The Destructive Force of Victimization

The Oz Principle
by Roger Connors, Tom Smith, Craig R. Hickman

(Page 4 of 5)

The world's societies suffer from the current cult of victimization because its subtle dogma holds that circumstances and other people prevent you from achieving your goals. Such an attitude prevents a person from growing and developing. In Charles Sykes's book on American society, A Nation of Victims, he says, A society that insists on stressing self-expression over self-control generally gets exactly what it deserves. The sulking teenager who insists, "It's not fair!" is not referring to a standard of equity and justice that any ethicist would recognize. He is, instead, giving voice to the vaguely conceived but firmly held conviction that the world in general and his family in particular serve no legitimate function except to supply his immediate needs and desires. In a culture that celebrates self-absorption and instant gratification, however, this selfishness quickly becomes a dominant and persistent theme. No wonder, then, that the range of the external victim - majority and minority, male and female, "abled" and "disabled" - is so often expressed in the plaintive cry of disappointed adolescence. When I refer to America's youth culture, I do not mean merely one that worships the young. I mean a culture that refuses to grow up.

A thin line separates success from failure, the great companies from the ordinary ones. Below that line lies excuse making, blaming others, confusion, and an attitude of helplessness, while above that line we find a sense of reality, ownership, commitment, solutions to problems, and determined action. While losers languish Below The Line®, preparing stories that explain why past efforts went awry, winners reside Above The Line®, powered by commitment and hard work. The Accountability Chart on page 11 will help you visualize the difference between Below The Line victimization and Above The Line accountability.

People and organizations find themselves thinking and behaving Below The Line whenever they consciously or unconsciously avoid accountability for individual or collective results. Stuck in what we call the victim cycle or the blame game, they begin to lose their spirit and resolve, until, eventually, they feel completely powerless. Only by moving Above The Line and climbing the Steps To Accountability® can they become powerful again. When individuals, teams, or entire organizations remain Below The Line, unaware or unconscious of reality, things get worse, not better, without anyone knowing why. Rather than face reality, sufferers of this malady oftentimes begin ignoring or pretending not to know about their accountability, denying their responsibility, blaming others for their predicament, citing confusion as a reason for inaction, asking others to tell them what to do, claiming that they can't do it, or just waiting to see if the situation will miraculously resolve itself.

The crucial element of personal and corporate accountability should be woven into the very fabric of the business character, process, and culture of organizational life. At Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, any number of dot-coms, or anywhere Below The Line behavior exists, you will find victims - and victims of victims. In business, the descent Below The Line usually begins with creating an environment where no one acknowledges the truth and people don't speak up. In their article, "Why Companies Fail," Ram Charan and Jerry Useem offer a description of one company's demise:

The descent occurred because of what one analyst calls "an incremental descent into poor judgement." A "success-oriented" culture, mind-numbing complexity, and unrealistic performance goals all mixed until the violation of standards became the standard. Nothing looked amiss from the outside until boom. It was all over. It sounds a lot like Enron, but the description actually refers to NASA in 1986, the year of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. We pull this switch not to conflate the two episodes - one, after all, involves the death of seven astronauts - but to make a point about failures: even the most dramatic tend to be years in the making. At NASA, engineers noticed damage to the crucial O-rings on previous shuttle flights yet repeatedly convinced themselves the damage was acceptable.

Charan and Useem go on to say, "Companies fail the way Ernest Hemingway wrote about going broke in The Sun Also Rises: gradually, and then suddenly." Nonaccountability can creep into any organization. First it may come unannounced as a reasonable excuse; then it may escalate into the more aggressive blame-oriented accusation; then, finally, it just becomes the way we do things around here. The price paid by such inaction does not become clear until you see its opposite: accountable people getting results. Then, you can actually calculate the value of accountability in terms of profit gains and market share expansion.

Cisco Systems provides another example of the cost of living Below The Line in the victim cycle. Cisco Systems, by no means a failing company, suffered a market-value drop of nearly 90 percent. After forty straight quarters of growth, the company's managers got soft and neglectful; success often does that to people. Evidence of customers going bankrupt, declining demand, and rising inventories wasn't enough to cause CEO John Chambers and his executive team to change their rosy assumptions and projections. The company had never worried about what might happen if its assumption of growth ever faltered. When the signs of slowing growth began to emerge, Cisco's managers stayed Below The Line, ignoring and denying the problem. Forced to face reality, the company finally had to write down $2.5 billion in excess inventory and lay off 8,500 people. Cisco shares lost 90 percent of their value almost overnight. To its credit, the company has now begun modeling what might happen when growth assumptions show initial signs of faltering. Sometimes, getting Above The Line means anticipating and preparing for worst-case scenarios.

To get Above The Line, and out of the blame game, you must climb the Steps To Accountability by adopting See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It® attitudes. The first step - See It® - involves recognizing and acknowledging the full reality of a situation. As you'll soon see, this step poses the greatest hurdle because it's so hard for most of us to undertake an honest self-appraisal and acknowledge that we can do more to get results. The second step - Own It® - means accepting responsibility for the experiences and realities you create for yourself and others. With this step, you pave the road to action. The third step - Solve It® - entails changing reality by finding and implementing solutions to problems that you may not have thought of before, while avoiding the trap of falling back Below The Line when obstacles present themselves. And fourth, the Do It® step entails mustering the commitment and courage to follow through with the solutions you have identified, even if those solutions involve a lot of risk. Happily, these four steps make enormously good sense - common sense. Ultimately, your common sense can propel you Above The Line.

Copyright © 2004, Portfolio Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Roger Connors and Tom Smith are cofounders of Partners in Leadership, an international management consulting firm with hundreds of clients in almost all major industries. They are also the coauthors of Journey to the Emerald City, a sequel to The Oz Principle.