Blame

I hate placing blame. Always have. When something goes sideways and the room starts hunting for who did it, my gut reaction is, “Oh, we’re looking for fault? That’s me.” Then we can get on with the part that matters.

That’s not me being a martyr, and it’s not me being nice. It’s me having figured out, over a lot of years, that blame is one of the most expensive things a team can spend time on, and it buys almost nothing. This piece is about why, and about what to do instead when it’s your team and your mess.

The question that eats the meeting

Every shop has this meeting. Something broke. A contract lapsed, a mod went out wrong, a customer called the boss before they called you. Everyone files into the conference room, and the first question out of someone’s mouth is some version of, “How did this happen?”

That’s a fair question. The problem is what it usually means: “Who did this?”

The second the room hears that, it changes. People start lawyering up in their heads. They rebuild timelines that start with “Well, I sent it to…” The person who actually knows what happened goes quiet, because talking now means volunteering to be the answer. Ten minutes in, you’ve got a really detailed account of who touched what, and nobody has said a word about how to keep it from happening again.

You can’t make the boss stop asking. What you can do is decide how fast the hunt ends.

The contract nobody got paid on

I picked up a services contract mid-stream once. The CO before me had sent the contractor a letter saying the option was hereby exercised, subject to the availability of funds. He had the funds. He just never put them on the contract with a modification. So for ten months the contractor kept working, we kept accepting the work, and nobody got paid. Then the contractor called.

I found the gap, wrote the mod, put the money on the contract, and got them paid. Then the questions started. How did this happen? Who missed it? Was the fix even right? Fair questions, all of them. Leadership’s job is to make sure something like that doesn’t happen twice. But every answer pointed backward at a guy who was already gone, and who’d done almost all of it right. He just missed one step.

When the questions turned to my fix, I asked, “What should we have done instead?” Nobody had an answer, because there wasn’t a better one. So I said it was on me. It was my contract now. The hunt stopped right there, and we could talk about the only thing that mattered: making sure the next mod doesn’t get missed.

I’ll be honest, I almost didn’t put this story in, because it’s hard to tell without sounding like I’m defending myself. But that’s kind of the point. I could have spent that meeting proving the miss wasn’t mine, and I’d have been right. Being right would have cost us another hour and taught everyone in the room that the safest move is to have your receipts ready. The other option cost me nothing but a little pride.

Blame solves nothing

Sidney Dekker has spent his career studying how things go wrong in aviation, healthcare, and other places where mistakes get people hurt. He describes two ways organizations look at human error.¹

The old view says the system is basically safe and the people in it are the weak link. Something breaks, you find the bad apple, you retrain them, write them up, or move them out, and the problem is solved. Dekker calls this the “bad apple theory,” and his argument is that it almost never works.

The new view flips it. Human error isn’t the cause of the failure. It’s a symptom of something deeper in the system: the workload, the tools, the handoffs, the checks that should have caught it and didn’t. And the big one: people almost always did what made sense to them at the time, given what they knew and what was on their plate. If it made sense to the person who made the mistake, it’s going to make sense to the next person in that seat. Swap out the person, and you’ve changed nothing except who’s going to make the same mistake next.

Run the contract story through that lens. The interesting question isn’t “Who forgot the mod?” It’s “Why could an exercised option sit unfunded for ten months without anything catching it?” That question has an answer you can fix. “Some guy forgot” doesn’t.

Google figured out the same thing building some of the most complicated systems on the planet. Its engineering teams write what they call blameless postmortems after every major outage.² The rule is that the write-up assumes everyone involved had good intentions and acted reasonably on the information they had. Not because Google is soft, but because they learned that the moment people expect to be punished for mistakes, they start hiding them. Hidden mistakes don’t get fixed. They repeat, usually bigger. You can’t fix people, but you can fix systems and processes.

Blame also spreads. Nathanael Fast and Larissa Tiedens ran four experiments where people read about someone blaming others for a failure. Afterward, those readers were more likely to blame others for their own, completely unrelated failures. Watching someone protect their ego made people protect theirs. The fix they pointed leaders toward was simple: own your mistakes out loud, and reward people who learn from theirs.³ Your shop learns how to handle blame by watching you, whether you mean to teach it or not.

So when your boss asks, “How did this happen?” answer the version of the question that helps: what in the process let this through?

What happens when you say “that’s me”

Something kind of funny happens when the leader in the room takes the blame. The temperature drops. People stop defending themselves and start offering what they know. A lot of the time, the troop who actually made the error speaks up on their own, because now it’s safe to.

Jocko Willink tells a story in Extreme Ownership about a friendly-fire incident in Ramadi when he was a SEAL task unit commander.⁴ A bunch of people made mistakes that day, and there was going to be an investigation. When it came time to brief his chain of command, he could have walked through every individual error. Instead, he stood up and said the only person to blame was him, because he was the commander and everything in his world was his responsibility. He figured it might end his career. It did the opposite. His bosses trusted him more, because now they knew he wasn’t going to hide anything from them or throw his people under the bus.

His whole book comes down to one line: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. You can argue with that as an absolute, and I would in some cases. But as a default stance for a new leader, it’s hard to beat. If it happened on your team, it’s yours.

Take the blame, give the credit

Jim Collins studied companies that went from average to great and stayed there, and he looked hard at the leaders who ran them.⁵ One habit kept showing up. He called it the window and the mirror.

