I’m working on writing a book and one of the eventual chapters will be titled Responsibility = Results. This idea, along with three others, represent my guiding philosophy of how you be a successful leader and how you run a successful company. The full list of these ideas are below:
- Responsibility = Results
- Failure is Always an Option
- CI:IC Constant Improvement through Incremental Changes
- Automate, Delegate, Eliminate
The second one I stole from the popular show Mythbusters, and feel it is really necessary in the business world, and I’ll write about that a little next week. But I feel the first, Responsibility equals Results, is the foundation upon which everything else flows. Without this idea, you cannot truly be a leader, nor can you really advance a company. So what does this mean?
At its core, it is about personal accountability. There are several cliche phrases that I’d heard growing up that I never truly understood until I was a leader. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” We’ve all heard this and for the most part, I assumed it was about people actively working against someone. Say you have a solution and people drag their feet because they don’t think it will work. As I assumed more leadership within my company I came to realize it also meant people identifying problems, yet offering no solutions. This is where responsibility comes in.
All businesses have problems, some minor, some major, but everyone has problems. The thing is what do you do about those problems, once identified. In thinking about this, I’m always reminded of this Seinfeld clip about “reservations”
Anyone can “identify” a problem! It’s “solving” the problem that’s important. I remember reading this phrase somewhere, “I thought someone should do something about this. Then, I realized that I’m SOMEONE!” Even before I was given responsibilities as a manager or even shift lead, I would identify problems, or be told about them from fellow co-workers, and then think about a solution. I would then propose it to my manager, or if it didn’t require that level of approval, implemented the solution. It’s really that simple, though it does require those in power above you to want to make things better.
Once you have the power it is about executing, and empowering those below you to execute, solutions. What Responsibility = Results means is once you’ve identified a problem it is your RESPONSIBILITY to find a solution. Regardless of your position within the company.
First, let’s be honest, you cannot always solve a problem immediately. Perhaps the solution doesn’t yet exist. For example, a little over a decade ago I wanted to modernize our memo system. We were faxing memos to stores and creating so much paper waste. Creating a blog seemed to be the answer, but I didn’t quite have a way of making it private. I needed the ability to have a login for, at least, each store if not each employee. 10 years ago WordPress was founded (which hosts this site) and I had my solution. It was probably a year or two before I discovered this, but it saved our company about a box of paper a year, That’s 10 reams of paper or 5000 sheets a year on average. The solution wasn’t readily available, but because I had identified the problem, and made my self responsible for the solution, it was solved. Responsibility = Results!
Second, even with power, you will still have superiors who either don’t think it is a problem or don’t agree that your solution will fix it. I encountered that many times. No, in business and business alone to be clear, is the start of a negotiation (another cliche that is true). I know that my boss, once he’s said no, will not change his mind. However, I learned that when presented with hard data, you could convince him. So I learned never to come to him with a problem where I only had a vague idea of a solution. I had to wait until I had all my facts and figures down. He might still say “no”, but I was giving my solution the best shot. Having taken responsibility for the problem I could revisit it later, perhaps as the landscape had shifted. I’m no longer with the company and there are several solutions I wish I had implemented but never got the chance to, you can’t win them all!
Finally, if you are a leader then you need to encourage your direct reports to come to you with solutions rather than problems and reward them by allowing them to implement those solutions. In the post about Failure is Always an Option, I’ll explain how even if their solutions don’t always work, you’re encouraging them to take responsibility for their work.
Some people call this “ownership mentality” or “personal accountability”. I like responsibility because that’s how I articulated it to others the first time I began growing this idea. When something goes wrong in a company a bad manager will find someone to blame. I don’t, I say, “That’s my fault”. By taking the blame for the problem it is my responsibility to ensure it doesn’t happen again. As you go about your day think about whether you are taking responsibility for problems you see and whether those who report to you are as well. Once you do, you’ll find you will start to see results.
Joe Robles 
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