How to take more responsibility

“I’ll take responsibility for that.”

Hearing this phrase in a team setting is generally a good sign. Choosing to be responsible for something is effectively an act of leadership. And whether it’s in our families, at work, at church, or in community groups, more people choosing to lead is a good thing.

So instead of worrying about abstract concepts like “leadership development”, why not just focus on “taking responsibility”? If more folks - like us and our peers - are taking responsibility for their conduct and the needs of others, isn’t that exactly what we want?

One way to foster responsibility-taking is to make it clearer why taking responsibility is really important. This is fairly intuitive, it’s hard to convince someone to take responsibility for something if they believe it doesn’t matter. In my experience, people on teams don’t take responsibility if the challenge is unimportant, myself included.

Another way to foster more responsibility-taking is to build up competence. This is also intuitive, if someone feels like they’re definitely going to fail or have no idea what they’re doing, they don’t step up to take responsibility. For example, if someone asked me to take responsibility for making sure a car’s design was safe, I would say absolutely not. I do believe having safe automobiles is extremely important, but I am not comfortable taking responsibility for something in which I have no competence.

A third way to foster more responsibility-taking is to make teams non-toxic. I’d put it this way. Let’s say you’re in a meeting about a new problem that’s come up, maybe it’s a product safety recall your company has to do. You’re deciding whether or not to step up and take responsibility for executing the recall effort. 

If you believed everyone would dump every last problem on you and vanish, would it make you more or less likely to step up? If you weren’t sure whether your boss would constantly overrule your decisions or if it seemed like your colleagues would scrutinize your work unfairly, would you volunteer? If you questioned whether or not you’d get the money and staff to solve the problem, or felt like you’d get all the blame for a mistake and no gratitude for a success, wouldn’t you think twice about taking responsibility? 

I would, regardless of how important it was or how competent I felt. If the culture around us is toxic, we shouldn’t expect to see responsibility-taking.

In the American context, we tend to emphasize competence a lot. We like “all-stars” and “high-potentials” to save the day. There is a danger, however, to overindexing on this when assessing leadership. Competence (and also confidence) is easy to fake. It’s also easy to have hubris and think we have more competence than we really do.

I would also hypothesize there are diminishing marginal returns to competence. After a certain point, adding more competence doesn’t lead to more responsibility taking if importance isn’t clear or if a team has a toxic environment. If we want to increase responsibility-taking, competence matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters.

The big realization from this thought experiment came when I put these ideas into the context of our family.

I, like many others, want my kids to take responsibility for their actions and for helping others as they grow older. In fact, I believe that I owe it to them to help them learn how to do take responsibility. But no extra-curricular activity, or online video is going to do that for me. I cannot expect our kids’ school to teach them to take responsibility.

Rather, the responsibility lies with me. I have to explain to them why taking responsibility for something, like befriending a classmate who is struggling with a bully, is important. I have to create a non-toxic environment at home, and let them make decisions for themselves. I have to give them the time and support, and help them clean up a mess when they screw up - even if I knew beforehand that whatever they were doing was going to fail.

Sure, maybe at the margins, some sort of class, extra-curricular, or book is going to help them build up fundamental competence in some way, like say in how to run a meeting or how to manage the budget of their lemonade stand. But even then, I’ll still have to coach them - they won’t learn everything from a class, video, or book.

In a family setting, it seems to me that learning to take responsibility has much more to do with how we interact with our kids and shape our family’s culture than it does with sending them away to camp for a few weeks and assuming the “training” they receive there will be enough.

So why do we think “leadership training” at work would have different results? It seems to me that if we really want to create teams where more and more people take responsibility, having “leadership development” retreats or “high-potential talent pipelines” are a bit of a sideshow. 

What we should be doing is telling stories about why the work we do is important. What we should be doing is finding really specific training courses to build up contextually-specific competence. What we should be doing is treating our colleagues with more compassion so they can count on a reasonable level of support and respect when they step up and take responsibility for a challenge.

I’m skeptical of the concept of “leadership” and have been for a long time. It seems to me that if I want other around me to take on more responsibility - whether it’s my family, my neighbors, or my colleagues - the biggest obstacle to that is not them and their “leadership abilities” or creating more “leadership development” opportunities. The biggest obstacle is probably me, and the way I treat them.

Every person has a remarkable story, and something special to contribute

One of my most perplexing parenting moments is when something like this happens:

“I can’t do it! I can’t do it!”

Or:

“It’s not working Papa! Can you help me?!”

Or, the most comedic version:

“I can’t do it! Can you carry me? I forgot HOW TO WALK!”

I originally thought, I don’t know where Bo learned this, it must’ve been at school. I don’t remember pouting and screaming “I can’t do it!”, in front of him at least.

