While I agree with this, some of the best, most likeable, and longest-surviving managers I've worked with have had a Teflon-like quality when it comes to blame. It's not that they don't take blame, yet somehow it doesn't stick to them. They attend the meetings and post-mortems when things go wrong; but they have a superficial relationship with blame somehow. They take the issues seriously, yet it feels somehow like they're not actually to blame, even when they've been involved the whole way through. Then one day you look up and notice that they're smiling and chatting with someone on a different project team, they've moved on. Everyone will think their efforts were serious, well-intentioned, appropriate, etc. And the blame is palpably absent from them, while it clings to others like a bad smell. I'm still unsure about how it's done. I suspect it's a deeper personality trait; plain-old likeability perhaps.

Does anyone know more about this particular fun fact of humans? Is it some kind of defense mechanism? Insecurity? Those are the only plausible reasons I can come up with. I guess its all office politics (something else I despise.)

My experience has also been that managers at the "average company" these days are pretty much expected to both manage and be a fully productive individual contributor. Realistically, this means that they spend about 80% of their time working to hit their own goals, which directly point at them, and 20% of their time (at best) really working to enable their team to succeed, which can always be deflected from direct responsibility to some degree. Since most managers' managers are also in the same boat, they can't tell when someone is shooting their own team members for self-preservation because they are too busy to have any sense for the morale and culture they've created.

In my personal opinion, you get a healthier culture if you either 1) have managers and let them manage or 2) admit that you require them to be individual contributors and restrict their "managing" purely to part time HR initiatives and not to actual additive management (something more like extra-curricular mentoring and not talent management, career and skills development).

I should caveat that I've had good managers, bad managers and completely mediocre managers. So I do believe that, although rare, it can be done well and it can provide value to individual contributors' careers and to the company's value. I just don't assume it's automatically the right approach at every company.

It's usually the way someone was brought up.

Lots of parents spend their days blaming other people for their lot in life, and taking no responsibility themselves. They do this loudly to each other while the kids are there.

Little kids have big ears and learn by imitating.

Once the pattern is set, it's like kiln-fired concrete. When that kid makes it into management - everything good that happens is their doing, everything bad is somebody else's fault. It's unlikely that person will ever change unless they have some sort of epiphany.

Personally I hold myself responsible for all outcomes assigned to me. In the cases where it could be plausibly not be my fault, I still allocate blame for not having foresight to avoid the situation. This is my hack to prevent development of a blame reflex, and to enforce learning from every poor outcome.

I think it's fear. How do you measure that a manager is doing a good job?

If you only judge by the team shipping on time or hitting their number, then a dictator/slave driver looks pretty good early on.

If you judge by employee morale, someone that misses numbers but doesn't overstress their team can look good.

Unfortunately, things like employee churn are lagging indicators, so if a manager wants to look good, the temptation will always be there to take credit for themselves out of self-preservation, even if it's all in their head that they're in any danger of losing their job.