What five years in the IDF taught me about responsibility
In the army I developed a habit of setting up two alarms, one for 05:30 and a backup for 05:45. Did I ever actually get up on the first? As you might have guessed — no, I’d snooze it and wait for the backup.
In this short article I will explain the phenomenon called social loafing and how duplicate or shared responsibility can lead to critical failures.
Responsibility
In the IDF’s officer training school, over a bare concrete wall, the following quote is engraved in large letters:
Responsibility cannot be shared or transferred
— Yitzhak T. Taito
The message is clear — if you are assigned a task you can’t transfer your responsibility to someone else, you can only duplicate it. If you decide to further assign the task to your subordinate you are now both responsible.
Let’s use a metaphor: if you are happy and share your happiness with a friend, there is now 200% happiness between you. Sounds good doesn’t it? The thing is, turns out responsibility is nothing like happiness.
Social Loafing
The concept of social loafing was introduced in 1913 by professor Maximilien Ringelmann: imagine a person competing in tug of war (rope pulling contest) applying his maximum strength. If we send 4 additional teammates to help him we should expect to measure 5 times the force. Surprisingly, that is not the case.
As more people are involved in a task, their average performance decreases, each participant tending to feel their own effort is less important.
Consider These Examples
1. Email recipients
During my service I noticed that sending a task to multiple recipients is counter productive. Let’s say you need a quick answer to question and you have four contacts that can help you. Most people would draft a single email and send it to all four contacts, that is NOT best practice as each recipient is more likely to procrastinate.
A more productive approach would be to send four copies of the email, each one to a single recipient. Make people feel important, as if their contribution is the only one that matters.
2. Duplicate representatives in meetings
In my branch it was common practice that a major would be accompanied by his captain subordinate to meetings for learning purposes. The subordinates almost never prepared for these meetings and the major would end up doing all the talking.
If for some reason the major could not attend a meeting, a drastic change would take place. Suddenly the lone captain in the corner would step up, his true abilities revealed.
If you want people to thrive let them be autonomous and have sole responsibility (and credit) for their labor.
3. Guard duty
The base I was stationed in had two guards at the gate, both assigned the responsibility to check every person that entered. This had an amusing side effect: if you came in smiling and saying “Hey man, what’s up? Didn’t see you a for a while now” each guard would assume his partner knows you and let you pass.
If you want people to feel accountable for their actions it needs to be clear that the responsibility lays solely on their shoulders. Counter intuitively it would be more effective to define only one of the guards as responsible and the other as support.
Summing up…
Big bureaucratic organizations seem to derive some sort of forbidden pleasure from handing out responsibilities. While not entirely a bad habit, it does become counter-productive once duplicate responsibilities are assigned. When many people share the same responsibility they actually tend to feel less responsible, this behavior can be explained by the social loafing phenomenon.
As this short article presents a very simplistic and narrow view of things, further reading is highly recommended:
