Unfair blame and how to survive it

Dear CAHL,

You’ve found yourself in a classic banking bind. Your willingness to help has been greeted not with gratitude but with blame.

It’s frustrating but not unmanageable. The trick now is to understand how you got here, take back control of the story, and protect your reputation and peace of mind.

First, let’s acknowledge the uncomfortable truth: you were set up to fail.

When a territory is underperforming and someone is pushed out, the next person to take it on inherits not just the workload, but the latent problems too.

In the short term, management often prefers a fall guy or girl to a fix. You became that scapegoat the moment you said yes without preconditions. That was an error, and next time you’ll know.

It doesn’t mean you’re powerless, though. It just means you need to approach this with cold-eyed pragmatism rather than bruised feelings.

Start by gathering evidence that the decline predates your involvement. Pull league tables, deal timelines, or any internal data showing when the slippage began.

If clients were already drifting before you took over, that’s your first line of defence. Present this not as an excuse, but as context — you’re not shirking responsibility, but rather ensuring the problem is properly diagnosed, even as you’re developing a solution.

Set up a meeting with your manager and keep it constructive. For example: “The data shows the trend started well before my time. I’m committed to turning it around, but let’s agree on what’s really driving the underperformance and what we need to do to sort it.”

Next, force a decision. Senior management at investment banks thrive on ambiguity; it lets them demand more while committing to less.

So make them choose: either properly resource the turnaround, or acknowledge this was always a temporary arrangement. If they want you to own this territory permanently, spell out what you need — extra people, more risk appetite, adjusted targets.

Be specific: “I can’t rebuild the Benelux pipeline if I’m still expected to cover the Nordics at full capacity.”

If they balk, propose an alternative: “If this was meant to be interim, let’s agree a timeline to transition it to someone else.”

The goal isn’t ultimatums, but to stop the slow erosion of your internal standing due to unrealistic expectations.

Your reputation needs active defence now. Quietly document every win — clients retained, mandates salvaged, processes improved. When critiques surface in meetings, redirect firmly but professionally: “Actually, we’ve stabilised X and Y — the bigger issue is the legacy attrition in Z, which I’ve flagged before.”

Find allies among senior colleagues who understand the situations and know who has a vested interest in deflecting the blame on to you.

There’s a broader lesson here about banking’s internal calculus — favours are remembered when needed, forgotten when inconvenient. (Actually, that’s a good lesson for life in general, but I digress.)

Next time you’re asked to “step up”, negotiate terms upfront. “Happy to help, but let’s agree what success looks like in six months.”

“If this becomes permanent, how will comp reflect the extra responsibility?”

If those questions make your bosses squirm in their seats, you’ve learned something useful about how much they value your effort and how much they take it for granted.

Finally, and this is a question that comes up time and again in this column: is this battle worth fighting? If the territory is fundamentally broken and management refuses to face facts, sometimes the smartest play is to hand back the burning brief on your terms.

But if you believe you can fix it, go all in — demand the tools, reset expectations and make it clear the solution runs through you.

Either way, don’t let them rewrite history. You took on a mess not of your making. That’s called leadership, even if no one’s calling it that yet.

Be proud,

Craig