Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
I have loved sitting on the sofa with each of my children watching their animated movies. Yes, I am easily entertained and I laugh at everything. I also have a long attention span and suspend disbelief as soon as the movie begins. Every so often, however, one of the characters - good or evil - will say something that immediately sends my mind reeling, and it happened during A Bug's Life. So, there I am enjoying the movie and my son's reactions to the characters and, wham!!, a grasshopper's words jumped through the screen and hit me in the mouth so hard the change in my pocket rattled. And here it is.
The bad guys of the movie, the grasshoppers, have shown up looking for their annual offering of food from the ants below who have toiled to prepare it - only it's gone when the grasshoppers arrive. The goofy ant has ruined the whole thing without anyone knowing. The grasshoppers corner the ants, looking for an explanation. Identifying the queen/princess the leader of the grasshoppers accuses her of failing her task, to which she says, "...It's not my fault." That's not the lesson. It's what the grasshopper said next that stopped me in my tracks, "Your in charge! Everything is your fault!"
Here's the thing, taking responsibility is the only way anything gets done. If you want to be valued by your friends, bosses, peers and those who look to you for leadership (heck even yourself) you've got to take responsibility when things go wrong. The princess ant looked and sounded quite pathetic attempting to slide the blame off to unnamed others, and so do you. So, the next time something bad happens, follow the grasshopper's words and follow these three steps to accountability, and more importantly, improved results for your customers.
1. See your customer. When you see people distancing themselves from issues or challenges, you can be sure they are not thinking about their customer. In fact, I think it's impossible to look out for the customer at the same time we're looking out for ourselves. When we focus clearly on the people impacted by the mistakes of our organization, we change our view of things and are more willing to do what must be done.
2. Fix now, learn later. When fixing something for our customers, speed and accuracy are of the essence - but accuracy is more important. As leaders, we have to help people focus on the right thing. In an organization I led we had two goals for every key customer deliverable - quality and timeliness. People can get confused wondering which is more important. I always answered this way - accuracy first and it's identical twin is getting it done on time. I believe one can explain a day late to be sure everything is correct, but it is impossible to recover from poor quality by reminding people how quickly you got it done.
3. Commit yourself and your organization to 3.7 rules. #1 - do what you say you will do. #2 - do it when you say you will do it. #3 - do it right the first time. #3.7 - take responsibility for failure in #1, #2 or #3 and learn from them.
Very little of worth, that I can think of, has been accomplished by people who didn't feel like they were responsible for much more than their portion of the job at hand. In fact, it is more likely that they have taken responsibility for things that weren't theirs, viewing the failures of others as their own and putting their customer first.
Don't just take responsibility - seize it.
