Responsibility
Some skills, as you progress in developing them, become more efficient.
Making coffee falls in this category.
The better you get at other skills, the more others rely upon you to utilize them.
This is particularly true in the field of leadership skills.
Taking responsibility falls in that category.
When something goes wrong, your brain defaults to finding out what went wrong and placing blame.
Responsibility represents an important leadership skill: focusing on blame is a dead end, taking ownership
and setting ego aside enables momentum and learning.
The awareness of the need to take responsibility is Leadership 101; the practice and maintenance of doing so is another level.
The challenge with taking responsibility is that on your team, in your organization, or even in your community, there are endless opportunities for you to roll up your sleeves and take something on.
When you find yourself taking responsibility for everything you quickly find yourself accomplishing nothing.
Your brain exacerbates this: at some point taking responsibility for everything creates the illusion of control and certainty.
When you consider responsibility as a skill rather than a state of being, you recognize the need to manage it like any other skill.
A barista can make only so many cups of coffee in a given timeframe.
Great leaders actively evaluate their capacity for taking responsibility.
They also look to develop that capacity in those around them in order to alleviate organizational bottlenecks.
The longer the day, the stronger the coffee,
- Morning Cup