Published March 2003

Want good leaders?
Teach responsibility

There have been many influences on American management, but none more enduring or more persuasive than Peter Drucker. His contributions to management thinking penetrate to the essential character of the workplace, from the shop floor to the corporate boardroom.

One of his observations, a personal favorite, is worth repeating, not only because it is dead-on accurate but also because it is a management fundamental that we often tend to forget in the heat of our daily labors. He wrote, “Management isn’t about authority. Management is about responsibility.”

Unfortunately, most people do not arrive at the workplace fully equipped to take on responsibility. Even those who might have the will to do so often lack any understanding of how to go about it.

There are good reasons why a sense of responsibility is not a prominent feature in the thinking of today’s incoming work force.

For several generations, our society has not really encouraged personal responsibility. In fact, there have been some strong influences in the opposite direction. As managers, we have to recognize that the link between achievement and responsibility is not obvious to many of our new workers — at any level.

This is not to say that “everyone under 30” (or under 100, for that matter) is self-absorbed and uninterested in taking responsibility — far from it. What is common, however, is that new workers, especially young ones, are unfamiliar with how to deal with a world where someone expects them to be responsible not only for themselves but also for things that others do.

You can save yourself a lot of grief if you can assess the sense of responsibility of individuals before you hire them. You probably already do this to a certain extent by examining their resumes for key elements such as work history and education completion, which give you a picture of responsible, vs. irresponsible, habits of behavior.

The job interview is also an excellent way to assess a candidate’s sense of responsibility. How can you tell? If you ask, “Are you a responsible person?” guess what the candidate will answer. Instead, try to ask about something that didn’t go so well in the candidate’s history — a poor grade in a class or an unhappy work experience.

A responsible person will discuss it in terms of what happened and what he or she did to cause it, or didn’t do to avert it. The less responsible person will describe these events in terms of outside causes — the teacher was a rat, the supervisor was off his meds, etc.

Some things genuinely are the result of outside forces, but a “not my fault” attitude is, unfortunately, a habit that is all too easy to fall into, especially in a society like ours that accepts it. Even more unfortunately, though, “not my fault” is absolutely poisonous to any hope of becoming a good manager.

To develop good managers in our organization, we have to remember that a sizeable number, perhaps even most, of our workers arrive predisposed to avoid responsibility. As a result, what they see is the outward appearance, the authority aspects of our management structure: managers get paid more and seem to enjoy all sorts of privileges.

What they don’t see, because it is less visible and because the workers aren’t prepared mentally to see it, is the responsibility underlying the authority.

If we don’t intervene, they will begin to fail as supervisors and managers, with unhappy results for both themselves and the organization.

One of the best ways to intervene is this: The next time something goes wrong — a missed deadline, a misdirected shipment, an ignored customer — talk with the person responsible.

(If nothing ever goes wrong in your organization, please contact the newspaper immediately. We would like to start quoting you instead of that Drucker guy.)

When you talk with the person, look for the words and phrases that deflect responsibility.

They always involve some other person, some other organization or some “thing” (weather, computers, etc.) that the person was powerless to do anything about.

What you need to do then, without launching into a full rant, is to indicate that this is not a fully satisfactory answer, because we as managers have to deal with those kinds of failures all the time. And good managers anticipate them, and then do what has to be done to finish the job anyway.

Try to get your managers to start speaking in these terms: “It was my fault. I should have _________,” and that way they will start learning how to convert those “should haves” into successful managerial actions.

Management responsibility cuts both ways. If our incoming managers aren’t fully prepared to take on responsibility, it is our responsibility to show them how, and why.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.

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