When layoffs happen, when a toxic work culture festers, when promises are broken, we default to blaming “the organization.”
It’s the company that made the cuts, the institution that failed, the brand that let us down. But organizations are just shells – legal entities, mission statements, and office spaces. They don’t make decisions. People do. And yet, somehow, when things go wrong, the people responsible fade into the background, shielded by the impersonal language of corporate inevitability.
Layoffs are framed as business necessities, not as the sum of individual choices made by executives with options in front of them. Cultures that enable dysfunction are excused as systemic rather than as environments shaped by leaders who could have intervened. And when someone’s career stalls, it’s often blamed on the company’s “structure” rather than the specific individuals who failed to mentor, advocate, or recognize potential.
We grant decision-makers an extraordinary privilege: the ability to act without personal accountability. But let’s be clear – corporations do not sit in boardrooms making calculations about who stays and who goes. Institutions do not cultivate toxic cultures. Brands do not betray trust. People do. It’s executives choosing spreadsheets over humans, managers prioritizing comfort over courage, peers opting for silence over advocacy. When we talk about failure in organizations, we need to resist the instinct to depersonalize it.
This doesn’t mean we should assign blame indiscriminately. Leadership is complex. Economic pressures are real. Hard decisions sometimes must be made. But the moment we let organizations take the fall for human choices, we let decision-makers off the hook. If leaders claim credit for success, they should also own their role in failure. It’s not “the company” that decided your role was expendable – it was a group of people in a room, looking at numbers and making a call.
Ironically, the same logic applies when things go right. When a company thrives, it’s because people made it happen. A great culture isn’t the product of a mission statement; it’s built through everyday decisions – who gets hired, who is promoted, what behaviors are rewarded. Trust isn’t a brand attribute; it’s earned (or lost) through countless human interactions. The best leaders understand this. They don’t hide behind “the business.” They step forward, take responsibility, and stand by their decisions, whether they’re popular or not.
But too often, we let them disappear into the fog of corporate abstraction. We let the story become one of market forces, industry shifts, and organizational restructuring, instead of what it really is: a series of human choices, made by people with names and faces. If we want better workplaces, we need to change how we frame accountability.
Because organizations don’t fail us – people do.
