Responsibility

By B. Dear

Every day, I read the news and see CEO’s at companies, organizations and government claiming that that aren’t responsible when things take a turn for the worse. Their most common excuse is that they didn’t now what was going on and shouldn’t be held responsible. It is called “transferring responsibility,” and when they attempt this it really brings their leadership into question.

As a CEO, they are expected to make decisions, manage those decisions to return results, and take responsibility when they don’t.

These captains of industry and political leaders seem to be adopting the notion that they aren’t responsible when things go wrong. When they are caught doing the wrong thing, they often claim that they didn’t know what was going on, or that their employees were operating without proper authorization when carrying out their misdeeds. They feel that they can push responsibility for their organization’s bad dealings down to subordinates.

I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. Nice try though.

Here’s how it works. Tasks can be delegated, responsibility cannot.

When you make decisions, you need to gather the right information and involve the right people in discussions surrounding a decision. This often will alow you to make the best possible decision. If you don’t do this, it’s on you. You’re the boss.

Your employees are there to carry out and execute tasks that fall out of the decisions you make. They are not there to do your job. Although this may seem like a good idea when you have less work, it will bite you when they make a mistake. You are still the responsible party.

You still need to be involved in monitoring and controlling the tasks that fall out of your decisions since only you know the intent and actual desired result of the work being done.

If you are leading properly, there should never be surprises. By keeping yourself properly involved in your organizations dealings, leading by walking around, and reviewing regular progress reports, you should have a pretty good understanding of what is going on. Your middle management should be doing the same thing. Your primary concern is that you are on schedule, your personnel know what to do, and equipment is functioning properly. If you do this, everything should go according to plan. Surprises occur when the golf games start to interfere with your daily business.