Responsibility. It’s something I feel passionate about, for myself and others. I’ve not always been good at recognizing how to handle other’s responsibilities. If you’ve ever found yourself similarly confused, I encourage you to read Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results author Nate Regier Ph.D. and Marshall Goldsmith.
Your Responsibility Switch is Off
When our responsibility switch is off, we lose track of the fundamental truth that we cannot control others, but we can control our responses. To mask our discomfort or inadequacies and avoid difficult conversations, we isolate responsibility in ways that get us further away from real solutions.
When our responsibility switch is off, we forget or abandon the boundaries about who’s responsible for what.
These five clusters of observable behaviors let us know the responsibility switch is off:
Responding to an Unprepared Meeting
In advance of an important executive team meeting, you sent out an email to your team with an agenda and two documents attached. You asked your team to review these before the meeting. You intend to make sure everyone’s informed about the big decision on bonuses. The team is expected to vote on a decision. When the meeting begins, you ask the group, “Did you all have a chance to review the documents I sent out?” Several people look at you with blank stares. One person says, “I never got it.”
What do you do next?
What thoughts go through your head?
What feelings do you experience?
With the responsibility switch off, you might respond by quickly checking your Sent email folder hoping to prove to yourself that you did your part and that they are at fault. Another way to isolate responsibility would be to poll the group to see who got the email and read it, thereby singling out the people who didn’t.
You could do what many well-intentioned leaders do when things don’t go as planned: divert attention away from the real issue by saying, “Well, I sent it out last week,” as if reminding people that you did your part somehow fixes things.
A leader with their responsibility switch on says, “I can’t control what happens to me, but I can control what I do next. How will I take personal responsibility for my feelings and what I want and then address the relevant behaviors respectfully?”
Revisiting this scenario where your executive team isn’t prepared to vote on bonuses.
Here are two ways you could respond with your responsibility switch on that take on neither too little nor too much responsibility:
In either case, the leader owns their feelings, takes responsibility for what they want, and asks for help to find a solution.
In the second response, the leader takes responsibility for enforcing a natural consequence without pointing fingers by focusing on the desired goal rather than acting out a whodunit.
Leaders often try to shift responsibility in these situations to avoid vulnerability, bypass conflict, or hide their lack of skill in handling a situation effectively.
The first act of personal responsibility as a leader is to get crystal clear about what they are and aren’t responsible for. Taking too much or too little responsibility for our own and others’ feelings, thoughts, and behaviors has the long-term impact of undermining value and capability.
An important leadership skill is helping others navigate this difficult boundary as well.
Table 6.3 from Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results clarifies how to take responsibility and Compassionate Accountablity.
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