Take Responsibility: Claiming Beats Blaming 

By Barb Springer Beck

Vol. 24 No. 3,  2003-04

    It puzzles me that we have become so practiced at blaming and complaining these days.  Regardless of where we live or work in America, it seems that everyone wants someone else to take responsibility for anything bad that happens.  This is evidenced by everything from our personal behavior, to insurance rates, to the number and kind of lawsuits in our country.  If you drink hot coffee and burn your tongue, you sue (and win!); if you ski out of control, crash, and break a leg, you sue; and if you get a hair in your soup, you sue!  This is not to minimize the fact that some individuals, businesses, or agencies are indeed negligent on occasion and the courts are needed to mete out just compensation.  But, it seems that we’ve taken the whole idea of legal respons-ibility to a ridiculous extreme. 

Why should you care about being personally responsible?  Well, if you are happy, have your life completely in order, and are satisfied with the directions our country and the world are headed, then the subject of personal responsibility is probably irrelevant to you.  If, on the other hand, you get frustrated, you can’t seem to get the results you desire, and you’re some-times angry with others, keep reading! 

Let’s look at an example from the workplace: how a Fish and Wildlife Service employee got good results by practicing personal responsibility.  Sue was the interdisciplinary team leader for a large environmental assessment on her refuge.  As the team leader she was responsible for meeting the agreed-upon deadlines for the project, but the specialists on the team did not report directly to her.  After the project had begun, the wildlife biologist’s supervisor pulled him from working on the team project to another priority despite Sue’s attempt to negotiate for more of the biologist’s time.  Sue was very concerned about meeting her deadlines and also with having a quality project containing all of the appro-priate input.  As she watched the team struggle without the biologist’s input, Sue realized that she had several alternatives.  She could continue on without the input and either miss the deadline or produce an inferior document, knowing that she could blame the missed deadline on the biologist.  She could go to the refuge manager and complain that the biologist’s supervisor was jeopardizing her project.  Or, she could look for biological expertise from another source.  Although Sue was tempted to just complain, she realized that it was in her best interests and that of the project to try to stay on track by finding another biologist.  Requesting the help of a biologist from another refuge on detail, Sue was able to produce a good quality analysis, meet her deadline, and relieve the pressure on the biologist originally assigned to the team.   Sue’s refuge manager appreciated her ability to deliver on time without turning a difficult situation into the manager’s problem.

Have you ever applied for a job you thought you would get, only to learn someone else had been selected?  Did you handle the disappointment constructively or just blame and complain?  Maggie applied for a Field Office Manager job with the Bureau of Land Management.  Believing that she had excellent qualifications for the position, she was discouraged to learn that she had not been selected.  In her discouragement, Maggie was tempted to gripe that the successful applicant only got the job because he knew the supervisor.  But lacking any evidence that the individual selected was not well qualified, she decided that she’d take a hard look at her application, experience, and references, to see what she could learn about how she stacked up against the other candidates. After a candid conver-sation with the supervisor of the position she had applied for, Maggie learned that although her experience was on a par with the person selected, she had not adequately emphasized her management experience in the application, focusing instead on her technical strength in geology.  Maggie gained some good insights for her next application and turned the selecting supervisor into an ally for any future vacancies.

Here’s another situation where an individual held herself accountable and made the best of an unavoidable shortfall.  Sandy, the Fire Management Officer for a Ranger District, was assigned a target for fuel reduction in a wildland urban interface area.  She identified the acres she wanted to treat and prepared the environmental documentation.  In the fall, her crews felled the trees in the unit leaving the woody material on the ground to dry out.  Sandy planned to burn the unit the following fall.  All preparations were made for the burn, but Sandy did not get the weather conditions she needed to safely conduct the burn.  At that point Sandy knew she would not be able to achieve the assigned target for that year.  She was concerned about her accountability and that of her District Ranger.  Before she went to the Ranger with the news, Sandy asked herself what she could do to address the situation, and contacted the Fire Management Officer on the adjacent district.  The other district had carried out a successful burn in the spring and as it turned out, they had exceeded their acre target.  Sandy made a deal to accomplish the acres for both districts in the following year by burn-ing her prepared unit and one other unit.   Although she was unable to burn during the planned year, Sandy was able to explain to her supervisor how she had done her best to make sure the entire Forest met its acre target for the current and next year. Although it was completely legitimate to blame the weather in this case, that wouldn’t have solved the problem.  Sandy’s extra efforts did solve the problem for both the current and following year.    

Now, if you’re like most, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “I know someone who really needs to do better on personal responsibility.”  We probably all know a person or two who could benefit by changing their basic approach to problems, but rather than starting with someone else, the essence of personal responsibility is to start with ourselves.  When we successfully demonstrate our accountability, we create a powerful model—a model much more powerful than mere words. 

If we take responsibility for our choices and actions we accomplish several things.  First, by taking control over the things that we can influence, we produce results that we wouldn’t get by simply blaming others.  Second, we can serve as a positive role model for others—our kids, our spouse, our co-workers—by making good choices when the easiest way out might be to point the finger elsewhere.   Third, people who do practice personal re-sponsibility shine as problem-solvers and become known as the go-to people in difficult times.  And, finally, the greatest accomplishment of practicing personal responsibility may be how we feel about ourselves at the end of the day knowing that we’d done all we could to overcome whatever barriers we found in our way.  According to John G. Miller in his book QBQ: The Question Behind the Question (2001, Denver Press), “The only things we have any real control over are our own thoughts and actions.  Asking questions that focus our efforts and energy on what we can do makes us significantly more effective, not to mention happier and less frustrated.”  So, don’t think of yourself as a victim the next time you’re faced with an obstacle, instead ask yourself “What can I do to get the best possible outcome?”  Then, do it!