Foreman Tries to Scapegoat Civil Engineer After Pouring Wrong Concrete Foundations, Refused To Take Mere Minutes To Refer to the Drawings Despite Being Asked 3 Times—Gets Fired When the Engineer Comes With Receipts – FAIL Blog

A civil engineer documents a foreman’s mistake after being blamed by the foreman for having poured incorrect concrete foundations

When does documenting workplace mistakes become responsible accountability, and when can it feel like someone is protecting themselves at another person’s expense?

Mounting pressure in the workplace often leads to mistakes. Pressure can’t always be avoided, but workplace cultures- coworkers, collaborators, or leaders who insist on finger-pointing when something goes wrong, and organizations that feed into this and insist on punishing those who are bearing the blame become a concrete issue. While accountability is important, creating a culture where everyone is scurrying to make sure the blame doesn’t stick to them and where people can effectively be scapegoated for something that wasn’t their fault presents a more foundational problem.

Besides, these days it’s kind of hard to get away with blaming someone for something. With so much being written and recorded electronically, there is a paper trail following you everywhere. Of course, there is always the risk that all of this evidence is simply ignored by toxic leaders and sycophants who are eager to stay tucked in behind their coat tails. 

When you have repeatedly ignored repeated warnings and then tried to shift blame to where it is unwarranted, you can’t fault anyone but yourself when it comes to bite you.

In this story, an engineer found himself facing blame for a foreman’s hasty error. The engineer documented the conversation and the builder’s decisions in a follow-up email. He learned later that the foreman had been fired, and wondered whether or not he was wrong for redirecting the blame right back at the foreman like an uno reverse card.

In the case of the foreman’s ranting about engineers always being problematic… You see it said often that if you encounter someone who is a problem once in a while, they’re probably the problem. But when you are always encountering people who are problems, you are probably the problem.