It's easier to feign infalibility than to take the blame

At work, some people just won't admit to making a mistake. They have a gripping fear that it will indict their character, attract more work and invite future blame — not to mention ruin a perfect record of never having admitted to one before.

To excel at never admitting mistakes, you have to take care to burnish your unaccountability and sorrylessness. It helps, for example, to have a fall guy, someone who has responsibility for a project who is less known to your boss than you are. Also, any mistake made under time pressure can be blamed on a lack of time. Soon enough, you'll combine elements, blaming the lack of time you had because of the sluggishness of the fall guy.

These are the tactics Robert Wert, a former lawyer and current management consultant, gleaned from one of his former colleagues who actually "planned the blame-shifting in advance, evaluated the lay of the land minute by minute and acted accordingly," he says.

This co-worker got so good that he had a hierarchy of blame-takers. It began with outsiders: co-counsel, clients' in-house counsel, a court ruling or clients' insane expectations. Short of those, he made sure to work with perfectionist colleagues. "If something went wrong, they would find ways to blame themselves," says Wert.

As for the stainless attorney: "I never saw him take responsibility for any error," Wert added.

Flub artists sometimes get their just desserts. But in too many companies, nothing ever catches up with them. In fact, they seem to thrive, not in spite of their ability to avoid accountability but because of it.

Colleagues fantasize about someday witnessing a tearful mea culpa. But that's like waiting for a love letter that was never written.

Meanwhile, the mistake goes unrepaired. "Nobody fixes problems they deny they have," says Marshall Goldsmith, a management consultant who devotes much effort trying to persuade executives to apologize. "We get focused so much on winning that when we do something wrong, we don't even think it's wrong."

This type of delusion is explored by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, in her book "Mindset: The Psychology of Success." In the business world and elsewhere, people either have a healthy belief in growth, whereby they expect to evolve their talents over time, or they possess a fixed

mindset, whereby they believe their talents are innate traits that will carry them to the top.

The fixed folk "believe mistakes reflect on their deepest abilities and call them into question," says Prof. Dweck.