By Ben Dattner with Darren Dahl (Publication Date: March 15, 2011: Free Press/Simon & Schuster)
Book website: http://www.creditandblame.com/
Synopsis:
For better or for worse, the dynamics of credit and blame are at the heart of every team and organization and make or break every career. Unfortunately, credit and blame are rarely assigned in an objective or fair manner, and individual psychology, team dynamics, and corporate culture all influence, and are influenced by, how credit and blame are given and received. Too often, people and organizations get caught up in “the blame game” and the wrong people get blamed for the wrong reasons at the wrong time. The result can be that people are demotivated and demoralized, focus more on organizational politics than on getting the job done, and are too afraid to speak up or experiment with new approaches.
This book considers academic research and theory, as well as real world examples, that illuminate how human evolution, our own life histories, and our personalities impact how we assign credit and blame to ourselves and others, as well as how we react to the credit and blame we receive from others. Credit and blame are also at the heart of workplace relationships, and are critical in determining how teams will develop and interact with each other. The book explores the situations in which we can all be susceptible to “the blame game” and presents recommendations for how we can win in our careers by refusing to play. By taking a more mindful approach to credit and blame, individuals, teams and organizations can overcome the “blame game” and successfully adapt to new challenges instead of remaining stuck in the past.
From the book jacket:
FROM HIS YEARS OF EXPERIENCE CONSULTING to leading companies, psychologist Ben Dattner has discovered that at the root of the worst problems we confront at work is the skewed allocation of blame and credit. In so many workplaces, people feel they're playing a high-stakes game of "blame or be blamed," which can be disastrous for the individuals who get caught up in it and can sink teams and afflict whole companies. Dattner presents compelling evidence that whether we fall into the trap of playing the blame game or learn to avoid the pitfalls is a major determinant of how successful we will be.
The problem is that so many workplaces foster a blaming culture. Maybe you have a constantly blaming boss, or a colleague who is always taking credit for others' work. All too often, individuals are scapegoated, teams fall apart, projects get derailed, and people become disengaged because fear and resentment have taken root. And what's worse, the more emotionally charged a workplace is—maybe our jobs are threatened or we're facing a particularly difficult challenge—the more emphatically people play the game, just when trust and collaboration are most needed. What can we do? We can learn to understand the hidden dynamics of human psychology that lead to this bad behavior so that we can inoculate ourselves against it and defuse the tensions in our own workplace.
In lively prose that is as engaging as it is illuminating, Dattner tells a host of true stories of those he has worked with—from the woman who was so scapegoated by her colleagues that she decided to quit, to the clueless boss who was too quick to blame his staff. He shares a wealth of insight from the study of human evolution and psychology to reveal the underlying reasons why people are so prone to blaming and credit-grabbing; it's not only human nature, it's found throughout the animal kingdom. Even bats do it. He shows how our family experiences, gender, and culture also all shape the way we cope with credit and blame issues, and introduces eleven personality types that are especially prone to causing difficulties and illustrates how we can best cope with them. He also profiles how a number of outstanding leaders, from General Dwight Eisenhower and President Harry Truman to highly respected business figures such as former Intel CEO Andy Grove and Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, employed the power of taking blame and sharing credit to achieve great success.
The only winning move in the blame game, Dattner shows, is not to play, and the insights and practical suggestions in this book will help readers, at any level of any organization and at any stage of their careers, learn to manage the crucial psychology of credit and blame for themselves and others.
Advance Praise:
"The Blame Game is a modern management masterpiece; one of the most well-crafted business books I have ever read. It is useful, timeless, and often counter-intuitive. This compelling gem weaves together rigorous research and commonsense to show how the wisest, most humane, and most effective leaders get ahead -- and enable their teams and organizations to succeed -- in surprising ways." -- Robert I. Sutton, Stanford Professor and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss
"Packed full of intriguing, all-too-familiar stories, and based on a foundation of well established theories and research, The Blame Game is an excellent resource for developing greater self awareness about the dangerous allure, and greater social awareness about the contagious effects, of blame. Ben Dattner provides us with sound practical advice about how to stop playing the blame game, and how to instead create and maintain relationships and organizations based on honesty, trust and respect." -- Annie McKee, co-author of Primal Leadership and founder, Teleos Leadership Institute
"Blame and credit constitute a hidden economy that, if not managed properly, can undermine even the most promising organizations and derail even the most promising careers. This book is an encyclopedia of blame in the workplace that anyone, at any level of their company and at any stage of their career, can benefit from reading." -- Keith McFarland, #1 Best Selling Author of The Breakthrough Company and Bounce.
"We've all suffered from the blame game, whether we are the one getting unfairly blamed, or the one yielding to the temptation to unproductively blame others. Through the lens of organizational psychology, Ben Dattner explains why blame is so prevalent in the workplace and presents so many challenges in our careers. Then he shares practical advice for how to break free from the blame game by taking appropriate responsibility for our actions, learning from our mistakes, and giving others the credit they are due." -- Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, author of Women Who Think Too Much and The Power of Women
"Through a wealth of stories and research, The Blame Game presents a compelling case that individuals, groups and organizations can benefit greatly by focusing less on blame and more on problem solving and collaboration. Leaders at any level of any organization will find practical guidance for how they can make this shift and also lead others in a better direction." -- Pamela Meyer, author, From Workplace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning and Changing Through Dynamic Engagement
"Ben Dattner has authored a brilliant and timely book. Unfortunately, the blame game is alive and all too well in business today. In The Blame Game the author offers us insights as to how to change the game and create healthy and productive companies." -- Doug Lennick, author, Moral Intelligence
Chapters:
Chapter One: How individuals assign credit or blame to themselves, considering how we all tend to give ourselves undue credit when things go well and to shirk responsibility when things go badly, from individuals overestimating their contributions to group projects to CEO’s making rationalizations in annual reports. Includes research about attribution theory and self-serving biases.
