As a faculty member at the University of Texas, I often watch our football team play on fall Saturdays. During last week’s game, there was a penalty on the Longhorns’ defense. The referee called the penalty and mentioned the player who committed the infraction. Watching the replay, it was clear that the penalty was actually on a different player. No big deal, of course, because there was clearly a penalty. But, one player got called out on national television for the mistake of another.
And that got me thinking about the times when someone makes a mistake at work, and then you get blamed for it. Not only can that be frustrating, but it may have implications for your annual evaluation or your job. So what should you do?
The ideal way to react depends on a few factors. One is why people above you in the org chart think you’re to blame. Another is your overall seniority in the organization.
Why do they think it is you?
It is easy to understand how a referee could call out the wrong player for a penalty in the chaos of a football game happening in real time. It is less clear why you would get blamed for a problem at work that you did not cause or contribute to. It can be helpful to get some insight into how you came to take the blame for the problem.
One possibility is that nobody is sure how the problem came to be, and management has speculated that you were the source of the problem. In that case, it is important to sit down with your supervisor and discuss any involvement you may have had in the situation. If you were involved, but not the source of the error, then engage in the discussion in a spirit of understanding how you can do things differently in the future to support a better outcome or perhaps to catch an error. If you were not actually involved in the situation at all, then just clarifying your lack of participation should be enough. You should offer to help identify the source of the problem as part of this conversation.
A second possibility is that you have been mistakenly identified as the individual who made a mistake, but the person responsible for it is known. In that case, it is also worth engaging with the person who made the mistake to encourage that person to come forward and accept responsibility. Most organizations would prefer that people who make mistakes own those errors so that it can become a learning opportunity. It is best for everyone involved if the person responsible for the problem steps forward.
The third possibility is the most difficult one. It is possible that someone else made the mistake and has pinned the blame on you. That is unfortunate and poor collegiality. In this case, you need your receipts. Any information you have to demonstrate that you were not involved will be important. Find an ally in leadership to help you address the mistake. Focus primarily on yourself. There is a temptation to want to ensure the person who lied about you gets punished. Don’t spend too much time trying to get justice. Talk to your ally about why you think you got blamed and then get back to work. Don’t spend additional valuable time and effort on someone else’s bad behavior.
How senior are you?
If you’re low in the food chain of your organization, then engage in all of the steps in the previous section. You want to ensure that you don’t suffer significant consequences for something you did not do.
As you get more senior, the calculus changes. Certainly, you want to ensure that high-level leadership knows what is and is not your responsibility so that you don’t get evaluated for the poor performance of people who don’t work with you or for you.
However, as you rise in the organization, your responsibility gets larger. You do bear some responsibility for the mistakes of the people who work for you. Just as you will get more credit than you deserve for the successes of your team, you will also get more blame than you deserve for the failures. If the mistake was made by one of your supervisees, don’t try to evade responsibility by pinning the blame on them. Shoulder the responsibility for the error and then work with your team members to ensure that nothing like that happens again.
Even when the failure lies with another adjacent team, you may still want to think about whether there are things you could do differently to decrease the chances of future errors or to minimize the damage caused by those errors. As you rise in the organization, your responsibilities influence more of what happens in the organization, and so you may benefit from taking some heat for actions that may not have been directly in your control. In those situations, have a frank conversation with leaders above you about what you think happened and what you believe can be done differently to avoid problems like that in the future. When you focus constructively on what comes next, you can develop a reputation for being a problem-solver rather than an excuse-maker.
