Road to Responsibility

Last Thursday CDC Software  HR team showed us a  presentation on Road to Responsibility by Christopher Avery​  . Here is the summary of the session as I understood it.

When things are going well and everything is successful, everyone is happy to claim and share credit for it. However, when things go wrong, there seems to be no one who is accountable and responsible for the issue. Many people use responsibility and accountability interchangeably. However, Chistropher gives one important difference.

Accountability – Depends on someone else. Some one holds you accountable for failure of the project and there is nothing you can do about it. You might not think that you are the cause of the failure, but there is noway you can convince the other person.

Responsibility – This is an internal feeling. You wanted to do something well, but things didn’t go properly and it was a failure. Then you take responsibility for the failure. Sam(Our HR Head) asked us to give examples of accountability and responsibility at this time and everyone including me were thorougly confused with some of the examples. After some thinking I think I have some answers.

Some examples are an example for both accountability and responsibility depending on the point of view. • Your child behaves badly with another kid – Other parents hold you Accountable. You feel responsible because you want your child to be a model citizen. •Your parents say your room is dirty and needs to be cleaned – Parents hold you accountable for the tidiness of your room. But, You feel it is already tidy( after all You just cleaned it last month)… You don’t think the room is dirty and hence You don’t take responsibility… Every person goes through a set of phases before he starts taking responsibility. These phases can be best described with the example of vegetable price rise and Indian government 🙂

1.Denial – In this phase you refuse to accept the truth. You can recognise the person is in this state when he utters sentences like these… “Oh, it is a seasonal fluctuation. Prices will fall in 6 months”

2.Lay Blame – Once the person comes out of denial, he looks for some one  or some circumstance to blame for the issue. The thinking is that “Problem lies elsewhere… not with me”. In our Indian government stituation the sentence would be “The state governments need to do more to curb hoarding”

3.Justification – If you come out of the previous state, you will start justifying why it happened. The more intelligent you are better are your justification stories.Now you realise that “The problem was not caused by someone else but by me because of certain circumstances.” In our government example, it would result in statements like “The crops were destroyed by unseasonal rains and hence prices have risen…”

4.Shame – This is the most private phase of taking responsibility. You realise that the jsutifivcations you were making are really hollow and the real reaosn for the failure is plain simple “I screwed it up”. You will not find any statements from our government for this phase, but I am glad to report that they have given indication that they have moved to next phase

5.Obligation – This is a phase where from which you start to correct the situation. However, you still are not taking responsibility for it. You will take steps as an obligations. Christopher Avery says, Obligation is a state of mind in which you do just enough to get a “pass”. A person in this state of mind will utter a lot of statements with “have to” in them.In case of Indian govenment ” I have to reduce the prices somehow or else the people will throw us out in the next election”. Hence they announce temporary solutions like banning exports and start imports which will give “pass” marks.

 6.Responsibility – This is a state in which you want to fix the issue. This is a difficult stage to come to since if don’t care about something there is no way someone can make you reach this state. The best you can do is obligation state. Hoever, for things you do care about you will hear yourself say “I want to “. ex: I want to take good care of my family. Our government has not reached this stage yet, but when they do they will come up with some superb ideas like “cold storage” or “Amul-like” co-operative society for vegetables.

One of the participants in the session came up with an interesting point. He said sometimes we do a good job inspite of it being a “have to” rather than want to. He gave an example of his home where sometimes he has to cook food inspite of not liking it. But he does a good job. How is that? Why is it that even when he feels it is an obligation he does a good job of it?

My answer is that sometimes you will do a good job of “have to” to achieve a bigger “want to”. In the above case he cooked well because he wants to keep his wife happy.So, the want to made him do the unpleasant “have to cook” to her satisfaction.

This example also gives us a clue as to how to take responsibility for things that you  would otherwise not care much about. Managers could also help by making employees understand how this meaningless boring task(obligation) would relate to something that they really care about.

 ex: ” Make sure you understand the issue reported by testers so that you can fix it now properly. Don’t ignore the issue if it is not reproducible in your machine.”  If you don’t fix it properly now, you might get a critical issue raised by a customer on friday evening which might keep you away from your family.

I have seen that most people will be able to take responsibility for a task that has a direct reward( or relates to a direct want). However, most people cannot recognise tasks that help them achieve their wants in an indirect or two step way. I think managers need to educate their team members as to how each task that they do contributes to their want.

 Do comment….