Yeah management by blame is the worst kind. It's usually fostered by higher level managers who are severely insecure in their ability to make decisions. Run away from places like that. As fast as you can.
I went to work briefly for a mattress company. On my first day we had a meeting with a sr VP, or may have been COO kind of position, can't remember. Either way the highest person they had to get on the call. There were major system issues they were working through and I had just been debriefed but I had a good idea where some of the issues were. In the conversation I noticed hardly anyone was willing to speak up to her about anything, and as soon as the previous day's performance was being discussed she went straight to whose fault is it lines of questioning. The engineer tried to divert the conversation back to the actual issue, you know the system problems that were the root of all of it, and she got more and more aggitated until she fairly yelled "I want to know who is to blame!" I jumped in at that point, being the new guy and responsible for the site, and said "I guess it is me to blame, I am responsible for the operation, can we get back to dealing with the root cause of the issues?" Wow was that the wrong thing to say. I soon found this attitude was pervasive, mainly because of this one leader filtering the **** down through the various levels of leadership. My boss and the HR manager acted like a mini-hit squad, going after people to be sure to be able to sacrifice someone in case something went wrong. Seldom was the focus on the actual problems, hence we had a really hard time resolving anything. At one point I went against the flow and told them we needed to back off of a plan we were pursuing and start over again, hey if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Man was that the end for me. No way to move backward one step to go forward 3. I was then "the guy to blame". Wasn't long and we separated because I wasn't having any of that ****.
There are a lot of companies that operate this way unfortunately. "Leaders" who get where they are by being "***-kickers" which gets short-term results and is highly visible, so the other higher-ups, who were also "***-kickers" elevate their fellow ***-kickers into higher and higher positions of authority. If you can find a company that does not operate on the mantra of expendable human capital, with managers willing to look not just at the operation, but themselves, as ultimately fallible and needing correction from time to time, stick with them.
I make a very strong effort to lead my managers away from root cause analyses (whether large-scale formal RCAs or simply day to day diagnostic conversations about minor issues that arise) that ultimately end on "employee error", because if our systems are robust enough, this will be the true cause in the vast minority if incidents, not most of them. And frankly, if this is legitimately the problem most of the time, then your management system, or operations systems, need to be seriously overhauled. Most people try to do the best they can to do with what they have been taught to do, with the tools available, in a way they think is most efficient. If any of those things are lacking (training, tools, motivation) that needs to be viewed as a failure of management, not the people.
Sorry didn't mean to rant, this is just something close to me personally so I wanted to address it.