Then, I got real with myself. I accepted that I wasn’t so perfect. I have complained, been wounded, or just been flat out pissed about the world around me before:

“I’m sick of people talking over me at work. I don’t see this happening to my white, male colleagues”

“I can’t believe someone put a brick through the window of my Ma’s shop. Why do we have to keep dealing with this?”

“Everyone keeps telling me I’m too verbose during presentations, and then they turn around and tell me to explain my thinking more when I try to be direct. I can’t win with these guys and I don’t see anyone else getting dressed down in front of the whole team”

“I just have to put in my dues. Once I get a bit stronger, confident, and more respected I can really share my opinion with authority.”

”I’m the most inconvenient kind of minority, I get all the prejudice without any of the political clout and social protection that comes from being part of a larger constituency.”

Sadly, I could go on. Upon reflection, these statements - which are selections of my inner monologue, nearly verbatim - are just adult versions of “I can’t do it! I forgot how to walk!”

For much of my teens and twenties, I dealt with this by maintaining an attitude of hidden arrogance which I fooled myself into calling “swag” Even if I wasn’t outwardly a jerk, “Eff these guys”, is more or less what I would think. The cool part was, that attitude actually worked.

Arrogance did serve me well, which I honestly wish wasn’t true. But arrogance comes with a social cost - it requires putting others down, whether it’s directly or indirectly. Actions borne of arrogance make the water we’re swimming in dirtier for everyone else, our culture worsens because of it. In my personal experience, I’ve found, for example, that the more assholes are around, the less a group trusts each other.

There came a point where I couldn’t justify my so-called “swag” anymore. It was wrong, and I didn’t like who I was becoming on the inside. The problem was, when I cut the act of swag, I didn’t feel confidence, or agency, anymore.

The longer I’m alive, the more I believe that humility is a fundamental virtue that keeps our society and culture healthy - it’s an essential nutrient for benevolence, collective action, and ultimately prosperity and peace.

Humility leads to openness and listening. Listening leads to love and understanding. Understanding and love leads to commitment for a shared vision toward a better future between people. Commitment leads to shared sacrifice. And shared sacrifice leads to a better world.

So how do we be humble and confident at the same time? How do we believe we have worth without veering darkly into arrogance? How do have inner strength without having to exert outward dominance?

This is where I’ve been wandering for my late twenties and early thirties. It’s become a bit of an obsession to figure this out since I became a father. Humility is so important, and I know it in my heart, but I want to be able to explain how to my sons, beyond saying “just be humble.”

Humans of New York is one of my favorite communities. I’ve followed their instagram page and have read it regularly for many years. Humans is one of our coffee table books and is excellent.

Basically, HONY is a photo-journalism project, where the founder, Brandon Stanton, tells the stories of everyday people, with photos, one New Yorker at a time.

Every single story is a powerful example of the human condition’s beauty and strength. No joke, every single story of every single person, is extraordinary. I’ve read hundreds of these stories on HONY. And I began to realize, every single person in the world has incredible capabilities, has unique gifts, and has endured significant personal struggle. It’s there, in everyone. If we don’t see them or can’t find them, that’s on us - because they’re there.

As I’ve moved through life as an adult, I’ve somehow figured out how to connect with people about their core stories, sometimes within minutes - even waiting in line at a store’s checkout counter. Or maybe it’s my neighbors or colleagues. Or the person waiting our table at a restaurant. Everyone has these capabilities, gifts, and triumphs over struggle.

I’ve got glimpses of people’s love for their parents and children. Or, their dedication to their work, their church. Some have overcome addiction, or grief, or the grueling journey of finding their voice. It doesn’t matter their station - it could clearly be a wealthy professional, or a house cleaner. I’ve found that every single person has something special to contribute. Every single person has gifts and a compelling story.

To me, that’s a strong reason to be humble. Every single person has gifts. Every single person has something to contribute. Every single person has something special to contribute that I don’t.

That merits my respect to every person on this earth. It doesn’t have to be earned, nobody has to earn my respect. If I haven’t figured out what that special gift or unique capability is, it’s on me. If some arrogance creeps into my heart, I’d best remember that and humble my ass down.

The real eureka moment in this idea came some years later.

Yup - everyone else clearly has gifts. That’s why I should be humble. It’s to respect the unique light in everyone and the special contribution that’s within them to make.

But, if I see this light, this special atman and soul in everyone - literally everyone else - it also means a version of that light lives in me too. It would be audacious to think otherwise; I have no good reason to think that I don’t have something special to contribute, or some unique capability to share. If everyone else does, I must too.

That’s the secret. The elusive third-option truth I’ve struggled to find for the better part of three decades. It does not have to be a choice between arrogance and humility. I can be humble and confident if I recognize that the light in everyone else lives in me too.