Taking responsibility at work is the process of proving yourself to be valuable, ethical, accountable, and dependable. Whether you’re a newly hired employee or a C-suite executive, it’s about developing trust by getting your job done with a high degree of professionalism.
Being accountable for what you say you will do is a cornerstone of integrity and is essential for sustainable success. Workplace and personal responsibility go hand in hand, offering the same benefit—boosting your capacity to live a better life both inside and outside of work.
Understanding Responsibility at Work
While it takes a range of skills to advance your career, being seen as highly responsible sets you apart. It is foundational to earning promotions and expanded responsibility. Leaders depend on team members to fulfill assignments or projects on time and with quality to reach or exceed individual and team goals. Those seen as consistently responsible tend to be trusted and elevated by their leaders.
Being responsible in the workplace starts with accountability and integrity.
The Role of Accountability
FranklinCovey’s 4 Disciplines of Execution® includes Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability. The first three disciplines allow the team to determine together complete clarity on their Wildly Important Goals, as well as what it will take to achieve them.
Once the team members have that clarity on “how to play the game,” it is their responsibility to make the commitments each week that will keep them on track. This is what we’d describe as “how to win the game.” This weekly meeting is the team’s meeting, it’s not owned by the leader. This is where the team members get to share the commitments they kept and the ones they are making to achieve the goal on time and with quality. The leader’s job is to “clear the path,” ensuring team members have the best chance at success. This is an amazing way for team members to show how responsible they can be.
The Power of Integrity
Holding yourself accountable is vital for professional integrity. This is having the courage to act in keeping with your personal values and beliefs, as well as aligned to company values.
Integrity, one of The 4 Cores of Credibility, is at the root of workplace trust and will ensure your professional reputation as a trusted colleague.
Habits for Building Responsibility
Many of Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® speak to the importance of working responsibility. We focus on 5 of the 7 habits here.
Habit 1: Be Proactive®
Being proactive means taking action to ensure good outcomes. This is the opposite of reactively blaming others or circumstances for your behavior, mistakes, or lack of foresight. Proactively demonstrate your capacity to manage workloads, deal with adversity, learn from mistakes to better hit (and even beat) targets.
Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind®
Do you have clear goals at work? Even at home? Every project, every meeting, every conversation should have a clear end in mind to ensure a measure of accomplishment. Many people find it helpful to develop a personal mission statement to provide focus on your overall plan for success.
Habit 3: Put First Things First®
Prioritize tasks to achieve your most important end-states and goals first instead of just reacting to the next urgent task. Work on important tasks before they become urgent, mindful of not falling into a pattern of thinking that everything is important and urgent. Consider the various “emergencies” that demand your full attention and separate the real emergencies from unnecessary or manufactured crises that can be deprioritized. You will always face urgent and important activities, that is real life, but you will never achieve your goals if you become addicted to immediacy and don’t effectively prioritize.
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood®
Seek to develop your social awareness, in addition to self-awareness. You may be very articulate when you speak, but are you a good listener? Have you been known to finish other people’s sentences for them? Too often, we only listen to someone else in order to make assumptions of what they are saying or formulate our reply, rather than really listening and hearing what the other person is saying. When someone feels really seen and heard by you, they will find you more credible and responsible and be more open to hearing what you have to say.
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw®
There’s little hope for work responsibility and consistent high-performance if your life is out of balance and you are burned out much of the time. Being effective for the long haul requires energy and wellbeing, taking care of all four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual. Every day is a new opportunity for renewal (to sharpen the saw, so to speak), so take the time to recharge.
The Impact of Responsibility on Team Culture and Business Outcomes
High-performance teams are created when there is a shared understanding of quality as each colleague works with integrity and accountability. Such teams develop a strong culture of trust and a sense of common cause that will drive market-beating business results. This in turn increases employee satisfaction and engagement and makes work more exciting and fulfilling. It’s a virtuous cycle of success.
Enhancing Responsibility: 3 Practical Tips
Know How Your Role Aligns to Organizational Success
Deeply understand how your role connects to the mission, vision, and strategy of the organization. This turns your role from a mere job to a true contribution and ensures that work responsibility is productive effort. Clarity about what matters most is a joint effort between leaders and team members, so make sure you and your leader are aligned.
Seek Continuous Improvement
As you seek to gain increased responsibility, take the time to proactively enhance your skills and knowledge. Seeking continuous improvement helps make it more likely that your abilities will expand along with your responsibilities and provide tools for personal career development as well.
How to Ask for More Responsibility at Work
Asking for more responsibility isn’t always easy, but the payoff can be great. A smart time ask is after the successful completion of a significant project or after you feel like you have trends of high-quality work delivered on time. Make sure that any request for increased responsibility is concrete and specific. Start the conversation with a clear statement of positive intent, a few examples of your good work and also think about questions your boss might ask so you can be prepared with possible answers.
