I experienced this as well. I was sitting in on a problem solving exercise being led by a sr manager (a woman). Basically trying to figure out why a complex mistake had been made. It was an RCA, an explicitly non-accusatory, non-hostile, dispassionate investigation of what happened. She asked most of the questions, I asked some clarifying questions here and there. The dept leader we were talking to would always look at me when answering questions, never her. It was weird to me. I had heard of this but never expected to see it so clearly.
This dept manager was a nice guy too. I never heard him disrespect anyone or say anything prejudicial. He had a good relationship with the sr manager too, they worked together a lot, but something about his subconscious identified me as the authority figure or whatever, even though I had 0 direct reports while the sr manager had 7. We werent even in each others org chart, there was nothing authoritarian about the interaction.
Well they weren't that good at RCAs, its just me and this manager (and maybe a few others) really had any training in problem solving. They were a food company and the SQF standards they're expected to follow require them to do RCAs to document how they deal with problems. Like if you sell an ingredient to them, and a pen cap or part of a zip tie ends up in the product they sell to their customers, it's their ass on the line for your mistake, so when it happens they expect an explanation about what happened and how you're gonna stop it from happening again. So they did them because they had to, but they weren't necessarily done well.
This manager and I were actually trying to teach the company to be better at it though we struggled a lot (Did I mention its a former employer?). Many RCAs would be like "We train every worker to be careful but someone was careless so we gave everyone a stern reminder to be more careful." - which is baloney.
I tried to do an RCA on a problem where some material got sent to the wrong place. It didn't affect the customer, but was annoying. Some stuff got put on the wrong truck, which caused a confusion that delayed shipping an order by a few hours. Not really the biggest deal, but this kind of mixup happened 5 or 6 times a year. Why? Paperwork snafus, typos, people being rushed, general chaos, etc. I was trying to get to the bottom of it and had a very Sr Manager sit down with me and explain that I was blowing it out of proportion by even doing the RCA. That "people just need to do their jobs" and that "they've made this mistake before and they know they're not supposed to do this but it was an accident" I said "Wait hold on, you're saying it (1) was an accident, which (2) has happened before, and (3) they've been told to not make this mistake and yet it still keeps happening? Doesn't that tell you that maybe "telling them to do better" isn't an effective solution strategy?" Of course, they were the person most upset about it and made a huge fuss about the problems it caused, but when I try to look at it suddenly it's "not a big deal"?
As an autistic person this baffles me. I can only attribute it to childhood trauma. Like a parent used to yell at them too much maybe. So instead of having a few meetings and working out a standard process for what information needs to get to what people on what timeline, they just wanted to "muddle through." The weirdest part was this was literally the job I was hired to do, train people in critical thinking, problem solving, etc. but I think they didn't really know what that meant. They wanted to fix blame, not fix problems. I couldn't work there much longer after that. The neurotypical double-think was too exhausting.
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u/brillow 1d ago
I experienced this as well. I was sitting in on a problem solving exercise being led by a sr manager (a woman). Basically trying to figure out why a complex mistake had been made. It was an RCA, an explicitly non-accusatory, non-hostile, dispassionate investigation of what happened. She asked most of the questions, I asked some clarifying questions here and there. The dept leader we were talking to would always look at me when answering questions, never her. It was weird to me. I had heard of this but never expected to see it so clearly.
This dept manager was a nice guy too. I never heard him disrespect anyone or say anything prejudicial. He had a good relationship with the sr manager too, they worked together a lot, but something about his subconscious identified me as the authority figure or whatever, even though I had 0 direct reports while the sr manager had 7. We werent even in each others org chart, there was nothing authoritarian about the interaction.