Never Blame the Other Guy

author: Lee Buttolph

Never Blame the Other Guy... until you have fully solved the problem.

I was almost fired on my first day or real work in the Marine Corps because I didn’t follow this dictum. We were having problems with our communications network and as the duty Watch Officer I was responsible for making sure it got up and running.

My Commanding Officer (CO) stopped by to get a status update and I told him “It’s the other ends fault, we are waiting for them to fix the problem.”

"Wrongo Bongo." He didn’t like that answer and he proceeded to tell me that we never presume it is someone else's fault. We work, in a coordinated manner, with our counterpart on the other end of the line to jointly troubleshoot the problem. We never blame the other side and we continuously check to make sure our side of the network is working until the problems is found and resolved.