Morning,
‘Deolu here, before Joseph Parker takes it away, in the spirit of valentine, there will be another post up by 3pm, 18+, its called Animal Lust, endeavor to read it. People who love rough sex should like it 🙂
See ya!
__
Happy St. Valentine’s Day Reader, although personally, I think today is overrated. The way you see how the desperation for a lover takes over a person’s being as if their lives depended on it, one wonders that if you are single, it’ll be better to tie a huge stone around your neck and jump into the lagoon. Dear reader, maybe at this point, you are bored and have no one to be with. Whether you long for a boyfriend or girlfriend, or miss your family and friends, keep in mind that humans are indeed social animals, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t be perfectly happy outside of society too.
Remember this: You may be single, but you are not alone. Valentine’s Day is meant to celebrate love, not couples. Just because you are not in a romantic relationship, doesn’t mean you don’t have love in your life. I’m sure St. Valentine would have preferred if we focused on giving love this season. Love is about giving and sharing, and not taking and getting. If you focus and where you can get love, you will be disappointed, but if you think about the people (notice I didn’t say person) you love, you will find joy.
That being said (my good deed of the day done) I will delve right into our discussion for this week: The Blame Game. Whether you are in Aso Rock or small cubicle, things go wrong at work. And when they do, blame must be assigned. The key to surviving and prospering in your job is knowing when to dodge the blame, when to deflect it, and when to take the hit.
The problem with the blame game is that everybody thinks he’s a player. It is easy to see why: There’s just no beating it for elegance and adaptability. The object is simple (just point and scream), so anyone can play, and a single contest can accommodate any number of participants. Class-action versions are in vogue, but one enduring variation remains solitaire, whereby a single player nurses a specific bitter grievance for an indeterminate period, often over the course of an entire miserable lifetime. But like golf, blame is a game of deceptive simplicity, and Nigeria’s corridors of power are littered with whimpering fools who underestimated its challenges.
To paraphrase the great cult philosopher Tyler Durden, the first rule of the blame game is: You don’t talk about the blame game. When facing the fallout from a major catastrophe, the last thing you do is invoke what sounds like a cheap phrase – “Let’s not play the blame game” – that (a) articulates the very thing you’re trying to avoid, (b) trivialises the severe fuckup for which you’re being held accountable, and (c) telegraphs your attempt to conflate blame with responsibility. This is, in fact, pretty much the opposite of what you want to accomplish: appearing to take responsibility while deftly deflecting the fallout.
Everyone hates the colleague who never, ever takes a hot, and sophisticated blame gamers understand how to preserve the illusion of accountability while minimising the damage. Your ability to survive and thrive in your average cutthroat professional environment may depend on your mastery of the three fundamental blame-game techniques: dodging, assigning, and trickiest of all, accepting.
Dodging
Anyone who has ever studied a martial art knows that the most effective tactic in self-defence is avoiding the fight in the first place. Only an idiot walks the streets at night without keeping an eye on the shadows in the block ahead, and you’re a dimwit of you don’t immediately size up your co-workers so that you can avoid, whenever possible, sharing responsibilities with the laggards, the incompetents, and all the other office parasites likely to sabotage your best efforts. If the boss asks you to produce a project with the biggest loser on staff, you’d better think up a good excuse. And fast.
If you do get sucked into a lose-lose situation, you can protect yourself with effective communication. Rule number one: Document all key exchanges. E-mail wasn’t just invented to facilitate the spread of vicious rumours; it is also the single greatest ass-covering technology ever devised. I was once involved in a nasty spat with a superior who wanted to get rid of me. He routinely altered instructions midway through assignments so that he could later claim I was failing to follow directions. I tried to limit my communication with him to e-mail – that way, I could always refer to earlier exchanges. And when he caught on to that, I switched to taking notes. It didn’t take him long to seek easier prey.
E-mail’s virtues, of course, can also prove a liability in the blame game. Never, ever (ever) send a sentence via e-mail that you wouldn’t be happy to see posted, your name, on the Internet. Remember, once you’ve hit the send button, that message might as well ne engraved on granite.
Assigning
Few things are less appealing than overt finger-pointing. Plus, nobody likes a snitch. So the art of assigning blame involves the skilful use of misdirection, i.e., blaming people without appearing to do so (there so many things I cannot share here. Meet me around the street corner.) More often than not, this can be accomplished by keeping your mouth shut and letting the “amebos” hang themselves. Certain situations, however, require that you take some initiative, and one of the most effective strategies is the pre-emptive warning: Under the guise of keeping your boss “in the loop” on a project, you offhandedly share some concerns about the weak link on your team. You can even disguise such a comment as praise, as in “Biodun’s got some really innovative ideas for Friday’s pitch meeting. He can’t wait to see how the client likes them.” When the shit hits the fan, the seed has already been planted in your boss’s head.
Accepting
I have never gotten into serious trouble for admitting a mistake. On the contrary, I learned a long time ago that timely acceptance of responsibility tends to defuse whatever bomb you’ve ignited. The operative word here is timely. Even when I might have gotten away with, I’ve never tried to lie my out of trouble after I almost caused my former employers a boko-haramish fiasco! Ultimately, the best prophylactic against blame is competence, and one aspect of competence is integrity. When you screw up, admit it and take the consequence like a grown-up. You will earn some respect – not least with your own bad self.
Peace of mind…over everything.
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