In previous excerpts, we’ve talked about “owning our failures” and what can happen when we create an environment where creativity and risk taking can flourish. In our last excerpt we talked about how we can accept responsibility for our thought lives. In this fifth excerpt, we’ll be addresssing the importance of accepting responsibility for our entire lives.
What does accepting responsibility mean – especially as a leader? Accepting responsibility means that we fully own our gifts, our strengths, our experiences, our education (or lack of it), our weaknesses, our setbacks, our personalities. and our leadership. Only when we fully “own” who we are can we make the kind of impact that we can only make.
Have you ever considered that you are the only one in the entire universe with your set of gifts, strengths, experiences, education, family background, and leadership acumen? We accept responsibility for our lives by doing the following:
- Accepting responsibility for the choices and decisions we make
- Accepting responsibility for our own leadership development
- Owning what we choose to think or feel
- Not blaming others for what happens to us
- Not taking responsibility for someone else
- Letting go of resentment towards others for the hurts you feel
As a leader – you need to model an environment where staff members take responsibility for their behaviors and actions. One of the ways you can help create a healthy and productive work environment where people accept responsibility (besides modeling this yourself), is to train your leadership team and staff that covering up mistakes, blaming others, or engaging in destructive gossip is simply not tolerated. Indeed, some organizations include accepting responsibility as a part of their core values. I love this quote on the importance of taking responsibility:
“Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility . . . . In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility.”
— Michael Korda
Editor-in-Chief, Simon & Schuster
