Whoever's Standing Next To Them

Blame does not land on the person it names. It lands on whoever is standing closest to them.

I sat through a run of meetings where, in every one of them, somebody’s name arrived attached to something that had not moved. No voices raised. Nothing cruel. Every sentence reasonable, delivered in the flat tone of a weather report, and every one of them landing on a person instead of on a process.

Then I caught myself doing it. Same flat tone. The blame was enough for me to notice it after the words left my mouth.

What I quietly stopped doing was mentioning how I had been working with the person after that. The distance between “they haven’t been doing the job” and “and you have been in the room with them this whole time” is about one sentence long, and I had no interest in being the one to close it. So the context that would have actually explained the situation, which happened to be the context that puts my name beside theirs, stayed in my mouth.

That is the tax. Not effort. Association.

Nobody in a room like that actually stops working with the person. They stop saying they work with the person. The collaboration moves into direct messages and hallway sentences where nothing can be attributed, and the public record of who is carrying what quietly empties out…

Blame is cheap, which is the entire reason rooms reach for it. An owner is assigned forward. Blame is the same gesture with the arrow turned around, handed out after the fact, at a fraction of the price. (And it feels like paying attention, which is the part that makes it habit-forming. Yikes!)

The ten seconds after one of those sentences lands belong to somebody. Almost nobody takes them.

I took them once. A breath, and then something close to “I could see how they would think that.” Not a contradiction of the person doing the calling out. Not a defense speech either. Just the assumption, said out loud while everybody was listening, that there was a reason, and that the reason was probably something missing rather than somebody lacking.

Everyone is doing the best they can with whatever they have in front of them, which means the gap is almost always a thing nobody handed them. Handing it over is ours to do. It isn’t theirs to earn first.

The first work to die in a room that has learned otherwise is anything cross functional… Positioning, launches, the customer story.

None of it belongs to one person and all of it requires somebody to say a second name out loud next to their own. When standing close to someone starts costing something, people stop naming each other, and what is left is a stack of individually defensible tasks that add up to nothing anybody would call a strategy…

That sentence cost me nothing. One breath, and it changed exactly zero about the deadline or whose fault anything was. All it did was put my name back next to theirs in a room that had just quietly decided that was a bad place to keep it.

Stay Positive & I Could See How…