Pet Peeves: Non-Blame Blame
I really dislike when people say, "I am not blaming you, but you didn't ...." If I am not to blame, why does it sound that way?
There were two instances of non-blaming this week at work:
1)We are rolling out a project and I finished my portion 2 days earlier than the deadline. I alerted the other department to perform their testing and I thought everything is fine. Almost a week later I get notified that they wanted to begin testing the following day. I had no problem and it scheduled this task. The day of testing I was at my desk working and I the lead of the other team begins lecturing about deadlines. I let the person know that the deadlines were being met, but they continued the diatribe about if something causes a missed deadline that I should communicate this. At this point I had to point out that I was two days early and it was their department that caused the delay. This person finally left and I let my supervisor know what just transpired and they was PISSED. It all got handled and we met our deadline.
2)A system failed that I am the lead of due to an oversight, and I took responsibility for the failure and alerted the proper people. The next day, files were deleted from a server because after someone in upper management starting playing around with programs. I did my job to started the process to recover the files. The following day it turns out that highly critical files were deleted and the need to recover them was urgent. We started the process in about an hour we recover the files. Later that day a meeting was scheduled to discuss this matter. It started off with the person in upper management who deleted the files accepting responsibility, and stated that the meeting wasn't about blame. Which would have been great if it wasn't followed by this person saying things like "we aren't here to throw [me] under the bus", "we aren't blaming you, but ..." (while referencing me), etc... I took responsibility for the issue, and accepted blame because it was warranted. After that, I was being "non-blamed" for things I had no part in.
Ugh.
Anyway ... so how was your week at work?
There were two instances of non-blaming this week at work:
1)We are rolling out a project and I finished my portion 2 days earlier than the deadline. I alerted the other department to perform their testing and I thought everything is fine. Almost a week later I get notified that they wanted to begin testing the following day. I had no problem and it scheduled this task. The day of testing I was at my desk working and I the lead of the other team begins lecturing about deadlines. I let the person know that the deadlines were being met, but they continued the diatribe about if something causes a missed deadline that I should communicate this. At this point I had to point out that I was two days early and it was their department that caused the delay. This person finally left and I let my supervisor know what just transpired and they was PISSED. It all got handled and we met our deadline.
2)A system failed that I am the lead of due to an oversight, and I took responsibility for the failure and alerted the proper people. The next day, files were deleted from a server because after someone in upper management starting playing around with programs. I did my job to started the process to recover the files. The following day it turns out that highly critical files were deleted and the need to recover them was urgent. We started the process in about an hour we recover the files. Later that day a meeting was scheduled to discuss this matter. It started off with the person in upper management who deleted the files accepting responsibility, and stated that the meeting wasn't about blame. Which would have been great if it wasn't followed by this person saying things like "we aren't here to throw [me] under the bus", "we aren't blaming you, but ..." (while referencing me), etc... I took responsibility for the issue, and accepted blame because it was warranted. After that, I was being "non-blamed" for things I had no part in.
Ugh.
Anyway ... so how was your week at work?
Labels: pet peeves
by Killervirgo @ 8:27 PM| --- Say, what?
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