Information Technology Dark Side

“It’s not my problem.”

“It’s the manager’s responsibility to take care of employee productivity problems, not the project manager’s.”

“It’s the manager’s responsibility to take care of employee productivity problems, not the team’s.”

“It was my fault.”

“I’ll fix it, but I need some help.”

“Tell me what I can do to help.”

I have been thinking about personal responsibility lately, and I started a brief catalog of statements I have heard that reflect different ways people describe their responsibility. I started to see these different expressions falling on various locations on a continuum, the Personal Responsibility Continuum.

So, I drew it up this morning and posted it with a “stream of consciousness” version of this post. It wasn’t very well thought out, and one of my good friends told me so. So I decided to give it a second try, putting the in a more well-defined context.

The continuum reflects our willingness to accept responsibility for a problem, either after the fact (accepting we made a mistake) or before the fact (being willing to tackle a problem). Extreme positions at either end are unhealthy when they occur for extended periods of time. I would have added another end set labeled “pathologically guilty” and “pathologically angry”, but I wanted to stay in the range of healthy behaviors. Yes, I think anger and guilt are healthy feelings, as long as we don’t spend the majority of our time there. We all go there occasionally, but living there will make you insane. I have known extreme examples of both, and they all ended badly.

Which brings me to the different gradients in the continuum – angry, defiant, reluctant, indecisive, willing, eager, guilty. These represent how we perceive certain types of responses. We can categorize all of the statements I listed above along this continuum. Absent a specific context or observance of a pattern, none of these categorizations makes the response I listed earlier “good” or “bad”. Sometimes it’s good to be defiant, or reluctant to help. It is also sometimes bad to be eager to help. I need only think of my early attempts at romantic relationships to think of examples!

Behavioral patterns emerge in all of us, and when they do we start to perceive ourselves and others as generally falling in a particular place on the continuum. This is where the triangles come in. I think our behavior is probably distributed in a roughly normal way around one of the gradients. The triangles represent the areas of the continuum where most of our behavior falls. I suspect that if our behavior falls in one of the gradients more than it does the others, it will become the general perception others develop about us. This could encourage or inhibit them from seeking our help in troubled times.

I think it is important to consciously monitor how we respond to requests for help. Passing the buck one too many times, even for items that aren’t very important, can have a powerful negative effect on how you are perceived that will limit your opportunities for growth. Likewise, skilled facilitation will influence others to see you as a capable, effective leader and create opportunities with greater responsibility and reward.

To be honest, I’m not sure how much you can influence where you fall in terms of your instinctive responses to problems. It may be a natural aspect of your personality you have little control over. I do believe we can train ourselves to be conscious of our instincts and cautious about trusting them too blindly, particularly if we understand how they influence other people’s desire/willingness to work alongside us.

Also, I have no idea how to gauge this in an interview. As pointed out in the comments on the original post, you won’t get there with direct questions unless you are interviewing a complete dolt, in which case this continuum is pretty irrelevant. I do think clever people can come up with interviewing situations that make it apparent, even when the other party is on their best behavior. If you’re one of those clever people, I’d like to hear from you.

Stumble it!