Responsibility
Part One
By Tracy L. Chenoweth
Opening Question
• When you think of the word responsibility what kinds of
things come to mind?
• Let’s collectively make a listing of our ideas on responsibility.
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Things that come to mind
Type your answer in here!
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Defining Responsibility
• NOUN:
pl. re·spon·si·bil·i·ties
• The state, quality, or fact of being
responsible.
• Something for which one is responsible; a
duty, obligation, or burden.
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Self Test
•
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Answer True or False to the Questions below.
Be as honest as you can.
I do what needs to be done.
I am reliable and dependable
I am accountable for my actions; I don’t make
excuses or blame others
I fulfill my moral obligations
I use good judgment and think through the
consequences of my actions
I exercise self-control
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Short Answer Question
• I think I am/am not a responsible person
because…
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Okay, Let’s See How You Did
• 1. I do what needs to be done
– With regards to myself
– With regards to my Family
– With regards to my Work
– With regards to my Community
– With regards to my Religion
– With regards to my World
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#2
• I am reliable and dependable
– If we surveyed people who work with you, live
with you, or know you well, would they
describe you as a dependable person?
– A reputation for dependability is built or
destroyed in little ways.
– If you prove to be dependable in the small
things, you will undoubtedly be dependable in
the big things.
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Here are some of those little
things that matter:
• Keep track of any commitment or promise you make -Do you have a method to follow up on yourself? I can't
imagine that anyone can be consistently dependable
without some efficient follow-up system. It can be a
formal method, such as Day Timers, to a simple "to-do"
list or calendar, as long as it works! Whatever method
you use, be sure to write down all your commitments and
follow-up on yourself consistently. If you trust your
memory, you will eventually find yourself in trouble.
• Return your phone calls promptly --This is a very easy
way to buy yourself a lot of credibility. Most people are
amazed when someone returns a phone call promptly. It
sends a very positive impression of your
professionalism, and it also tells that person that his or
her call is important to you.
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…More Little Things
• Don't promise what you cannot personally
deliver -- Avoid the tendency to make careless
promises ("Under promise, over deliver" is a
good motto).
• When you realize you cannot fulfill a promise or
commitment you've made, for unforeseen
reasons, it is far more credible for you to inform
that person ahead of time rather than waiting
until he or she contacts you.
• Take the initiative to let that person know the
status of the situation, even though it may not be
pleasant to break the bad news.
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#3
• I am accountable for my actions: I
don’t make excuses or blame others
– Understand yourself and the day-to-day
choices you make that impact your
accomplishments and interactions with others.
– Don’t take the easy-way-out and blame others
for things going on in your life.
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Think and Share
• Have you ever really done or said
something that you severely regretted?
– What was the circumstance?
– What emotions were at play?
– What happened to cause your reaction?
– Could you have done something differently?
– Did you think of an alternative later?
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#4
• I fulfill my moral obligations.
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#5
• I use good judgment and think through the
consequence of my actions.
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#6
• I exercise self-control.
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Behavior Traits
• In order to accept personal responsibility
you need to develop the ability to:
– Seek out and to accept help for yourself
– Be open to new ideas or concepts about life
and the human condition
– Refute irrational believes and overcome fears
– Affirm yourself positively
– Recognize that you are the sole determinant
of the choices you make
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…More Behavior Traits
– Recognize that you choose your responses to
the people, actions, and events in your life.
– Let go of anger, fear, blame, mistrust, and
insecurity.
– Take risks and to become vulnerable to
change and growth in your life.
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…Still More Behavior Traits
– Take off the masks of behavior characteristics
behind which you hide low self-esteem.
– Reorganize your priorities and goals.
– Realize that you are the part in charge of the
direction your life takes.
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Responsibility Can be Enhanced
• There are six steps that can be followed to
help develop increased responsibility
skills.
• Let’s take a look at each one closely.
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#1 Awareness
• For a skill to be learned, information is
presented in various ways to create
awareness for each participant as to their
present use or non-use of the skill.
• That is what today is all about; a chance to
reflect and think of forward progress.
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#2 Desire
• Individuals need to be led to see what
benefit they might achieve through the use
of or improvement in the skill.
• An acknowledgement and a “want” to
improve.
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#3 Knowledge
• (how-to)
• Information examples, steps, or models
supply the knowledge individuals need to
be able to learn and demonstrate the skill.
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#4 Practice
• Activities that allow participants to apply
their knowledge about the skill.
• Using day-to-day instances for practice.
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#5 Success
• Feedback from self, co-workers,
supervisors, and facilitators, provide
encouragement and confidence for the
individual to continue to work on the skill.
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#6 Habit Integration
• Individuals understand the process and
know that they make a choice as to
whether or not to proceed to the next step
in the learning process.
• They recognize that the responsibility for
change is theirs.
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Six Pillars of Character
• A PERSON OF CHARACTER . . .
– Is a good person, someone to look up to and
admire.
– Knows the difference between right and wrong
and always tries to do what is right.
– Sets a good example for everyone.
– Makes the world a better place.
– Lives according to the “Six Pillars of Character”:
• TRUSTWORTHINESS, RESPECT,
RESPONSIBILITY, FAIRNESS, CARING and
CITIZENSHIP
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• RESPONSIBILITY- Pillar #3
•
DO: Know and do your duty. / Acknowledge and meet your legal and moral
obligations.
•
DO: Accept responsibility for the consequences of your choices, not only for
what you do but what you don’t do. /Think about consequences on yourself
and others before you act. /Think long-term/ Do what you can do to make
things better. /Set a good example.
•
DON’T: Look the other way when you can make a difference. /Make
excuses or blame others.
