» Do You Take Responsibility For Your Actions?

A few years ago I managed client database, which was used daily by several hundred employees. Occasionally we’d get a stream of calls from people stuck in the system, unable to work. When we took a look, we’d find a mess of blockages, like a whole stack of dominoes fallen over. Looking further we could identify the original blocker, the one whose action had affected everyone else.

Then I’d make the phone call:

‘Hi there, have you had any problems with the database this morning?’

‘Well I was searching for something and it was taking forever. So I closed the search and started it off again. It’s okay now though.’

‘Actually it isn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When you closed that first search down, you left the computer in a quandary. It had already started doing your search but it didn’t know what to do when it came back with the results: you’d disappeared, and it was just left in mid air with your information. The result was a blockage that’s affected around a hundred other people, some of them sitting right next to you. And now we need to ask everyone in the company to log out of the database so we can clear the blockage.’

‘It wasn’t my fault, it shouldn’t have taken so long.’

I can’t recall the number of times I went through this type of conversation.

A similar thing would happen with our technical guys, and sometimes people running system  maintenance or statistical programs. Something unexpected would happen and we’d go looking for the explanation. We’d either be able to pinpoint it to an action, or we’d have a ‘before and after’ scenario: it was okay last night when we went home, it wasn’t this morning when we arrived, so what changed over night?

Sometimes at the end of a long, frustrating conversation there would be the casual remark thrown in: ‘I did X but I know it can’t have been anything to do with that.’

Hiding my elation at the breakthrough in the interrogation I would, equally casually, suggest we look into this a bit further ‘just in case’. And if this did turn out to be the guilty action, as was often the case, there was never any apology. In fact I was usually given the impression that it was ‘my’ software causing problems with ‘their’ wonderful IT network.

Even when it was possible to pinpoint the cause with 100% confidence and demonstrate exactly what had happened, it was difficult to get people to acknowledge responsibility. In fact people were often offended at the suggestion that they might have had anything to do with  the problem.

Is it so hard to admit responsibility?

What’s the big deal about admitting you messed up, knowingly or not?

Surely it’s better to come clean and take whatever steps you can to help put things right, and learn how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. You’ll always get my respect if you do.

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