How will practicing Responsibility set me apart?

How can demonstrating Responsibility set me apart from other managers, agile coaches, scrum masters, project managers, and the like?

Leadership is Responsibility. Leadership is the ability to respond to change, and to make change happen, to take ownership of the situation and rally people to a goal.

Responsibility demonstrates caring. How much is caring worth to bosses, to managers, to companies, to your employers, to your customers?

People who practice Responsibility tend to be better problem solvers. No problem gets solved until someone takes ownership of it.

Without Responsibility, problems often go unsolved because nobody actually takes ownership of the problem.

Teams swarm around a problem with various ineffective solutions, solving only their anxiety around the problem.

People who practice Responsibility find and own the real problem – and that produces great value. Value that sets you apart from every other leader, scrum master, manager, project manager out there.

You, as a Responsibility practitioner, tend to make better decisions. You tend to operate with a clearer framework of integrity, trust, and honesty.

All of these things are important in terms of setting you apart in your role as a scrum master, project manager, or an agile leader of any type.

So what can you do today to start your Responsibility practice?

Familiarize yourself with what it means to have a responsibility practice. In other words, get a copy of The Responsibility Process® poster.

Download it, print a bunch of copies and put them where you will see it all the time. Now it will challenge you.

It will get in your face because you will notice yourself blaming, and justifying, and shaming, or getting stuck in obligation.

All of those mental states below the line of Responsibility – those are the mental states that make us feel like we’re a victim, like we’re powerless, like there’s nothing we can do.

A Responsibility practice is catching ourselves in those states and refusing to stay there.

A Responsibility practice is clawing your way back up to the mental state of Responsibility, because that state is where we can be bigger than any problem.

Responsibility is where we can be much greater. We can be more awesome. We can take ownership of anything, and can demonstrate caring in decision making & leadership.