In sectors like finance, would you take the responsibility and blame for something at work or is it better to let someone else take the blame?

For high stress, high stakes sectors like finance, tech, and medical care where one mistake can negatively affect your reputation, do people usually willing take the responsibility and blame for something even if they are not to be blamed for it, or do people usually push the blame onto someone else (so I guess you can say backstabbing)? This is not a question of what is considered morally right or wrong but rather what happens to be the reality at work. Furthermore, I can not speak for the finance world, but in tech, it seems that people would push the negative stuff onto someone else's name and would pick up the positive things for themselves even if they had no real part in the project or something.  

2 Comments
 

I think most people in the industry tend to blame others, or at least shift blame from themselves to other “external factors.”

I have made one what I would consider “material” mistake in a deck sent to external investors, and they called my team out on it - I owned up to my MD right away, sincerely apologized, acknowledged how it made us look bad and said it wouldn’t happen again. He was actually really cool about it, and has still continued to be in my corner since. It was for the heaviest lift of a deal I’ve ever been staffed on, so I think he acknowledged how much we all had been working and he didn’t let it discount all the other hard work I’d done.

My philosophy is to always be honest, but I recognize the industry can be cutthroat and people with egos can be overly harsh. Sometimes you make a mistake that you can fix without anyone else realizing you ever made the mistake in the first place, but if I think there is a chance something could come back to bite me I feel it’s best to proactively bring up and put to rest (I noticed ABC and fixed by doing XYZ, just giving you a heads up). However if caught I would NEVER blame someone else for my mistakes. That’s just a shitty thing to do and if the truth comes out, your credibility is ruined. In fact, even if someone else does make a mistake that impacts me and it somehow comes up in conversation, I try to avoid playing the blame game/bad-mouthing the other person and instead try to focus on the solution. It still can reflect poorly on you to bad mouth others like that, even if it is their fault.

 
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