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How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure
Simon and Schuster
March 2011
On Sale: March 15, 2011
256 pages ISBN: 143916956X EAN: 9781439169568 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
FROM HIS YEARS OF EXPERIENCE CONSULTING to leading
companies, psychologist Ben Dattner has discovered that at
the root of the worst problems we confront at work is the
skewed allocation of blame and credit. In so many
workplaces, people feel they’re playing a high-stakes game
of “blame or be blamed,” which can be disastrous for the
individuals who get caught up in it and can sink teams and
afflict whole companies. Dattner presents compelling
evidence that whether we fall into the trap of playing the
blame game or learn to avoid the pitfalls is a major
determinant of how successful we will be. The problem is that so many workplaces foster a blaming
culture. Maybe you have a constantly blaming boss, or a
colleague who is always taking credit for others’ work. All
too often, individuals are scapegoated, teams fall apart,
projects get derailed, and people become disengaged because
fear and resentment have taken root. And what’s worse, the
more emotionally charged a workplace is—maybe our jobs are
threatened or we’re facing a particularly difficult
challenge—the more emphatically people play the game, just
when trust and collaboration are most needed. What can we
do? We can learn to understand the hidden dynamics of human
psychology that lead to this bad behavior so that we can
inoculate ourselves against it and defuse the tensions in
our own workplace. In lively prose that is as engaging as it is illuminating,
Dattner tells a host of true stories of those he has worked
with—from the woman who was so scapegoated by her colleagues
that she decided to quit, to the clueless boss who was too
quick to blame his staff. He shares a wealth of insight from
the study of human evolution and psychology to reveal the
underlying reasons why people are so prone to blaming and
credit-grabbing; it’s not only human nature, it’s found
throughout the animal kingdom. Even bats do it. He shows how
our family experiences, gender, and culture also all shape
the way we cope with credit and blame issues, and introduces
eleven personality types that are especially prone to
causing difficulties and illustrates how we can best cope
with them. He also profiles how a number of outstanding
leaders, from General Dwight Eisenhower and President Harry
Truman to highly respected business figures such as former
Intel CEO Andy Grove and Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, employed
the power of taking blame and sharing credit to achieve
great success. The only winning move in the blame game, Dattner shows, is
not to play, and the insights and practical suggestions in
this book will help readers, at any level of any
organization and at any stage of their careers, learn to
manage the crucial psychology of credit and blame for
themselves and others.
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