Why We Love a Scapegoat

Happy Thursday,

It happens in politics, organisations, small businesses, big businesses and life. Something goes wrong, and we look for a scapegoat. A project fails, a customer gets pissed off, a target gets missed, or a decision blows up, and almost immediately we start looking for someone to shoulder the blame. Sometimes, of course, someone genuinely screwed up. But more often than not, there isn't one villain. There is just a collection of decisions, incentives, processes and circumstances that somehow combined to produce a bad outcome. Unfortunately, our brains aren't particularly fond of messy explanations. So we find a scapegoat. Blaming someone feels like solving something. But it isn't.

🧠 LEARN something.

Part of this comes down to something psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. We tend to overestimate the contribution of someone's character or ability, and underestimate the contribution of the situation around them. Someone misses a deadline and they're unreliable. Someone makes a poor decision and they're incompetent. A team isn't performing and the manager isn't good enough. Maybe. But what about unclear priorities, conflicting incentives, poor information, competing KPIs, poor leadership from above, ridiculous workloads or a decision-making process where five people can say no and nobody can actually say yes? Those explanations are harder because systems are messy, complex and difficult to pin on one person. Responsibility gets spread across structures, processes, decisions and people, which makes finding a single person to blame incredibly attractive.

Organisations do this all the time. Someone gets moved, managed out or replaced and everyone feels like something has been done. Then, six months later, remarkably similar problems appear with a completely different person. As someone who works with CEOs and executive teams every day, I see this more often than you might think. And when the pattern keeps repeating, at some point you have to consider the possibility that you don't just keep hiring the wrong people. Maybe you've created conditions that make sensible people behave in remarkably similar ways. This doesn't mean people shouldn't be accountable. Of course they should. But accountability and blame aren't the same thing. Accountability asks what someone could reasonably have done differently. Leadership should also ask what made that behaviour or outcome more likely in the first place. Otherwise, you can replace the person without ever fixing the problem.

🤔 REFLECT on an idea.

It's easy to read that as letting people off the hook. I don't think it is. People are responsible for their decisions and behaviour, but leaders are also responsible for the conditions people operate within. Sometimes the most important question isn't who failed, but why the system made failure so easy.

😊 SMILE a little.

The good news is you got rid of the problem. The bad news? You said that about the last three people you let go too. 😂

📣 Wait, before we get to actions...

Help me out here. Rather than me sitting here guessing what 6,000+ subscribers want to read about, I thought I’d do something radical and actually ask you! Help me make Leadership Unplugged the best and least clichéd leadership newsletter in the industry.

Give me your thoughts. It takes 2 minutes, and if you complete it before 3 September, you’ll go in the draw to win a $100 Prezzy Card.

✅ DO IT to get results.

Now back to the newsletter. Two things to consider, depending on where you sit.

If you're the leader, resist starting with "Who screwed this up?" Ask, "What made this outcome happen?" Look at the person, absolutely, but also look upstream at the expectations, incentives, information, workload, processes, decisions and leadership around them. You might still conclude that someone needs to be held accountable. But you might also find something far more useful: a problem you can actually stop happening again.

If you feel like you're becoming the scapegoat, don't wait until the story has already been written about you. Don't let your optimism or pride get in the way. Instead, get ahead of it. Make decisions, risks, dependencies and concerns visible early, preferably in writing. Ask for clarity when expectations are vague. Speak up when something isn't working rather than quietly carrying it. And build relationships beyond your immediate boss so other people understand your contribution and context. You can't always stop someone looking for a scapegoat, but you can make it much harder for an unfair narrative to become the accepted one.

🌱 How can we support you?

We provide strategic leadership solutions tailored to align with your business strategy, size, and budget. We can support you with:

• Individual Coaching (for leaders and doers)

• Team Coaching (for group and leadership teams)

• Workshops, off-sites, and team building

• In-house Leadership Programs to suit your scale.

Kia pai tō wiki

Kenny Bhosale

CEO & Founder, The Bridge Leaders