Personal Responsibility: Is there any other kind?

Sometimes we wish there was. Sometimes we behave as if there is.  The bad news: There isn’t any other kind of effective responsibility other than the personal kind. The good news: It’s your’s, not for the asking, but for the choosing.

Let’s start at the macro level. Even in the situations in which we feel we play no part and have no hand in – e.g., the BP oil spill – if we step back and take a look at whose hand is holding the gas nozzle as we top off our SUVs, we see the part we play.  We see our hand.

I am not saying “Stop driving.” I am saying, rather than mumble “How could THEY be so irresponsible as to not have an effective plan to stop the gusher?” consider mumbling “How can I act responsibly in the part, however small, I play in this situation?”

To say “How can I…?”, each of us must first uncouple responsibility from blame.  Blaming ourselves or others produces right/wrong, winner/loser, either/or responses and quick fixes, not long-term solutions.  When we are willing to consider the possibility that we have some connection to the situation being how it is, we are much less likely to buffer ourselves with blame and more likely to see the bigger picture.

Sometimes we (me, too) wish those people, who did this or that would stop this or that so I could “get my life back”, just as BP CEO Tony Hayward declares in this 14-second YouTube clip:http://tinyurl.com/3ak552n.  Our teeth grind at the dissonance between our expectation of a leader and his words. Yet we fail to hear ourselves when we declare our version of get-my-life-back in this NPR story: http://tinyurl.com/2ehsp95.

NPR Excerpt: “Ed Scharmer is gassing up his truck… He kind of shrugs and admits he’s starting to tune the spill out. “It’s to the point where I don’t want to watch it anymore,” he says. “It’s discouraging. I don’t feel that there’s anything that I can do about it.” But BP wasn’t just tinkering around out there in the Gulf. The company was trying to create a product that we all buy every day. Gas is something we all want — and want cheap. Most of the people I talked to were driving what you’d have to call gas-guzzlers, so I asked whether they feel any personal culpability. “Uh, no,” Carpenter says. When I ask the question, he looks sort of angry.

Let’s move to the micro level, from the environmental stage to your career. Business Week shakes, in a good, WAKE-UP way, our personal responsibility bones with “30 ways to wreck your career.” http://tinyurl.com/23cgud8. Check out #7 and #13. You’ll know why I picked them.