Responsibility as the unit of measure (The Office Matters Journey Lessons Part 3)
As I’m writing these articles, a great discussion on Facebook ensued here. I loved it because it allowed us to responsibly understand one another’s definitions and to take effort in understanding one another’s point of view to come to a common understanding.
So rather than arguing who’s right and therefore has greater “power” or “influence”, it is about coming to common understanding. That is the cure for politics, or politicking. The cure is people taking responsibility for their involvement, their words and the outcomes of the interactions.
A great way of looking at the words responsibility is also to look at the root of it — response ability. It means the ability to respond and if we want to look at it with the positive slant of the word responsibility, it means the ability to respond meaningfully and effectively to new information.
So we would like to define responsibility as the taking of the consequences or outcomes, good or bad, of decisions made.
When an authority figure acts irresponsibly, it is because they don’t want to respond to the consequences of their actions — they want someone else to do it for them. When a person makes a decision, gives an order or takes an action, the consequences are from their decision making, good or bad.
By being irresponsible, it means that they don’t want to have to put the energy or time to respond to the consequences or outcomes, but instead throw it to someone else.
That’s also how we can talk about authority.
Lesson 3: Authority is projected responsibility
Most people who come to authority positions are often flooded by the responsibilities it comes with. Anyone who’s been an entrepreneur before knows that you have to worry about bills, salary, finding clients, creating systems and the list keeps going.
Authority figures have so many things to respond to. That’s why a lot of them, with the experience of their previous authority figures, decide to offload their responsibilities to others. And they often offload without thinking of the outcomes and consequences of how they do it because their own authority figures didn’t do so either.
Another scary thing is that we realised that many people who are subordinate to the authority figures project their own responsibilities to their bosses. What this means is that they are not taking ownership of the consequences of their actions, words or behaviours, but chalking it up to what their bosses said, did or decided.
To project one’s responsibility to someone else is to give them authority over that aspect of your life. So, when we have a manager or boss on top of us at work, these people are responsible for our pay, career stability, growth and a whole host of other things.
That is what giving power means — it is the gift of responsibility to decide your future. And therefore, people who give authority to their superiors at work would not want to take responsibility for those things they left their superiors to decide.
Therefore, we are unhappy when authority doesn’t take responsibility — it means they might not be responsible for us the way that we wish them to be.
What we discovered is that office politics happens whenever anyone refuses to take responsibility for their words, actions and behaviour at the workplace.
When a person acts passive aggressively, it is to avoid taking responsibility for what they want to say. When a bully bullies, it is to avoid taking responsibility for things that they throw onto other people.
That’s why office politics happen. There are great leaders out there who eliminate politics but taking responsibility and holding other people accountable to what they say, do and act. And they create cultures which holds one another accountable with empathy. And that’s another ballgame altogether that I’ll talk about in Part 4 (next week).
