The blame game has no winners. You get nothing good from looking for someone or something to blame. And others certainly get nothing good from being dumped on.
Maybe you don’t think you play the blame game? Well, you still may be playing.
Have you ever blamed the economy or your competition or bad timing? That’s a version of the blame game.
It can be helpful to pull up and look at your emotions and your impulse to blame. Is there some helpful information buried under the frustration? Maybe there are some market trends that are working against you. Identify them, and then either reconfigure what you’re doing so that you are less affected by them, or figure out how you can actually benefit from them.
Small business owners can change direction more easily than larger companies. This agility is one of our superpowers. If something isn’t working, we can always pivot.
Often, the first way we go to market doesn’t work. We can try to assign blame externally or even internally, which is really destructive. We can think that we’re bad, stupid, incapable, or incompetent. We can say we should have done more market research or more beta testing. Blah blah blah.
Do you see how trying to assign blame can be a lose-lose situation?
Sometimes, on a bad day, you may find yourself really going off on someone or about something. In this case, it is a discharge of discomfort and pain, or a discharge of anger. This is the definition used in the research, as Dr. Brené Brown brilliantly describes below.
Within a company, a corporate culture that allows managers or team leaders to assign blame leads to toxic relationships and stunted innovation and creativity.
In short, blaming is poison for your business.
I bring this to your attention so that you can stop blaming – today.
Blaming yourself or others is not a good use of your energy, although noticing the impulse and acknowledging any helpful learnings can be very profitable for you and your business.
