Self-responsibility can be defined as the
state or fact of being responsible, answerable, or accountable for something
within one's power, control, or management.
Whether in personal life or at the workplace, when
something goes wrong or it doesn't go the way we want, most of us try and find
excuses or to find the people guilty for the situation. There will always be
someone else or a certain context we can blame and if we can’t find anything
rational, then we choose to think that we had bad luck.
This way we move on and
doing the same things we did before because we are convinced the problem was
somewhere outside of us or out of our control. We hope that the people
around us will do things right next time, we wait for a better context or for
the good luck to come. Taking the responsibility for our actions and for our
lives is not the most comfortable way, but is for sure the way to change those
things in our lives that we are not happy with.
The best thing about realizing that we are responsible
for what is going on in our lives is that, this implies the fact that have also
the power to do something in order to change the things we don’t like. We don’t
need to wait for others to do things better or for a turn of good luck. We can
do something right away and it’s up to us to decide what or how we will do it.
In the workplace environment, avoiding responsibility
can be easily recognized whenever we hear statements like: “We could have finished the
project on time if the Accounting would've given us the right calculations” or
“The meeting would have been much more successful if we had a better agenda.”
Each of these statements exemplifies what it means to place blame on another
member of the team, rather than working to solve the problem as a collective
unit. Moreover, individuals tend also to place the blame on others for their
under-performance. Affirmations like “I could have reached my objectives if I
had a better training” or “I could work more effectively if my colleagues would
be more organized” are examples of situations where self-responsibility is
avoided. This attitude will only create unnecessary animosity among coworkers
and managers and will definitely have a negative impact on the performance and
motivation of the employees.
If we are honest to ourselves, we will be able to
recognize all the situations in which we are shifting the responsibility for
our professional mistakes or failures on external factors. This is the first
step in taking personal responsibility.
The next step is to think about what our role in that specific situation was and what we could have done
differently or better. Although every one of us has different tasks to
accomplish, there is always something everyone can be doing to have a more
positive and progressive impact on the workplace as whole.
The link towards
positive change is to take action in order to avoid future failure or mistakes.
If we are not sure exactly what would be the most important or the best thing
to do, we should at least try to do something different until we will find out
what is that thing that brings us where we want.
Acknowledging
our part of “guilt” will make us learn and act differently in the future. Otherwise,
we will do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
This is what Albert Einstein called Insanity.
