I’ve been thinking recently about responsibility and intellectual courage. It started with my plumber (Note: Great title for my first novel): “It’s not my mistake and frankly, it’s the wells guy’s job” that reminded me of the line, apocryphally attributed to President Clinton, but actually (most) of the lyrics were from a 1968 hit by the Delphonics:
I didn’t do it. If I did it, you didn’t see me. If you saw me, I didn’t mean it. If I meant it, don’t expect me to apologize.
Increasingly, when confronted with hard jobs, a common refrain is that perhaps it’s somebody else should do it, it’s someone else’s job. If I actually have to do it, and if something goes wrong, it clearly must be someone else’s fault. This displacement of foundational notions of responsibility and intellectual courage for a mindset of excuse and evasion is bad. It is inconsistent with what we, in shorthand, would call adult behavior. We give adults considerable responsibility, considerable liberty, and expect them to step up and do what needs to be done and make the hard calls. (By the way, this is not an age thing. It’s all about values.). George Bernard Shaw said, “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” While he may have been early to the party, he may have captured the gestalt of early 21st Century America.
I know I’m running the risk of appearing (appearing??) to be both sententious and, frankly curmudgeon-ish, but this is a problem and it doesn’t get talked about enough, or at least get talked about honestly. When we do talk about it, we often excuse it…it’s a generational thing. It’s just the way the world works today, nothing can be done. That’s nonsense.
The country functions and businesses thrive when people, in Mr. Shaw’s parlance, embrace liberty and the responsibility it entails.
Since politics, a simulacrum of our culture, is 24/7 right now, it’s easy to see the problem reflected here, isn’t it? It fills the news every day. I assume all our pols are taught by their handlers to always claim to be working hard (reminds me of that great line from the Princess Bride…”Inconceivable! I do not think it means what you think it means”). I’m pretty sure that when a politician says they’re working hard, it means “please get me another frozen daquiri and post on X that I’m really breaking a sweat.” Our politicians are taught by their handlers to brag, to obfuscate, to dissemble and hoover up credit that they may find lying about. Never undertake something consequential that will actually be hard if there’s a risk of getting it wrong. Make sure there is a responsibility offramp. Don’t leave footprints on the hard stuff. If it goes castors up, always shift blame. Never apologize.
While all this might be understandable (as it seems to work) it’s hardly laudable. While it’s surely wrong to blame our politicians for leading us into this ethical abyss (as they don’t appear to be able to lead us anywhere) our politicians provide a very public exemplar of a broader failing in our modern society about responsibility, about accountability and courage. These examples contribute (if our gloriously elected leaders do it, it must be okay) to the corrosive impact this behavior has on character and, consequently, on achievement.
This metastasizing problem has three parts, doesn’t it? It’s first the evasion of responsibility to work hard and then it’s about the lack of intellectual courage to step up and make decisions. Finally, if something goes wrong, run away, run away and deflect.
Stepping up means taking on challenges, stepping up means embracing liberty and the responsibility it entails, having the courage to pull the trigger, to make judgments and to execute. Finally, when one is done, it means to stand up to the consequence of your decisions.
What do we hear? It’s too hard! There’s a deadline? Gasp! That makes me anxious. It interferes with other things that I value more than the obligation to be an adult. I’ve got a spinning class at 5:00 today and my cat expects me home. (Please don’t take that last comment as a validation on any vice presidential candidate’s world view.) Undertaking that project will give me stress and all my friends and everything I read on the internet says stress is bad.
If working hard is…hard, the risk of getting it wrong is worse. But if you have to do the work and you have to make a decision, and if someone “sees” you, there’s always opportunities for blame-shifting. I poured hot coffee in my lap? Sue McDonalds. Much of the robustness of our tort industry is an edifice built upon the received wisdom that no bad thing should not be accompanied by a lawsuit against someone else. It’s entirely okay to shift blame. Everyone does it. You didn’t succeed in school? Certainly can’t be your fault. Someone failed to educate you. You made a mistake? It’s probably that you weren’t up to it in the first place and shouldn’t have been asked to do it.
Our business enterprises are full of people who are clearly smart, who applied themselves to get a good education and competed to get a job. They can work hard and they’re smart enough to make good decisions. The problem is they have been marinating in the culture of evaded responsibility and accountability, a culture where pride in working hard and being a leader often seems to be values not to be pursued. Working just hard enough is entirely okay. Folks aren’t shy about this, not even a little embarrassed.
