Responsibility Stinks!

Originally shared in A Daily Dose Of Leadership on July 1, 2020.

Do you remember a time in your career, or even in your personal life, when so many people weren’t depending on you to make the right decisions? And maybe there wasn’t even anyone watching if you did something stupid, or something you wouldn’t have been proud to tell your grand kids about… Since smart phones have entered the equation, those days seem to be gone, huh…

I kinda remember those days… But I more clearly remember the day I volunteered to serve on a safety committee and learned that every move I made from that point forward would be under a microscope. The idea we touched on in the last message about Monkey See, Monkey Do would be hard at work in my life from that day forward. I couldn’t promote the importance of choosing safe behaviors and continue to do dumb stuff that could get me hurt if I wanted to earn any credibility at all! And as I accepted different roles in the 20+ years that’s followed, the ante has gotten even higher!

The more responsibility we accept for leading others, the more influence our actions will have on determining the behaviors the people on the teams we’re leading choose on a daily basis. If we take long lunch breaks, our team will likely follow suit. When we step out of a meeting to take a personal call, we send a message that it’s acceptable for our team members to do that too. And if we decide it’s OK to be less than honest in a tough situation, you better believe that’s going to leave a mark on the standard our team strives to maintain!

Bottom line… Responsibility stinks sometimes! Although I’ve targeted this at those of you who are actually choosing to LEAD, it applies equally to someone in an executive role who decides they’re not accountable to the people who work for them or the clients they serve. We hear crazy stories all the time of how this spirals out of control and ends up crippling major global companies, but it can happen locally too! (Don’t believe? Give me a call sometime…)

The example we set always has a ripple effect throughout the teams we lead. And the bigger that team or more prominent our role, the more it matters for us to work to earn trust on a daily basis and always set the example we hope to see duplicated.

In the next blog, we’ll take a look at how we can still blow it even when our own behaviors are always up to par! Yep, responsibility stinks sometimes…