When I was growing up, we had it drummed
into us that we must always stand up and take responsibility for something we
had done wrong; I can even remember times when my older brother would take the
blame for something that I had done in order to make my life easier! I think this was fairly normal in the UK at
that time.
When I first arrived in the then
Czechoslovakia (but read this whilst bearing in mind that this was a country
that had just escaped from the clutches of communism and everything that that
stood for), I remember that one of the things that drove us early expats to
near madness was the rather standard way that the Czechs would immediately
blame someone else for something that had gone wrong – or even start accusing
someone else for something before it had even happened….. a conversation that
started ‘it’s not my fault’ was pretty standard (along with ‘ah, that might
work in the UK/US/Germany, but it wont work here….’… but that’s another story).
Watching the news in the UK now, where the unbelievable
floods are having such a devastating effect, I find myself wondering what has
happened to the good old English way of ‘taking it on the chin’ and finding a
solution rather than looking for someone to
blame – for the past few weeks it seems that just about everyone
involved (apart from those that have lost absolutely everything, who seem to be
the most phlegmatic) are looking for someone to blame – from the politicians
that are blaming each other, to the regular public who hold the weather
forecasters responsible, to the local authorities who blame the politicians..
meantime half of the UK is disappearing under water. (A quick aside.. just seen a Sky news
journalist asking a Ghurka who has recently arrived from Afghanistan whether he
minds all the water and working in the dark… !!! Of course he must prefer being at risk of
being blown up every day… What is the matter with these people??!!).
One has to wonder how this new ‘blame
society’ can manage in business. Surely
anyone that has held a managerial role in a company would concur with me that
we would all prefer to deal with someone that is able to put up his or her hands
and say ‘sorry, my fault, here is a solution’ rather than ‘ah, it was his fault
that this happened, don’t look at me’?
If all we ever do is pass the buck, then we are all going to run out of bucks
even faster than we have in the past few years….
