Why Your Team Keeps Pointing Fingers (And How to Stop It)
Someone raises a problem. Within minutes, the room splits into blame mode. Procurement blames planning. Planning blames forecasting. Forecasting blames marketing. Here's what actually fixed it.
Fernanda Brasileiro
8/27/20262 min read
Six months ago I worked with a supply chain leadership team that looked fine on paper. Good tenure. Smart people. Strong individual performers.
But in every planning meeting, the same pattern showed up. Someone would raise a problem and within minutes the room would split into defense mode. Procurement blamed planning. Planning blamed forecasting. Forecasting blamed marketing. Nobody was lying and nobody was wrong exactly, but nobody was building anything together either.
The CHRO who brought me in described it this way. The team had stopped assuming good intent.
That line stuck with me because it's the same thing Amy Edmondson found in her research on psychological safety. Teams don't fail to collaborate because people are incompetent or unwilling. They fail because somewhere along the way it stopped feeling safe to be wrong, to ask a question, or to admit a mistake out loud. Once that safety erodes, self-protection becomes the rational move, even when it wrecks the team's actual results.
We started with a full diagnostic. Interviews with every team member, a review of how decisions actually got made versus how the org chart said they got made, and a look at where finger-pointing tended to cluster. The pattern that emerged centered on trust and, specifically, on the absence of a habit Patrick Lencioni calls vulnerability-based trust, the willingness to say "I don't know" or "I was wrong" in front of your peers without expecting it to be used against you later.
From there we ran a workshop series built around that gap. We skipped the trust falls and personality assessments in favor of structured practice in the specific behaviors that build trust under pressure. Naming assumptions before meetings instead of ambushing each other in them. Separating the problem from the person when something went wrong. Asking a clarifying question before jumping to a conclusion about someone's motives.
The workshops mattered, but the real change happened in the follow-up coaching. I worked one-on-one with team members over the following months as they tried these habits in real meetings with real stakes. That's where old patterns tried to creep back in, and that's where the coaching held the line.
Within a quarter, the shift was visible without anyone needing a survey to prove it. Meetings got shorter because people stopped re-litigating decisions out of suspicion. Cross-functional problems got solved instead of escalated. And the finger pointing that used to open every difficult conversation started to disappear, replaced by people actually asking each other what happened and what they needed.
None of that came from a single workshop. It came from a team that practiced trust as a habit long enough for it to become how they actually worked.
A leadership team that feels more defensive than collaborative is usually working with a trust habit that hasn't been built yet, and it's one of the most common patterns I see in the diagnostic work I do with HR leaders. I'd be glad to talk through what that could look like for your team.
Fernanda Brasileiro
People Development Consultant & Strategist
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