Are your solutions to shifting the blame as creative as those in The Boss of it All?
Films set in offices can reflect badly on us humble desk workers. Surely we can't all be as bitchy as the characters in The Devil Wears Prada, or disillusioned as the drones in Office Space. It's not about to get any more flattering as a workplace comedy set in the offices of a small Danish IT firm zooms in on a particularly unattractive branch of office politics - shifting the blame.
Getting on at work can be tough, and most of us don't feel we can afford to be associated with our own lapses of judgment. If we can find someone else at fault, we probably will. No matter how hideous our error we can usually think of at least one person who should have stopped us before we emailed our client's personal details to a rival, or emptied the stock cupboard into the dustbin.
But if you're head honcho the buck should always stop with you. If your product fails, well, it was your big idea. You might think you work with fools, but hey, you hired them. If times are lean and tough decisions need to be made, you will be the one dishing out the P45s. You can't talk you way out of it either, because you know your employees will always remember every injustice, missed promotion and stingy pay rise.
So if your name is on the letterhead and you want to boost your popularity, what can you do?
In The Boss of it All, which came out today, the "hero" has an inventive solution - he creates a fictional company president whom his employees never get the chance to meet. And then he goes about hiring, firing, denying staff perks and generally playing Scrooge while shifting the blame to the mysterious prez. It works very well - to a point.
Assuming that we aren't all inventing members of senior management (though if you are, do let us know), who do you blame when things go wrong at work? I would guess that technology comes in for a lot of the flak these days - who hasn't claimed there have been "problems with the server" when in reality we just haven't got around to sending that email yet? Interns and workies probably suffer unfairly, too. Who else?
