Blame Culture

Got a team that isn't performing? Won't raise issues in the retrospective? Acting like group of individuals rather than a team? Product owners constantly changing priorities mid-sprint? Scrum masters not protecting the team from interference? Team communicating via email instead of talking? That's quite a laundry list of dysfunction, isn't it? You would think you have a whole bunch of problems to solve, but if you are seeing all of these at once in a team that has been together for more than a sprint or two, chances are you only have one. It's a big one though. There is one really common dysfunction that can cause a whole range of problems. Usually, it's not a problem with the team, it's a problem with the wider organisation. What could well be to blame for your team's problems is...blame.

A corporate culture based on assigning blame for failure can manifest in a wide range of bad behaviours. The first casualty of a blame culture is trust. If everyone is frightened of being blamed for something, they will tend to start deflecting blame to others - "it's not my fault... Fred didn't get his part done in time...blame him!" Naturally, teamwork suffers as people retreat into self-protective shells and start communicating via documents and emails so they have evidence to back up their side of the story when blame time comes round. Naturally, this sort of thing makes teamwork pretty difficult. As soon as blame starts getting handed around, trust evaporates and with it goes teamwork.