As a management trainer and sometime consultant since 2004, I can safely say I’ve pretty much seen every type of dysfunctional culture. That is until I see the next one. But based on a decade-and-a-half of experience, hands down, THE most dysfunctional culture I’ve seen to date was one I experienced first-hand from 1995 – 1998 while in the Navy, stationed up in the Pacific Northwest.
I came there with 12 years in, fully motivated and intent on completing a 20-year career. Within 18 months I was looking for the quickest way out of the Navy. With the benefit of hindsight, I know most of what caused the dysfunction. It was a culture of blame. When something went wrong, we looked for someONE, not someTHING to blame.
- When a process broke down, we looked for human error.
- When we couldn’t get resources, we looked for who was at fault.
- When we couldn’t get a promotion, we blamed the system.
- When we were understaffed, we blamed the detailers.
- When we had unmotivated sailors, we blamed the generation.
The blame came from top-down which led to fear, loathing, and apathy at all levels. It was as if the Navy wanted to take the absolute worst officers and enlisted and put them together into one place (mind you, I was there too). The culture was there when I arrived, but it seems as though for every person that transferred, their replacement fit right in and reinforced it, or made it worse. The harder the Command tried to enforce discipline, the more chaos it created. Nobody tried harder for fear of retribution. And nobody took ownership for their own personal situations.
And sure, we were in the military. The battle for us? Tooth decay. I was a dental assistant, managing other dental assistants at a dental command.
In my work today, I still see organizations with blame cultures. That’s a problem. The biggest problem though is the helplessness and apathy it creates in the workforce. Over the next 10 weeks we’re going to look at how to conquer BLAME and create OWNERs. You owe it to yourself and your team to be an OWNER, not a BLAMEr. Those acronyms will make more sense soon. They are the tips I’ll offer up