It's Not My Fault

So, you’re the new broom (•), brought in to Fix Things, to Shake Things Up, and to Take Things To The Next Level. As the new broom, it’s really easy to blame stuff on the previous administration, y’know?  After all, the developers are clearly not as efficient as they could be, there are definitely things broken in the product, and you were explicitly brought in to “make change”.

“It’s not my fault!”, and “Can you believe the mess the previous person made!” ← These are so, so easy to use, no?

/via
https://www.cherylmcmillan.com/not-my-fault/

Be very, very careful about if and when you deploy these though! The wise — and ethical! — thing to do is go for Honesty After all, given that the place is a mess, you will need to lay out the scope of the issues, the fixes necessary, and get buy-in on all of this. The end game, of course, is for people to internalize the existing issues, and the change that needs to be made. (Remember, they might currently be inured to it, or not know better…).

Honesty is really your best option, but sometimes you may just not have the agency available to go down this route. Say, for example, you’ve got a belfry-full of #CowboyDevelopers, who are apt to go all defensive on you if you imply that there is anything wrong with the way they currently do stuff. It is so easy to find a common enemy (“the previous person!”) and use that as a lever, isn’t it? It helps you Buy Time, so that you can do what needs to be done!

The tricky part here though is that there is a very (!) thin line between this, and just Being Evil. The Players of Politics, the ones who surf waves of outrage to get ahead in their career, they are typically the ones who use blame to Buy Time. If you go down that path, you inevitably find yourself playing their game, and as the saying goes, “if you play with pigs, you get dirty”.

So yeah, don’t be that person, don’t go down that road. If not for ethical reasons, do it for sheer self-preservation. Remember, every organization has issues. Even when things go well, there is going to be some percentage of situations when “shit happens”, and in the world of politics, somebody else is constantly going to be trying to pin that stuff on you! It’s a downwards spiral, and to win is to lose. After all, blaming fate is a winning strategy only when things go well, but when they aren’t, odds are that your replacement will be using you as the scape-goat for all issues, y’know?

Be somebody who can look themselves in the mirror, and not get all shifty-eyed. Go for Honesty!

By the way, a huge tell for Political types, is that their accomplishments are always in the past. Nobody can quite point at anything they’ve done now but they’ve Done Amazing Things at previous jobs. And they’re always busy, so busy, but it’s always busy with somebody else’s stuff.
In case you’re still in doubt, if they take credit for successes, and blame others for failures, well, the alarms should be going off…

(•) By the way, the full quote is actually “A new broom sweeps clean, but an old broom knows the corners”, pointing out that while new perspectives can affect change, you run the risk of losing experience in the process.