[mns]

Leaving that company was one of the best things that happened to me. It also thought me that when a company, especially a big one, blames a low level employee for a big mistake or some visible incident, there is something very wrong there. There is usually so much politics, so many layers of management, that blaming one person that does some actual work is the easiest way of hiding your actual problems.

[kazen44]

in my experience this is detrimental for a company in the long term. It results in people who are in charge of taking leadership not actually leading the company and it shows everyone in the company taking risks is instant failure in their eyes.

To give you a counterexample.

The same company my prior example came from, also had some other "silly mistakes" made by an intern. He had to do inventory of a couple of old servers and remove hard disks from these servers. The servers where to be sold.

Sadly, no one told him we had additional servers in the back of the storage room which he forgot to check because they where not on the same pallet as the batch he was told to check.

Result, an couple of servers got sold with disks still in them. Luckely the company we sold to was friendly enough to give us a headsup about it and it resulted in no further issues, but still. Our company director personally took this as a reason to spearhead a plan about improving operational security and change processes (Aka, remove the hard disks when the machines are put out of service instead of half a decade later when their sold).

The intern felt pretty bummed and thought he was responsible for the mistake, but in my opinion he done the job that was asked of him, he just got incomplete instructions. This was also explicitly communicated with him by his direct supervisor.

In my experience, not throwing people under the bus to hide organizational or process failure, but simply admitting the processes could be better and striving for improvement does absolute wonders for morale and team building.

Being perfect is impossible, organizations should keep people to impossible standards, especially to hide incompetence.

[Xunjin]

Great for you. The company that I currently work hired a new manager, he is amazing on how he shows that we are a team and a "person" mistake, is actually, the process which need better thinking/layout.