“You got him fired!” — Blame shifting
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“A friend of mine had a problem with a coworker who kept on stealing her lunch, I guess because they both have to eat gluten free. She caught him red-handed a few times but he just wouldn’t stop no matter what she said, so she went to HR to see if they could do anything. A few weeks later the company let him go (she heard he was doing something else on top of the lunch stealing).
She says outside of the lunch theft, he seemed like a nice guy and now her teammates are mad at her and say things like, “You got [Mr. Nice Guy] fired! You’re so petty.”
The way they’re saying things feels unfair to me, can you help her defend herself?”
This is a bad situation but a great question. And it brings up a super common workplace issue: a distortion I call blame shifting language.
The distortion is exactly what it sounds like — the blame gets shifted away from a wrongdoer and onto another party. The inaccurate language sets up a new scenario, a different way of interpreting what happened.
In the accurate scenario, a perpetrator is at fault. And, if we follow social norms, this perpetrator should be held accountable and face consequences.
In the distorted scenario, someone else is to blame. Who? Usually, it’s either the victim or the messenger. (And the victim and the messenger may be one and the same person.)
Blame shifting is so common that we have a well-known phrase in English, “shooting the messenger.” Shooting the messenger is when you punish the bearer of bad news, even though they aren’t at fault.
Blame shifting language shows up all the time in the workplace, but it’s super common outside of work as well. Here are just a few examples I’ve encountered.
example 1
On April 25, rapper, Broadway performer, and entrepreneur Megan Thee Stallion announced her breakup from NBA player Klay Thompson via Instagram. In her post, she claimed Thompson had cheated on her, subjected her “HORRIBLE mood swings and treatment,” and told her (after they bought a house together) that he wasn’t sure he could be monogamous.
In the days following her announcement, the internet was filled with commentary blaming her. Saying that it was her fault he cheated because she isn’t “wife material,” she isn’t “wholesome” enough, she isn’t “high-value,” and that she is overly sexual in her performances. People also complained that she didn’t break up with him “gracefully” and shouldn’t have gone public with the details.
If in the accurate scenario, Thompson cheated on and emotionally abused his girlfriend, then her dumping him and explaining why seems like reasonable consequences.
Only in a distorted scenario is she to blame for his cheating, future faking, and poor treatment.
example 2
“Ryan” learned that his sister “Rebecca” was cheating on her husband, “John.” He really likes and respects her husband, so the news upset him a lot. After a long internal debate, he decided to tell John what he knew, since if he was in John’s shoes, he’d want that information.
Rebecca and John are now separated and John is preparing to file for divorce. Rebecca is furious with her brother and blames him for her current situation. She yells at him, saying things like, “You ruined my marriage! It’s your fault John moved out! It’s your fault he’s going to divorce me!” What’s more, Rebecca and Ryan’s parents also have criticized him for his actions and told Ryan multiple times that they blame him for breakup.
This is classic blame shifting and “shooting the messenger.”
In the accurate scenario, Rebecca is the wrongdoer. She has cheated on her husband, and it is her fault that, now that he knows, he doesn’t want to be with her anymore.
Only in a distorted scenario of blame shifting is Ryan to blame for informing John about his sister’s bad behavior.
EXAMPLE 3
“Mike” and “Lukas” work together on a small team. When Lukas had only been there a few months, he started stealing and taking credit for Mike’s work. Lukas would go to the shared team drive, copy slides and spreadsheets and data analysis results and then incorporate them in emails and reports to their manager as if it was his own work.
Mike started watermarking his spreadsheets in a small white font. He also started introducing small obvious errors into versions he uploaded to the shared drive while keeping accurate copies on his hard drive, which only he could access.
After a few months, their manager started noticing the mistakes in Lukas’s files and emails. When he questioned Lukas about them, Lukas didn’t have good explanations as to why the errors were there and couldn’t easily correct them. Around this time, during a team meeting when Lukas was showing one of Mike’s spreadsheets he was taking credit for, Mike said, “Hey, I think you somehow ended up with one of my spreadsheets?” He then went over to the laptop, scrolled down the spreadsheet, and highlighted the watermark, which was time stamped and had his name and email address.
Lukas got in trouble and may lose his job. After learning this from his manager, he waited for Mike in the parking lot and shouted at him, “You set me up! It’s your fault I’m on a PIP now. It’s your fault they may fire me!”
In the accurate scenario, it is Lukas’s own fault that he is in trouble at work. He has stolen other people’s work, he has taken credit for that work, he has not caught obvious errors in that work, and he has not been able to correct those errors. Lukas is the wrongdoer and being let go from his job for poor performance is a reasonable outcome.
Only in the distorted scenario of blame shifting is Mike to blame. Sure, he set up Lukas to be caught for stealing work or presenting error-laden work. But Mike is the (more active than usual) messenger, just doing what it takes to point out Lukas’s wrong doing.
What can you do?
Let’s go back to the original scenario in the question. A person who was the victim of lunch stealing is being told “You got [Mr. Nice Guy] fired!” What can she do?
Well, she can use language to push that framing away from the distorted blame shifting scenario and towards the accurate scenario.
So she can say something like, “I didn’t get Mr. Nice Guy fired. He got himself fired! He’s the one who kept on stealing my lunch and wouldn’t stop no matter how nicely I asked him. Don’t shift the blame to me. It’s not my fault that when I asked HR for help they decided he shouldn’t work here anymore.”
When someone seems nice or is socially powerful or is a good artist or has done important work, it can be hard to believe that they have done bad things.
The disbelief and distortions happen so frequently that it looks like it is human nature to shift the blame to the victim or the messenger.
So it’s important to be on the lookout for distortions and blame shifting language. Because being unfairly blamed feels terrible. And when the wrong person is punished, it can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes at work: toxic team dynamics, disengaged employees, low-quality work, high performers quitting, and more.
When you focus on who is actually to blame, you can make things less unfair.
And if you’re being blamed for someone else’s bad behavior? It might be time to reconsider your relationship with the people inappropriately blaming you.
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