Chapter Two: Insights about how our family experiences, gender and cultural influences shape our ways of thinking about, and behaving in regard, to credit and blame. Covers both social psychology and psychoanalytic perspectives.
Chapter Three: How personality and personality types impact how individuals assign credit or blame to themselves and others, considering how tempting it is to hold others to a different standard and to cast blame away from ourselves. Based on years of research in personality psychology, includes most supported personality models and typologies.
Chapter Four: How situations influence how we perceive and react to credit and blame. Includes multiple perspective, including individual psychology, interpersonal psychology, and group psychology.
Chapter Five: Corporate cultures and how credit and blame is a key determinant of cultures, for better or for worse. Based on research and theories about functional and dysfunctional corporate cultures.
Chapter Six: Leadership- how leaders assign credit and blame, and how the atmosphere that they create influences their success or failure, as well as the success or failure of the organizations they lead. Includes leadership theories and examples.
Chapter Seven: Builds on the preceding chapters to suggest practical ways individuals and organizational leaders can increase the chances that credit and blame will be a positive force for change and growth rather than a negative force for stagnation and failure.
Author Q + A:
Why does credit and blame matter?
Credit and blame are at the very heart of organizational psychology, and help determine whether individuals learn and grow in their careers or derail, whether teams take an open minded approach to the challenges they face or succumb to the temptation to scapegoat and blame, and whether entire organizations have cultures of trust and problem solving or instead waste time and effort on dysfunctional finger pointing. As an organizational psychologist, every time I work with a client or client organization, the dynamics of credit and blame are what everyone is focused on. My role as a consultant and coach is to help individuals, teams, and entire organizations to reconsider their understanding of credit and blame, in order to stop negative cycles of blame and to create positive cycles of trust and collaboration.
Why is this topic timely?
Unfortunately, as the economy has tanked there has been a “bull market” in blame. Whether it’s financial bailouts or oil spills, it seems every time one turns on the television there is some executive testifying before Congress on some topic or other, blaming other organizations rather than taking any accountability. This culture of blame permeates far too many organizations these days, and the result is that organizations fail to motivate their people, to innovate, or to acknowledge and fix deficiencies. Successful leaders, teams, and organizations are able to fight this trend, and to create environments where people are more focused on admitting mistakes and fixing things rather than on deflecting blame or trying to hoard credit.
What kinds of perspectives do you take on credit and blame in the book?
The book considers credit and blame from the point of view of individual psychology, relationships between individuals, dynamics within and between teams, and from the point of view of entire organizations. It also looks at leadership, and gives examples of how great leaders set a personal example for managing the dynamics of credit and blame in an open and positive manner. The book approaches credit and blame from both a theoretical and practical perspective, and I endeavored to balance descriptions with prescriptions.
Is there anything that a) readers and b) organizations can do to make things better?
Yes- there is an entire chapter that outlines specific things that individuals, organizations, and organizational leaders can do to make things better. These suggestions include tools to diagnose and evaluate one’s own credit and blame challenges and opportunities, as well as those of others. In addition to specific evaluative tools, this chapter also provides general advice about how to manage credit and blame for oneself and others in a more mindful and strategic way. This chapter should help individuals at every stage of their careers think in a new way about how they react to credit and blame, and how they assign it to others, and should help organizations and organizational leaders think in a new way about how the social psychology of the workplace can be understood and improved.
And what’s new about this book?
I must give credit to many other people for the ideas in this book, ranging from academics to business leaders, as well as many colleagues and clients. What I hope is new about this book is that it ties together theories, practices and examples into a single integrated picture of credit and blame, and considers credit and blame as causes of organizational behavior, rather than just as effects. Hopefully readers will gain a new way of looking at credit and blame, one that will help them more successfully navigate the dynamics of credit and blame in their workplaces and careers.
Author bio:
Ben Dattner, Ph.D. is an organizational psychologist, and the founder of Dattner Consulting, a workplace consulting firm based in New York City. He has helped a wide variety of corporate and non-profit organizations sort through their credit and blame issues to become more successful. Ben's consulting services enable organizations to make better hiring and staffing decisions, to enhance the professional capabilities of managers and employees, to configure teams more effectively, and to reduce the amount of interpersonal and inter-group conflict by, in part, embracing candor and accuracy when it comes to handing out credit and blame.
Ben is an Adjunct Professor at New York University, where he teaches Organizational Development in the Industrial and Organizational Psychology MA Program in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He has also taught Strategic Career Management in the Executive MBA Program at Stern Business School. Ben received a BA in Psychology from Harvard College, and an MA and Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from New York University, where he was a MacCracken Fellow and his doctoral dissertation analyzed the relationship between narcissism and fairness in the workplace. Ben's master's thesis examined the impact of trust on negotiation.
He is a member of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Society for Consulting Psychology/Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, and the Metro New York Applied Psychology Association. Before graduate school, Ben worked at Republic National Bank of New York for three years, first as a Management Trainee and then as Assistant to the CEO. After graduate school, he was Director of Human Resources at Blink.com before founding Dattner Consulting.
Contact information:
Ben Dattner, Ph.D
Dattner Consulting, LLC
Phone: 212 501 8945
Mobile: 917 533 7987
ben@dattnerconsulting.com
www.dattnerconsulting.com
Book website: http://www.creditandblame.com/
