A situation came up recently that caused me to think about responsibility in the professional world. It was related to the well-publicized corporate layoffs and I began thinking about the very strange perspective we have in which we take credit for all of our successes but not for our failures. In the corporate world, this equates to celebrations about what "we" as a company did to earn high profits, but then blame economic downturns for losses - not poor forecasting and bad decision-making.
For some reason, issuing genuine apologies is the opposite of what we do and I don't know if this starts in early childhood. I'm sure we've all heard a parent say to a child "Say you're sorry!" and the kid mumbles "I'm sorry" when they're clearly not. And while it's good to teach social skills and manners, we do need to think about what it means to take responsibility for our actions. I'm not suggesting we have a sit-down with a toddler and analyze why they threw a block across the room but at some point, exploring our roles in the patterns in our lives is valuable and necessary.
To back this out a bit and bring it back around to the initial point, let's think about corporate downturns and layoffs. I personally can't think of a single time when a CEO has issued an apology and taken responsibility for the loss of profits. How refreshing would it be to hear that? And, as a worker, how much more faith and confidence would we have in our supervisors to do the right thing going forward?
Outside of the corporate world, it's similar. Many years ago, someone apologized to me for their past behavior, totally unprompted and out of the blue. And while we're not besties today, we actually are friends. That never would have happened had they not reached out and taken responsibility for their actions.
Making mistakes doesn't make us bad. It makes us human. And taking responsibility makes us even more so.
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