How to Play Responsibility Dodgeball in an Organization

The corporate game is to avoid responsibility. These are the plays.

1. Take credit for things you didn’t do.
2. Tell your boss what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.
3. Focus energy on keeping your boss happy–ignore the customer completely.
4. Only do things when you don’t have plausible deniability for delaying them or skipping them entirely.
5. Make your boss feel like they’re smart by pretending you’re oblivious and leading them right into an easy improvement you can make.
6. Don’t leak more than one new insight per day.
7. Inflate all work estimates by at least fourfold.
8. Spend most of your efforts on playing up your accomplishments.
9. Attend as many meetings as possible where you’re just one of a large crowd.
10. Avoid one-on-one meetings where someone can ask you a direct question.
11. Avoid deciding upon anything–just lead people to believe you’re strongly considering their suggestions.
12. If you’re forced to make a decision, make sure you can squarely blame an adverse outcome on someone else.
13. Avoid agreeing to do anything that is not a direct assignment from a person who has authority over you.
14. Delay with phrases like “We just don’t know yet.”
15. Insist that everything requires oversight.
16. Speak in platitudes to the people below you in the hierarchy–speak in the socially approved keywords to the people above you.
17. Block out your calendar so no one will feel welcome to meet with you.
18. Don’t respond to emails or meeting requests within 48 hours of receipt.
19. Find out who has a big ego and flatter them.
20. Never create a sense of urgency where you’re required to contribute except for when your only duty is to judge someone else’s output.
21. Squeeze more work out of those below you by suggesting they’ve morally failed.
22. Create information silos where you’re the only one who knows how it all fits together.
23. Downplay your work when someone else is threatened by it.
24. Agree privately with everyone but don’t commit to any one opinion in group settings.
25. Blame it on ex-employees.
26. Never write down the business rules–keep them safe in your head.
27. Block your ears from customer feedback–it may trigger empathy.
28. Hire outside agencies to do things that internal employees can do, minimizing your accountability to peers.
29. Walk speedily and appear distressed when traversing office space to dissuade others from approaching you.
30. If you’re forced to accept an assignment, pawn it off to people beneath you.
31. Use the passive voice to obscure where responsibility truly lies, with phrases like “The decision was made” and “The proposal was denied.”
32. Say “I can make no guarantees” instead of saying what you will attempt to do.

Live by these rules for long enough and those above you who are also enjoying the benefits of non-accountability will be delighted to discover you’re an ally. They’ll reward you with a quieter corner where they stash their other scapegoats.