A new foundational principle: Don’t work too hard, don’t leave footprints; don’t make decisions and be ready to blame something or someone else for failure. All this has degraded peoples’ willingness to embrace challenge and to exercise the courage to do what needs doing. This diminishes both the actor and the institutions and businesses in which they toil (toil not too hard, of course).
Oh, we all succumb, once in a while, to that little voice that suggests blame could be shed, responsibility avoided but I’m afraid that voice is getting louder and harder to ignore and more yield to the surficial pleasures of a life designed around limiting effort and stress. Don’t overcommit, don’t strive, take it easy! Everyone does it! The siren’s song of ease and tranquility. If I don’t step up, I won’t have to work very hard and I won’t be stressed. If I don’t make any decisions, I’ll have no responsibility and therefore I will make no mistakes. I’m not accountable for bad outcomes. I leave no footprints; I take no risks.
Classic economic says we are all rational actors. Reward and effort (or better, value) are in balance. While a rational actor will size effort to reward, what happens when traditional notions of reward lose value and the risk of censure for not striving becomes attenuated? If you think about it, in business, the notion of “reward” is a bundle of things. It starts with current monetary compensation, then the psychic reward of the receipt of accolades and the absence of censure, accrual of a strong sense of self-worth, professional development (Human Cap-X) and the accumulation of opportunities. What happens when actors see only the near-term monetary economics and think there’s little downside or censure for lack of performance (e.g., getting your ass fired). When everyone thinks that not striving is in fact, closer to the cultural gestalt than the contrary, we have a problem. If working hard doesn’t make one feel good about oneself, when one doesn’t value the creation of opportunities or personal development and when one hears day in and day out that “no one” works harder than they have to, we get what we deserve.
Today, it seems that the coin in which we pay folks is not valued in the way it once was. So what do we do? Since nothing else appears to matter, we pay folks more and assume that that will encourage the behavior we want. At the same time, we simply default to a culture of reduced expectations. This is shoveling sand against the tide. The notion of working just hard enough to keep one’s job or to support one’s lifestyle while avoiding risk and stress is increasingly baked into the culture. With that mindset, monetary reward for performance is simply not compelling.
Okay, no eye-rolling, please. If this sounds somewhat pontifical, I’ll take the heat. We need to speak out loud about the quiet bits. We can’t be embarrassed to articulate an expectation of high performance. You shouldn’t have to camouflage or hide that message in HR psychobabble or word salads. It’s not wrong, even if the marinating cultural imperative is shouting, “Don’t say that! It’s mean!” We clearly need to at least try to address this malaise. We shouldn’t surrender. We shouldn’t lay down and abandon the foundational principles that make our businesses thrive and just simply observe, “Oh well, that’s the way it is.”
We should stop condoning a culture of excuse and create a culture of responsibility and excellence. We can do two things at once. We can support morale, diversity and inclusion (note the elision there) and still require excellence and be disciplined.
We need to do a better job of validating the offered reward. We need to add reality to downside risks of sub performance. At the same time, we need to do a better job of burnishing that coin; do a better job of validating the offered rewards. Lead by example. Show enthusiasm about the benefits of stepping up, the satisfaction of being a leader. Show what it’s like to have courage and reward folks for doing so. Do a better job of mentoring. Do a better job of saying thank you and dispensing accolades (something I did not do terribly well as a manager). We need to make our enthusiasm contagious and to help people understand the long-term benefits of personal growth and opportunity. That perhaps overused chestnut “empowerment” comes to mind, but it’s real and valuable. Liberty is responsibility, but liberty is worth the price of responsibility. Making mistakes is not awful; all adults do it regularly. We need to make that clear. We should treat mistakes as opportunities to help and learn. To not step up, to not answer, to not expose one’s thinking because of fear of being wrong is the path to mediocrity.
We need to fight against it. But remember what we’re up against. Our culture does not broadly censure and, in fact, almost seems to celebrate lack of courage and evasion of responsibility.
Being disciplined about a high-performance culture will drive some to change jobs, looking for acceptable compensation and limited responsibility, but enough will stay and embrace this notion of high performance culture. If we do a better job of rewarding a culture of responsibility and courage, we’ll end up with a sort of high quality cohorts that lead to a dynamic enterprise and a dynamic economy. Fighting for high performance against the backdrop of a world view where no one is embarrassed to sue McDonalds for hot coffee in their lap will be hard. It must be assayed.