Responsibility Explained

I recently ran across an interview on LinkedIn with a business author promoting her latest book. The book is What Awesome Looks Like: How to Excel in Business and In Life, by Amy Rees-Anderson. The author’s background is that she started a software business and later sold it for $400 million. The book is listed elsewhere as “a guide for entrepreneurs, executives and employees with the desire to understand how they can excel in business, balance work and family life and find a purpose beyond the bottom line on the way to becoming successful leaders and business owners.”

A guide to entrepreneurship seems a far cry from the idea of behavior having consequences. It didn’t catch my attention for that purpose. In fact the title was the first thing I noticed. It was a turn-off for two reasons. First it looks like just another book full of magic answers – excel in business and life? Otherwise, it could be good advice disguised and presented as magic answers, in which case people will find the path is easy to understand but the execution is hard, just as dieting and achieving financial security require discipline and responsibility. So there might be the link to behavior after all.

The second negative is just a personal pet peeve. "Awesome" is possibly the most overused word in the English language today. It is supposed to be an adjective, but adjectives are used to describe. In current usage, the description has become so watered down that it carries only some vague positive connotation. It has lost any specificity. It tells me that a person feels good about something, but hasn’t the energy or imagination to describe the feeling in more detail. With any luck it will go the way of groovy, a similar adjective/interjection, popular in the 1960s. But I digress.

Pertaining to the subject of behavior in the five key dimensions, the interview commented on the number of apologies in recent news from politicians and celebrities for various missteps. Some have been strong and some weak; some are almost non-apologies. They sounded good, but said nothing.

An important point is that everyone makes mistakes and the interview presented a good outline for making a good apology. Any apology should contain some commitment not to make the mistake again. The author presents the outline as a memory device calling it the, “Six A’s of a Proper Apology: 

1) Admit – I made a mistake
2) Apologize – I am sorry for making the mistake.
3) Acknowledge – I recognize where I went wrong that caused the mistake.
4) Attest – I plan to do the following to fix the mistake, on this specific timeline.
5) Assure – I will put the following protections in place to ensure that I do not make the same mistake again.
6) Abstain – Never repeat the same mistake.”

Underlying this process is the idea of strong behavior in the dimension of responsibility, taking ownership of your error and problems and making a sincere attempt to improve. How different this is from the current trend of playing the victim, blaming circumstances or someone else, or seeming to apologize only for getting caught.

This is a good guide for responsible behavior and also reinforces the point I have made often. Many books, articles and blogs explore portions of the solution contained in the five key behavioral dimensions, but only this one pulls them all together.