Episode 21: Take Responsibility - the Right Way!

There's nothing worse than a manager or an official who's incapable of saying, "I'm sorry. I screwed up." Dag Hammarskjöld offers us an excellent example. When it was time for a victory lap, he credited his entire team. If something hit the fan, however, he took responsibility openly. No blame games. 

If you are running a company, a department, a branch, an office, etc., you must know how to take responsibility in a way that counts.

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

#DagHammarskjöld #responsibility #accountability #businessethics #customercare #decodingtheunicorn 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Responsibility, leadership, accountability, apology, humility, team credit, public blame, reputation, customer service, management role, employee conduct, social media, public opinion, proper apology, business conduct.

Welcome to the decoding the unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 21 of decoding the unicorn the podcast, I appreciate you being with me in today's episode, I will be talking about the right way to take responsibility. We've definitely seen plenty of good bad examples of how not to be accountable. So if someone is in a leadership role or management role, or maybe public office if they screw up, how do they own up? How do they stand up and say, I botched the job, and I'm sorry this is on my mind, because I had a situation in my own personal life recently where a company absolutely dropped the ball, and even after I slept on it, and I tried to cool off. I am still livid, absolutely livid about the way that I was treated. And it got me to thinking, there's certainly a right way to apologize, and probably more than one right way, but there are dozens of wrong ways to go about it, if this has ever happened to you, or if you've ever been in a situation where you needed to have a slice of humble pie and apologize to somebody that you know, maybe as a customer, you didn't treat them as well as you should have, stay tuned.

Just a reminder, you can find Sara's book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld on amazon.com. The link is available in the summary for this episode. And now back to the show.

So as I said, this has been on my mind because I had just an absolute awful experience, and it was totally unnecessary, the way that I was treated. And then when I confronted the individual who treated me poorly, he tried to gaslight me and say that we had never even spoken, and it's like, that's just a bald faced lie. I have the evidence, I have the screenshots, to prove that we've spoken.

It really, really upset me.

If you've read decoding the unicorn, then you know, one of the things that I talk about in the book is how whenever there was a victory lap at the UN dag didn't say, Oh, it was all me. I did all of this. I was miraculous. I spearheaded the effort. Me, me, me, i, which is in today's leadership, we see a lot of that, but dag didn't do that if there was something to take credit for, if he was king of the day in the media, which, in my book simply DAG, I'm really talking about the folly of that, because with DAG, he could be king of the media for a day and then be a whipping boy the very next day. The press is so fickle, and they were back in the 50s too, that's nothing new. But if he was king for the day, if people were praising him, he would give credit to the organization and to his team. My team did this as a team, we were able to accomplish this. I have amazing people around me in the secretariat. He never got up and said, I did all of this myself. It was a one man effort. And look at how awesome I am. Even though there were times that dag absolutely was the driving force, he just was. He could have patted himself on the back and said, look at how awesome. Look at all the time that I spent. It really paid dividends, didn't it, but he didn't do that. Instead, whenever it was time to take credit, he gave the credit to the team and the organization, which is a very humble and decent way to lead, and it inspires other people. Because when your efforts are being acknowledged and not only acknowledged privately within the company or the organization, but being acknowledged publicly in that way by a prominent leader. It feels good. I'm also thinking of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion during JFK administration, even though he wasn't responsible for that, whenever it was time to eat crow in the press, he did so, and he said, I'm the responsible officer of the government, it's my duty to come out here and say, Maya culpa. This was a screw up, and I'll take the blame for it. If you want to throw daggers at somebody, throw them at me. That's a really savvy way of handling the problem. But what you don't do, you don't say, Well, I don't believe this, or I'm sorry that you felt offended.

Just allow me a minute to grunt.

And dag was very good at that side of things, too. If he was having Rotten Tomatoes thrown at him by the press, or he felt like he was in the town square in the pillory with. People throwing rotten vegetables and Oh, boo, Dag hammer should How awful. We don't like this and this and that. He would say, this is on me. So when it was time to take credit or take a victory lap, he gave credit to everybody. When it was time to take the blame and be put in the pillory and have rotten veg thrown in his face, he would say, this, this is my fault. This is on me. Just I will come out and be the public spokesman who gets blamed. I'm cool with that. I just think that is such a master class in how to handle it. And I think if you own and operate a business, if you're in a management role, maybe you're an intrapreneur and you're running a branch in somebody else's company, or managing an office, if one of your employees poo poos the bed and they are crass and crude to a client or a prospective client, you really can't let that slide, because it reflects On your department, your company, your office, there was a person that I worked for several years ago, must have been more than several years ago, a number of years ago, and I'll never forget him saying, if I have somebody that's a rock star, if I have somebody that's a top level producer, and they're making all kinds of money for the company, but they're terrible, their attitude stinks. They're rude and they're full of drama, I'll fire them because I would rather have peace and I would rather have a good reputation in the community than to have somebody that's bringing in money hand over fist, but they're alienating everybody and their ego won't fit through the door.

That's well said.

So here's my thought. This will be a short episode, because I feel like there's no reason to go overboard in over explaining anything. It's simple. If you're in a management role, if you're leading an organization, don't treat people like dirt. And also, in addition to that, don't allow your employees to do it either it takes a long time to build a reputation and it takes a short time to lose it. It's like how Dr Phil would say it takes a lot of atta boys and only one you're so stupid to destroy a child. The same thing is true in a different way with your customer base, people are not going to put up with it. They have social media, and they'll try you in the court of public opinion, if nothing else, apologize properly. Take proper accountability, proper responsibility. Don't shove it off. Don't make excuses. Don't talk around a problem 15 different ways or Well, I'm sorry you got offended. I'm sorry you interpreted it that way. He's a good old guy. He means, well, that's not a sufficient apology. If you want to stay competitive, if you want to do the right thing, learn how to conduct your business appropriately, or run your organization appropriately, and when a mistake happens, which they will, we're all human. Own up,

take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others. We'll see you next time.