
Elephant Island, where Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were marooned in 1916. After their ship Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea, the Shackleton expedition drifted north on sea ice from 27 October 1915 to 9 April 1916, when they reached the end of the ice and took to open boats for the journey to Elephant Island. There Shackleton left the main body of his crew, and undertook an open boat journey with five others to South Georgia, where he began navigating the bureaucracies of several governments to eventually secure a ship to rescue his marooned crew. At any of dozens of points in this saga, Shackleton could have evaded responsibility and rescued himself, from both the elements and the judgment of history. That he did not avoid that responsibility, and instead embraced it, is a lesson to us all.
Leaders, above all others, have opportunities to avoid responsibility with little risk to their reputations. Stories like Shackleton's provide inspiration and insight that are helpful to all leaders, in business, the military and government. Read the story in detail in Roland Huntford's biography of Shackleton, Shackleton. Photo by Mike Vecchione, courtesy U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
If your organization aspires to high performance, it's useful to know who avoids responsibility or the risks of being held accountable. Unless you're astute and alert, you'll eventually be a recipient of responsibility shifted by these shirkers. This little handbook is for you.
And if you're among the unfortunate majority who don't work in high-performance organizations, responsibility-shifting skills are essential to survival. Until you find a job somewhere better, this little handbook is for you.
Here are some popular techniques people use for avoiding responsibility. I've written it as a handbook for shirkers, but it's also useful for those who want to know how shirkers operate.
- Telecommute
- Working from a remote site makes anyone more difficult to reach, especially in emergencies. Evading responsibility is easier when you aren't there.
- Fend it off
- The best approach is to have the requestor ask someone else. If that doesn't work, inform the requestor that Mortimer is in charge of such things. Be creative. If all else fails, delegate.
- Defer the request
- Tell the requestor to come back later. Offer a particular time only if necessary. As time passes, the request might be overtaken by events, or forgotten, or the requestor might find somebody else to take responsibility.
- Drag your feet
- Accept the request, but send the requestor away with "Leave it on my desk," "Send me email," or even better, "Leave it with Melvin," if Melvin is your assistant. (Remember to use your assistant's actual name.) Leave-it-with-my-assistant is best because it makes you seem more important. Only later, apply the techniques below.
- Demand the broomstick of the wicked witch of the West
- Tell the requestor that Mortimer must deal with the request first, and after Mortimer does whatever he does, you'll review it. This protects you somewhat in case of later disaster, because you can say that you relied on Mortimer's input. Of course, again, use Mortimer's actual name.
- Demand more information
- In low-performance cultures,
responsibility-shifting skills
are essential to survival - Ask the requestor for more information — preferably information that takes time to acquire. During that time, you can prepare to use one of these other techniques.
- Excuses, excuses
- If somehow the request reaches you despite your best efforts, find excuses to delay or to send it back. Be too busy. Play dumb. Make something up. The best excuses involve travel, or people high in the org chart, or travel with people high in the org chart. The requestor must then either find someone else to deal with the request, or go ahead anyway somehow. Either way, you're off the hook.
Probably the most famous master of avoiding responsibility is Major Major Major, a character in Joseph Heller's Catch-22. [Heller 2004]. Major Major avoids all contact with anyone who might want anything. Clever. Sorry, no time for questions, gotta go now. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
Managing Pressure: The Unexpected
- When projects falter, we expect demands for status and explanations. What's puzzling is how often this
happens to projects that aren't in trouble. Here's Part II of a catalog of strategies for managing
pressure.
Mitigating Risk Resistance Risk
- Project managers are responsible for managing risks, but they're often stymied by insufficient resources.
Here's a proposal for making risk management more effective at an organizational scale.
Critical Communications
- From time to time, we're responsible for sending critical communications — essential messages
that the intended recipients must have. It's a heavy responsibility that can bear some risk. A strategy
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Fear/Anxiety Bias: I
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See also Workplace Politics and Workplace Politics for more related articles.
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And on May 21: Mismanaging Project Managers
- Most organizations hold project managers accountable for project performance. But they don't grant those project managers control of needed resources. Nor do they hold project sponsors or other senior managers accountable for the consequences of their actions when they interfere with project work. Here's a catalog of behaviors worth looking at. Available here and by RSS on May 21.
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group