You Are Your Own Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

So, this actually happens. You've probably seen it.

A manager asks for advice on managing, and certain staff perceive that as a weakness - and also not their job. They decline to give relevant input and then bitch endlessly about the cluelessness of management when decisions are made.

They create organizational failure in the very way they conduct themselves on a daily basis. And then they blame the failure they've created on someone else.

This infuriates me more than anything else I see in IT, precisely because it is so insidiously passive-aggressive, and always gives the perpetrator several outs ("I didn't DO anything", "I'm not paid to make decisions", etc., etc.).

I'm certainly not saying that management is blameless. Far from it. My point is that there is blame on all sides, and anyone who says "I'm pure. I'm not to blame for any of this" is most likely either lying or deceiving themselves.

We're all guilty of the organizational dysfunction we live with because we all create it together. And organizational dysfunction is a lot like cigarette smoking: it's bad for you, and it's a very difficult habit to break. The difference is that you alone control your smoking; the entire organization controls your organizational culture.