By the one course you gain goodwill, by the other you avoid hatred. A great man takes more pleasure in doing a favour than in receiving one... In high place one can only work by means of rewards and punishment, so grant the first yourself, inflict the other through others.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
This is legitimate as institutional design and corrosive as blame-shifting, so the line has to be drawn carefully. The legitimate version: deliver rewards and praise personally, so goodwill attaches to you, and route sanctions through process, policy, and systems rather than through a personal act of cruelty, so the pain is owned by the institution rather than inflicted by a person. That is how good organisations run; the rules, not the manager's mood, deliver the bad outcome. The corrupt version is different in kind: making a specific human being the scapegoat for your failures, arranging for someone else to take blame that is yours. The first protects people from arbitrary power; the second sacrifices a person to protect the powerful. Design the process to carry the pain, and never let a person carry what you should own.
Practice
- Deliver praise and rewards in person; let the goodwill attach to a face, and let that face be yours.
- Route sanctions through process and policy, so the bad outcome comes from the rules rather than from personal cruelty; this protects people from arbitrary power.
- ETHICAL LINE: route pain through fair process, never onto a scapegoat. Owning your own failures is the boundary; if someone else is taking blame that is yours, you have crossed from design into cowardice (maxim 149 is that grave, and this is how to avoid it).
Use this when
- Use this in any leadership role: personal rewards build loyalty, and process-borne sanctions avoid the hatred that personal punishment attracts.
- Use it defensively; notice when a boss is positioning you to absorb blame for decisions made above you (maxim 149 gives the recognition signs).
Ignore this when
- Don't use it to dodge hard conversations you owe personally; some difficult truths a leader must deliver face to face, and hiding behind process there is weakness.
- Don't ever route your own responsibility onto a person; that is the corrupt version this maxim must never be read to permit.
A picture of it
A plant head runs the good and bad news through different channels on purpose. Bonuses and recognition he delivers personally, by name, in front of the team. The unpopular new safety restriction he introduces as company policy, from the rules, not as his personal decree, so the grumbling attaches to the regulation and not to a man. Both moves are honest. What he never does is the third thing his predecessor was known for: when a decision he made goes wrong, he says so, rather than letting a junior wear it. The process carries the pain; he carries his own mistakes. The team can tell the difference, and it is the whole difference.
Hand out the rewards yourself, route the sanctions through fair process, and carry your own failures. The scapegoat is where design becomes cowardice.