Credit and Blame Archives - understand-culture

The Vocabulary of Credit

Toot your own horn. To toot your own horn is to talk about your own achievements.

Give credit where credit is due. The speaker names the person who did the work.

Take credit for. A person who takes credit for something claims the work, sometimes work that someone else did.

Steal someone’s thunder. This means to take the attention that another person had earned.

A feather in your cap. This is an achievement that adds to your record.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The person who speaks up gets the attention.

Visibility. In office speech, visibility means being seen by the people who decide on promotions.

Humblebrag. This is a boast that is disguised as modesty.

The Vocabulary of Blame

Scapegoat. This is a person who is blamed for the failures of others.

Fall guy. This is the person who is set up to take the blame.

Take the fall. A person who takes the fall accepts the blame, often for something others did.

Pass the buck. To pass the buck is to push responsibility on to someone else.

Point fingers. People who point fingers blame others.

The blame game. In the blame game, everyone blames someone else.

Heads will roll. People will lose their jobs because of the failure.

Left holding the bag. This person is blamed after the others got away.

In November 1999 the Institute of Medicine published To Err Is Human. It estimated that at least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000, die in US hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented.

The report argued that “the majority of medical errors do not result from individual recklessness.” It warned that “blaming an individual does little to make the system safer.”

The Blameless Postmortem

On May 22, 2012, John Allspaw wrote about “blameless postmortems” on Etsy’s engineering blog, Code as Craft. He described a familiar cycle after a failure. The “Engineer is punished, shamed, blamed, or retrained.” Engineers then “become silent on details,” and the result is “Cover-Your-Ass” engineering.

In a blameless postmortem, the engineer gives a detailed account of what happened “without fear of punishment or retribution.” The aim is to learn how the failure happened.

Allspaw gave the method a name because, as he described it, the familiar response to failure is to name, blame and shame.

Get the Girl

In 1960 Katherine Johnson and the engineer Ted Skopinski wrote a NASA report on equations for orbital spaceflight. According to NASA, it was “the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.”

Before his orbital flight, the astronaut John Glenn asked the engineers to “get the girl.” He wanted Johnson to check the computer’s numbers by hand. In 2015, at 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Taraji P. Henson played her in the film Hidden Figures.

Percent at Fault

After a car accident in Massachusetts, a jury may have to divide the blame in numbers. The state’s model jury instruction tells jurors to “determine the percentage that the plaintiff was negligent,” and then the percentage for each defendant. “The combined total of the negligence of the plaintiff and (defendant) (defendants) must equal 100 percent.”

The person who sued then receives damages reduced by his or her own share of the fault. A plaintiff found more than 50 percent at fault “will recover nothing.” This rule is called comparative negligence.

Rank and Yank

In the 1980s Jack Welch introduced a ranking system at General Electric. The top 20 percent of employees were the most productive, and the middle 70 percent did adequate work. The bottom 10 percent were to be fired. The practice became known as “rank and yank.” Welch called it “differentiation” and defended it. “If you want teamwork, you identify it as a value.”

Microsoft used a version called stack ranking. Each employee received a single rating from 1 to 5. The rating “triggered increases in merit pay, bonuses and the awarding of restricted stock units.” In November 2013 Microsoft’s head of human resources, Lisa Brummel, ended the system in an email to employees. “No more curve,” she wrote.

You’re Fired

The Apprentice premiered on NBC on January 8, 2004, with Donald Trump as host. The contestants worked in two teams on business tasks. For each task, each team chose one member as project manager.

The winning team was excused from the boardroom. The losing team was “questioned about the reasons for their loss and which members were responsible.” The project manager then chose teammates to face a final boardroom round. Episodes usually ended with one contestant hearing the words “You’re fired!”

The Matthew Effect

In January 1968 Robert K. Merton of Columbia University published “The Matthew Effect in Science” in the journal Science. The name comes from the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.” Merton described “the accruing of large increments of peer recognition to scientists of great repute.”

A Nobel laureate in physics put it simply: “the man who’s best known gets more credit, an inordinate amount of credit.”

The biologists R. C. Lewontin and J. L. Hubby described what happened to their joint work. Population geneticists, they wrote, “have consistently regarded Lewontin as the senior member of the team and given him undue credit for what was a completely collaborative work.”

The Brag Document

In June 2019 Julia Evans advised the readers of her programming blog to keep a “brag document.” She started from a common belief. “There’s this idea that, if you do great work at your job, people will (or should!) automatically recognize that work and reward you for it with promotions / increased pay.” In practice, she wrote, “it’s often more complicated than that.”

Her advice is to write down your own work before performance reviews. “And if you don’t remember everything important you did, your manager (no matter how great they are!) probably doesn’t either.” Work that is hard to see belongs in the document too, “because it’s the most likely to fall under the radar!”