Blaming someone else -- twice

Friday, December 11, 2009, 8:41 AM
Business by John (Article #252)

Here's something no one will ever tell you about business: sometimes you're going to have to blame someone else. In American culture it's generally unacceptable to push blame onto others. We're hesitant to even consider blaming someone else, because frankly the tendency to blame others is one of the diagnostic criteria for being a psychopath. So, we're told that functional adults take responsibility.

The problem is that sometimes it isn't your fault. Worse, sometimes someone else really, really does need to eat shit for their mistakes. In a client relationship this is difficult to navigate. You have to be with a client for a long time before trust barriers come down enough that the assignment of blame can be done without suspicion that you're simply shirking.

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I mention this because with a recent client they have had some trouble receiving emails from one of their clients. In both instances of trouble, I've had the ugly duty of blaming their client's mail system.

The first instance was because their client's mail server was misconfigured and identifying emails as having originated with an unregistered domain name. My mail server rejected the emails for looking spammy.

Then they send me an email saying they can't open attachments from their client. Well, it turns out that their client's system is giving all the attachments malformed MIME types (sending them as application/octet-stream instead of the appropriate format).

I cringed at the second chance to blame the other guy. It's not something you want to do. It's not good form in a business-to-business relation to find a third party and blame them -- let alone twice.

The new mail server configuration had its bugs. Don't get me wrong. We had to migrate a lot of stuff from their old system, a system that was somewhat hacked together almost ten years ago and was begging to be update. So, there have been things in the process that were my responsibility to fix. Not that points are accumulated for taking responsibility (they aren't, trust me), but you still like to know you've been honest about your own failures before you run off blaming others.

So, I sucked it up and sent out the second email explaining what was wrong and who was at fault. Strangely, this was a case where a workaround was easier to implement on my end than it was to demand that the third party make a full fix on their end. While blame might need to be assigned, the solution was simpler on this end.

I enjoy being direct and honest. But, there are times where it can be cringe-inducing. That said, at the end of the day if everyone wants to know what happened, blame has to be assigned.

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Wonder where to start with your web design business?

This blog follows along with my efforts to build and grow a website design business, Pro Content and Design.

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Good luck, and happy reading.

Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design