Before an unpopular move, leaders put an expendable party in the blame slot (an outside reviewer, a departing executive, a recruit hired for a doomed role), so the backlash lands there.
An example
Three quarters before a hotel group planned to cut a fifth of its property-level management jobs, the chief executive commissioned an outside efficiency review. The review recommended the cuts. A senior vice president of operations, already known to be leaving at year end, was asked to front the announcement and the town halls at all thirty-one properties, and the chief executive was traveling during each one. A regional general manager who sat through four of them noticed that the review's terms of reference, dated the previous spring, had named management layers as its first area of focus. When staff asked who had decided, the departing executive said the findings left no choice. Three months later the chief executive presented the savings to investors as the result of "acting decisively on independent advice."
Why it works
Putting an expendable party in the blame slot before the unpopular move makes the move cheap for the people who decided it. The reviewer, the departing executive, or the recruit absorbs the anger, and the decision-makers keep their standing. Once that party has been publicly tagged as responsible, naming the real authors means repudiating the story, which is costly for anyone who tries. It depends on a stand-in plausible as the owner, on an exit that already looks natural, on an audience that blames individuals over systems, and on decision-makers who keep their distance. It fails when the audience traces the decision back anyway: the principal then pays in full and looks cowardly as well.
The thinking behind it
Niccolò Machiavelli In The Prince (1532), Machiavelli advises princes to "leave affairs of reproach to the management of others, and keep those of grace in their own hands," and gives the example of Cesare Borgia, who put a harsh deputy in charge of pacifying the Romagna and then had him executed and displayed to show the cruelty had not been his. A departing executive fronting the cuts and an outside review commissioned in advance are corporate versions of that deputy.
Lee Ross The fundamental attribution error, named by Ross in The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (1977), is the tendency to blame persons and underweight situations. An audience that blames individuals will settle on whoever fronts the announcement, which is why the expendable party absorbs the anger. It is also why the defense is to ask in the forum who decided, and to have the decision recorded under that name.
Murray Edelman Edelman's Constructing the Political Spectacle (1988) argues that problems, leaders, and enemies are constructed and interpreted for an audience. An outside review commissioned quarters before the cuts constructs the problem the cuts will solve and supplies someone responsible for naming it. Checking when the review's terms of reference were written, and by whom, exposes the construction before the story settles.
Warning signs
Blame-holders are appointed before the decision, sometimes well before: an outside review commissioned quarters ahead of the cuts it later recommends, a departing executive fronting the announcement and the town halls while the sponsor stays out of the room. A risky initiative has a named owner without matching decision authority. An external hire arrives with a premium package, a vague mandate, pre-negotiated severance, and no internal champion for what they were hired to deliver.
How to defend yourself
Check the timing first: when was the blame-holder appointed relative to the decision, and who chose them?
- If you are asked to front a decision you did not make, make it conditional on the decision-maker standing beside you in public, or decline the role. What you are refusing is the absorption; the decision itself may be sound.
- If you are being recruited into a high-risk role, ask who inside the company champions the initiative, and negotiate against the failure: longer vesting, a public statement of the mandate, explicit success criteria, and a narrow scope of exposure.
- If you are in the audience, ask in the forum who made the decision, and ask that it be recorded under their name.
Wherever you are named as owner, get your accountability matched in writing to the authority you actually hold.
How a leader shuts it down
Put the decision-maker's name on the announcement itself, and have them in the room for the hard meetings. Record decisions under the names of the people who made them. Look hard at any hire whose severance was settled before their success criteria. Companies that become known for hiring people to absorb blame find the strong candidates stop taking their calls.