When things went well, those leaders looked out the window. They pointed at their people, at good luck, at anything but themselves. When things went badly, they looked in the mirror. They took the responsibility.

The leaders at the comparison companies, the ones that never made the jump, did it backwards. Mirror when things went well. Window when they went badly.

It pays off at the organization level too. Fiona Lee, Christopher Peterson, and Larissa Tiedens read 21 years of annual letters to shareholders from 14 companies. The companies that owned their bad years, blaming their own decisions instead of the economy, had higher stock prices a year later.⁶ Owning it made them look like they were in control. The ones that blamed outside forces looked like they weren’t.

This is the cheapest trade you’ll ever make as a leader. When something goes wrong, the blame lands on you anyway, because you’re the one leadership is looking at. Taking it out loud just makes it official and ends the hunt. When something goes right, your boss already assumes you had something to do with it. Putting your troop’s name on it, out loud, in front of the people who matter, costs you nothing and means everything to them. Take the blame up. Push the credit down.

Owning it isn’t the same as eating it

A few warnings, because this can be taken the wrong way.

Taking the blame doesn’t mean letting it slide. You still fix the problem. You still sit down with your person, in private, and talk through what happened. That conversation is coaching, not punishment. If someone was actually reckless, that’s a different conversation, and I wrote about where that line is in Dropping the Hammer. Owning a mistake in front of the boss and fixing it with your team behind closed doors aren’t in conflict. That’s the whole job.

Taking the blame doesn’t mean covering for something dishonest. Extreme ownership is about owning outcomes, not hiding things that need to come out. If someone lied, cut a corner on purpose, or did something that puts people or money at risk, taking the blame for it isn’t leadership. It’s helping.

There’s research on this one. Peter Kim and his colleagues found that apologizing repairs trust when the mistake was about competence: a missed step, a bad call. When the issue is integrity, owning it does the opposite. People decide you’re the dishonest one.⁷ So own the honest mistakes. Don’t adopt the dishonest ones.

Taking the blame doesn’t mean believing you’re the problem. If you read the first piece, you know I used to take every miss personally and carry it for days. That’s not what this is. Saying “that’s on me” in a meeting is a leadership move. It isn’t a verdict on whether you’re good at your job. Say it, fix it, learn from it, and put it down.

It doesn’t always work

I’d be lying if I told you this always ends well. It doesn’t.

Raising your hand doesn’t guarantee anything. Some leaders hear “that’s on me” and respect it. Some hear “great, now we have a name for the slide.” You can put a bullseye on yourself that sticks around longer than the problem did. And the people who came into the room looking for someone to blame don’t always thank you for taking that away from them. That can open a rift that takes a while to close, and sometimes it never does.

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky wrote a whole book about this, Leadership on the Line.⁸ Their argument is that leading is dangerous, and the people who do it take scars. One idea from that book helps a lot here: separate your role from yourself. When the heat comes after you raise your hand, a lot of it is aimed at the seat you’re sitting in, not at you. They’re also clear that martyrdom isn’t the goal. A leader who gets run out of the organization can’t help anyone. Take the hit, but stay in the game.

You can’t control how people react. I wrote a whole piece about how you can’t control people, and that includes how they react when you fall on the sword. All you control is what you do and why you do it.

So there’s a skill here that nobody really teaches. You climb down off your own pedestal, take your ass-kicking without arguing, and then roll your sleeves up and get back to work. No sulking. No “well, technically.” No telling everyone in the hallway afterward that it wasn’t really your fault. That last one undoes the whole thing. If you take the blame in the room and take it back in the hallway, you didn’t own anything. You just delayed the argument.

I don’t think you learn this from a book. You build it like calluses. David Goggins calls it callusing your mind: you get tougher by doing the hard thing over and over until it stops wrecking you.⁹ The first time you take the hit for something you didn’t do, it stings for days. The fifth time, it stings for an afternoon. Eventually you notice the ass-kicking was the cheap part. What people remember is how you showed up the next morning.

There’s research pointing the same way. A multiyear national study by Mark Seery and his colleagues found that people who’d been through some hard things in life did better, and handled new hard things better, than people who’d been through a lot, and better than people who’d been through none at all.¹⁰ It looked at big life events, not conference rooms, so take it as a direction, not proof. But the shape fits: some hits make you sturdier.

If that still sounds like a bad deal, think about the other option: the leader who makes sure they’re never the one blamed, receipts ready for every meeting. That leader rarely gets burned. Their team notices, though, and learns exactly what it’s worth to that leader.

When it breaks: the short version

1. Fix it first. The customer, the contractor, the mission. Stop the bleeding before anyone gets to the why.
2. Say “that’s on me” to whoever’s asking. Out loud, early, no “but.”
3. Ask what, not who. What in the process let this through? What would catch it next time?
4. Talk to your person privately. Coach unless it was reckless. Most of the time it wasn’t.
5. When it goes right, put their name on it. Out loud, in front of people who matter.
6. Take the hit, then get back to work. No sulking, and no taking it back in the hallway.

Place it on yourself, dear leader

You’re going to get blamed for stuff whether you volunteer or not. That comes with the rank. The only choice you get is whether the hunt takes an hour or ten seconds, and whether your people learn that mistakes get hidden or that mistakes get fixed.

Somebody has to stand at the front of the room when the question gets asked. Make it you.