, that reason being that you will watch their speech, consider what they have added to be most of the information, and draw conclusions based on that.

Answer 2

In my 15 year career employees who admitted fault at something were always taken out and shot while people who made excuses or just covered things up had good careers.

In my experience, it's almost always the opposite. I have to say this, the workplace(s)/organizations you mention, does not sound very good ones to work for. If one employee can get away with evading responsibilities, that means they are putting the "blame" on someone else and somehow that is acceptable in that work environment. Just imagine the scenario if you're at the receiving end of this treatment - how would you feel / react?

To add, being truthful and open is easier than trying to cook something up to cover your rear. If you're ready to take responsibility (for the negative / failure cases), it shows that you are ready to accept the fact that you are wrong and willing to give yourself a chance to improve.

However, there are couple of cases where this rule may not apply:

• You keep making same mistakes over and over again: If you keep on doing that, however honest or open you are about accepting responsibility, it'll be sure to create negative impact (as one would expect).
• You keep taking responsibilities which are not of yours While it's good to be a team-player, trying to "cover up" for others can be seen as a negative one. While it's good to own up your responsibilities, you must also let others face their battles.

Footnote: Yes, it's almost. There are some examples where people get away with hiding things, tweaking and twisting the facts before presenting them and sometimes while lying, but that's more of an exception than the rule.

Answer 3

Excellence demands taking responsibility

If you want to have a great career, good, that is a goal worth chasing. Is it necessary to take responsibility to have a great career? Not at all. You have to be good at other things though, a sixth sense for getting out of the line of fire will be necessary. If you develop your intuition it can become fairly easy to select the projects that will either die of natural causes or where you can ride someone's coat tails. You'll need to become good at marketing, almost any abject failure can be turned into a great success through the use of powerpoint and a lack of adherence to truth.

But IF you want to become good at something... If you want to be excellent - You have to become used to failure. You have to continuosly try to do stuff that you can't do - and this means a lot of failures. You have to become good at adjusting for not being good enough, inserting exstra skill or effort - learning who in your network can help you out. You need to help others out, their returned favor can save your skin some day. This means taking responsibility, owning it and the possible failures, and then working your ass off to ensure that things get back on track. It means exposing yourself and your weaknesses.

Some companies put great value in such behaviour. You'll end up in one - eventually.

Answer 4

Rational for whom?

• For the company it is entirely rational to want people to admit mistakes, because it allows for more targeted corrective action, and prompter and more effective mitigation of damages.

• For the employee it can be entirely rational to hide problems so they can evade consequences (if they have a reasonable expectation of success, and will not be overly penalized for detected attempts)

So when it comes to errors, the interests of the organisation and the interests of the employees are not naturally aligned. Good management realizes this, and creates an environment where it is better for employees to fess up. To accomplish this, management can:

• clearly define areas of responsibility up front, and reward people for accepting that responsibility
• investigate failures thoroughly to make it more likely to identify the correct cause
• harshly punish cover up attempts (or equivalently, hand out lesser punishments for cooperative delinquents)

For instance, I remember a case where a manager was fired, and his superior, when asked about the reasons for the firing, said:

"He made a mistake. I would have forgiven that, because mistakes happen. But he hid his mistake, trying, and failing to, handle it himself, when we could have still averted disaster. Hiding [errors] is never ok, and destroyed my trust in him. And that's why I fired him."

That sent a message.

In summary, when it comes to discovering errors, the interests of the organization and the interests of the people who caused them don't align naturally. Good managers realize this, and create artificial incentives to align the interests of the employees with those of the organization.

And even if your management is not smart enough to do that, and allows people to evade responsibility as a matter of course, it can still be rational for employees to admit a mistake, if a sufficient part of the consequences of the mistake affects them personally, and speaking up would allow for a more effective mitigation.

Answer 5

Is dodging responsibility the most rational workplace strategy?

No, the best strategy is to NOT BE responsible for problems. Do your work professionally and conscientiously and issues may still arise, but you would have no need to evade responsibility for them.

Answer 6

The 'correct' answer might depend on the size of the organization.

Generally, it's easier to hide in a large organization, unlike a start-up where everyone needs to pull their weight.

In addition, it depends on your own ambition. If you're driven by promotions, you will probably need to play the political game. If your work satisfaction depends on the quality of your work, do that.

The two are not mutually exclusive; ideally concentrating on consistent quality delivery should lead to added responsibility and recognition.

To be blunt, it's probably a red flag if a organization values political navigators over quality contributors.

Answer 7

In my 15 year career employees who admitted fault at something were always taken out and shot while people who made excuses or just covered things up had good careers.

Well, if the people that lie and cheat become the next management, then guess what their values are. It's a self-reinforcing spiral of doom.

Yes, this is valuable, but only in companies that share those values. Find those companies. Or get better at lying and making up excuses. Because we all make mistakes sooner or later.

Answer 8

People respect when others take responsibility however, just because you're respected doesn't mean you're free from consequence.

I have rarely seen this have much value. In my 15 year career employees who admitted fault at something were always taken out and shot while people who made excuses or just covered things up had good careers.

The main value is probably trust. If you're seen to take responsibility, then your superiors will trust you more. This can lead to preferential treatment, promotions and better work...

Now, there is such thing as taking too much responsibility. If you are perceived to be continually screwing up then, while your morals are respected, your ability to do the job isn't and you'll be the first to go, even over those who were truly responsible but flew under the radar.

Dodging responsibility is risky. Most likely your colleagues will become aware of it, and this contributes to creating a blame culture where no one wants to work. Pretty typical in companies where people have stagnated and don't have any ambition to grow. You may dodge short term, but you can be guaranteed your colleagues wont hesitate to throw you under the bus during performance reviews.

Is dodging responsibility the most rational workplace strategy

The key is balance.

Take responsibility for things you've done, but be very careful not to take responsibility for your colleagues or you'll become a scape goat.