Understanding Blame Culture- What is neuroscience bringing up, and how to navigate it?

Picture this: You are almost closing a customer or a candidate or wrapping up a substantial project that took you and your team a long time and effort to complete. You spend long hours catering to the right tools, processes, and communication, motivating, and engaging your team to bring their best self, only to hear a few days later that the customer decided not to move forward with your proposal, the candidate accepted another offer, or a project will take longer to be delivered, postponing, and delaying a series of other tasks. 

You call your team frustrated, angry, and very disappointed and lecture them on how they could have been more detailed, focused, or approached differently. This behavior can potentially leave irreversible damage to your relationship with your team, thinking that you were unkind and ungrateful and creating an environment where they will feel afraid to speak up, make mistakes, initiate changes, or bring in a growth or creative mindset. 

The Blame Culture:

In a blame culture, employees are often punished or criticized for their mistakes or failures rather than being encouraged to learn from them. This can lead to a lack of accountability at the organizational level, where managers and leaders refuse to take responsibility for their actions or decisions. Instead, they blame their employees for any negative outcomes. According to a study by Harvard Business Review, a blame culture can also lead to a decrease in employee morale and motivation, resulting in higher turnover rates and lower productivity levels (Goleman, 1998).

Neuroscience research has shown that blame is common in human thinking and behaviour. When something goes wrong, the brain naturally seeks to identify a cause, often leading to a blame game like the one we started with. Here's what happens in our brains when we are being blamed: 

Blame activates our amygdala: The amygdala is a brain region involved in emotional processing and plays a crucial role in our response to threats and dangers. Research has shown that blame culture activates the amygdala, leading to feelings of fear, anxiety, and disengagement (Rock et al., 2009). When individuals feel blamed, they are more likely to respond defensively, becoming argumentative or aggressive. This defensive response is mediated by the brain's prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for regulating emotions and decision-making (Van Overwalle & Baetens, 2009).

Blame culture can also impair the ability to learn from mistakes. Individuals may be more focused on defending themselves than learning from their errors, activating the brain's stress response and impairing memory and learning (Diamond et al., 2007). It can quickly spread throughout an organization, as individuals may start to adopt blaming behaviors themselves. This phenomenon is known as social contagion and is mediated by the brain's mirror neuron system, which allows us to mimic and empathize with the actions of others (Carr et al., 2003). 

How do we then navigate it and potentially create a well-wanted change?

Delegation:

Effective delegation is essential to avoid the blame game in the workplace. It involves clearly communicating expectations, providing necessary resources, monitoring progress regularly, and giving feedback. According to research, effective delegation can enhance job satisfaction, employee commitment, and performance (DeRue & Ashford, 2010). Effective delegation creates a culture of accountability, where every team member is responsible for their actions and outcomes. 

Celebrate Mistakes:

A positive company culture should embrace mistakes and view them as opportunities to learn and grow. Has a team member or you made a mistake? Try to debrief together and find ways to accept and learn from them by unpacking them. According to a study by Edmondson (2018), organisations that create a psychologically safe environment for employees to share their mistakes and ideas have higher innovation rates and faster learning.

Constructive Feedback:

Practical feedback, with logical steps for change, becomes invaluable guidance for employees to improve. In contrast, feedback with emotion quickly becomes blame. According to a study by Mannix and Neale (2005), emotional reactions in the workplace can impair decision-making and lead to biased judgments. Instead, unblur the conversation or situation you would like to provide feedback on and create a healthy discussion on what could have been better and what someone might need from you as a leader.

Concentrate on what you can change:

Other individuals cannot be changed. Attempting to do so will encourage them to resist our efforts. We kill accountability in ourselves by making ourselves passive victims, and we kill accountability in others by encouraging them to transfer the buck. Consider a system’s approach to your problem before assigning responsibility – defining the problem as a whole rather than in bits. Weak leaders may ask, "Who's at fault?" but good leaders, adopting a systems approach, will ask, "Where did the process break down?" Examining what's wrong with your systems will help you find answers to your organisation's difficulties.

References:

Goleman, D. (1998). What Makes a Leader? Harvard Business Review, 76(6), 93-102.

DeRue, D. S., & Ashford, S. J. (2010). Who will lead and who will follow? A social process of leadership identity construction in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 627-647.

Edmondson, A. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. John Wiley & Sons.

Felfe, J., Schyns, B., & Schmitz, E. (2006). The impact of transformational leadership on employees' psychological contracts. Journal of Business and Psychology, 20(4), 547-567.

Carr, L., Iacoboni, M., Dubeau, M.-C., Mazziotta, J. C., & Lenzi, G. L. (2003). Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: A relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(9), 5497–5502.

Diamond, D. M., Campbell, A. M., Park, C. R., Halonen, J., & Zoladz, P. R. (2007). The temporal dynamics model of emotional memory processing: A synthesis on the neurobiological basis of stress-induced amnesia, flashbulb and traumatic memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson law. Neural Plasticity, 2007, 60803.

Rock, D., Schwartz, J., & Lacey, P. (2009). Managing with the Brain in Mind. Strategy+Business, 54, 1-10.

Tang, Y.-Y., Tang, R., & Posner, M. I. (2015). Brief meditation training induces smoking reduction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(34), 10890-10895.

Van Overwalle, F., & Baetens, K. (2009). Understanding others' actions and goals by mirror and mentalizing systems: A meta-analysis. NeuroImage, 48(3), 564–584.