It’s tempting to get defensive when someone tries to blame you for something instead of taking accountability.

But sometimes in the office you already have what you need to get yourself out of the line of fire.

See the employee in this story anticipate a problem and cover himself perfectly.

HR & Payroll manager asked to automate their decisions away

My work was quite tedious, involving a lot of back-and-forth communication between multiple departments.

Plus, the company’s excessive paper-only bureaucratic workflow made the work go at a snail’s pace.

So they simplified the process.

We decided to automate away the paperwork to speed things up and introduced a fully electronic workflow.

The manager claimed she couldn’t keep up with the amount of tickets.

She then requested a change: she wanted any request from her employee to be automatically approved within the relevant scope of their sub-department.

Once the change was active, she demanded to know why we had granted full access to payroll data to her subordinate.

And then he made his boss eat her words.

I calmly reminded her of her request to automatically approve in-department access requests.

I handed her a copy of the document she had signed, which instructed us to automatically approve any and all such tickets without exception.

In the end, we managed to distill a subset of permissions that could be approved automatically and proceeded to implement a similar approach with other departments.

Here is what people are saying.

Definitely. An even playing field holds people accountable.

That’s one of the nicest things about getting more work experience.

It’s like this in Canada, too. I hate it.

It couldn’t have gone any better!

IT staff are your friends!

Get everything signed.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.