•
DO: Your best./Persevere. /Don’t quit./Be prepared./Be diligent./Work hard./
Make all you do worthy of pride
•
DO: Take charge of your own life./Set realistic goals./Keep a positive
outlook l Be prudent and self-disciplined with your health, emotions, time
and money./Be rational — act out of reason not anger, revenge or
fear./Know the difference between what you have a right to do and what is
right to do./Be self-reliant — manage your life so you are not dependent on
others; pay your own way whenever you can
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How to be a responsible person
and feel great!
• When you agree to do something, do it. If you let people down,
they'll stop believing you. When you follow through on your
commitments, people take you seriously.
• Answer for your own actions. Don't make excuses or blame
others for what you do. When you take responsibility for your actions
you are saying "I am the one who's in charge of my life."
• Take care of your own matters. Don't rely on others to remind you
when you're supposed to be somewhere or what you're supposed to
bring. You take the responsibility.
• Be trustworthy. If somebody trusts you to borrow or take care of
something, take care of it. If somebody tells you something in
confidence, keep it to yourself. It's important for people to know they
can count on you.
• Always use your head. Think things through and use good
judgment. When you use your head you make better choices. That
shows your parents they can trust you.
• Don't put things off. When you have a job to do, do it. Doing things
on time helps you take control of your life and shows that you can
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manage your own affairs.
Let’s Shift Gears…
• What about False Responsibility and its
remedies?
– What is False Responsibility
– Can your recognize times when you have felt
this way?
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• In this section we will look at the pattern of
"false responsibility" – when we take
charge of things that don’t belong to us,
such as:
– other people’s feelings,
– mistaken assumptions about who is
responsible for shared outcomes,
– or when circumstances change but we don’t.
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• Most adults have a natural ability to decide
what’s in and what’s out. Our family of
origin, fears, unrealistic expectations, and
stressors such as pressure or anxiety
sometimes cloud our judgment.
• The goal is to respond in ways that allow
us to make high-quality decisions more
often, steering clear of the landmines of
false responsibility.
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• In our prior discussion we’ve suggested that one
key to success is to take personal
responsibility for the results you get.
• Even when others are into deflecting ("It’s not
my fault"), projecting ("You need electro-shock
therapy!"), or blaming and shaming ("You didn’t
explain it right."),
• You can strengthen your approach while earning
respect for your commitment to learning.
• However, no matter what the other person owns
(or doesn’t own), there are limits to "healthy
responsibility" at work.
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These limits come in
three forms:
•
•
•
Under no circumstances are you
responsible for other people’s feelings
or experiences.
Caring about an outcome is different
than having to control it.
When there’s change, notice and adapt
lest ye get "bent out of shape."
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Limit #1
• Even when you directly contributed to someone
else’s experience, you are not responsible for
their feelings or problems.
• To accept some responsibility for the situation
would require your voluntary consent. I’m not
suggesting that you ignore their communication
or that you not listen. Indeed, listen carefully and
responsibly to their "stuff" – just don’t take it on!
• Realizing that it’s their stuff means you need not
defend or argue. This is their experience, and it
is a fact for them. Let it wash over you.
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• If you are having a hard time listening
without judging, ask them to "speak from
first person" – as in, "I understand you feel
that I let you down; what was your
firsthand experience?"
• If necessary, request that they "Start with ‘I
…’."
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Limit #2
• Caring about an outcome is different than having to
control it.
• Over-caring about a goal doesn’t achieve optimal results
– it prevents them! For example, if a manager claims to
be fully responsible for all the outcomes of their
department, what’s wrong with this picture?
• For starters, not all the outcomes are up to that
manager. It’s joint responsibility for shared outcomes:
the staff does their part and the manager does theirs
(hopefully).
• Though based on a good intention (caring), taking false
responsibility (over-caring) is a setup – a guarantee of
overwork, underplay, stress and eventual burnout for a
manager, depriving employees of power and recognition.
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• Of course, not assuming enough
responsibility ("Who, me? I’m not even
involved…"), would also be a problem.
Aloof and detached "under-caring" triggers
those who tend to over-care, both going
nowhere in a hurry.
• Remedy: assume functional and healthy
responsibility, which may involve an
adjustment in thinking, language and
approach.
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Limit #3
• Pushing to change circumstances beyond
our control causes frustration and wastes
energy.
• Being fixated on the way it has to be leads
to "over-push" – the tendency we all have
to escalate, retaliate, do battle …
temporarily buying into doing the
impossible.
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Example
• For example, imagine you’re driving to an
appointment on a tight schedule and
suddenly there’s a sea of red brake lights
in front of you. Do you go into stress or
despair ("over-push"), get creative
("Hmmm … how do I part the red sea?"),
or sigh and reschedule?
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Stress Makes People Stupid
• What keeps people from “letting go” when
holding on clearly isn’t going to work?
– Stress is what happens when the mind overrides our
common sense. Pressure and anxiety have a
blinding and distorting effect.
– When emotionally upset, “people cannot remember,
attend, learn, or make decisions clearly.”
• Short answer: negative stress clouds judgment,
and we need to notice it. The idea is to unlock
some of the agitation or anxiety – undo the
mental vapor lock. Return to center.
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Final Thoughts on False
Responsibility
• All three forms of false responsibility –
taking on other people’s stuff, over-care,
and over-push – are downside risks of
caring and ambition.
• This isn’t to suggest that you pretend not
to care or that you lower your aspirations.
• To the contrary, awareness of this pattern
provides a way to care and succeed with
far less effort and greater confidence.
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Communication
Part Two
Why Communications Skills Are
So Important:



The purpose of communication is to get your
message across to others clearly and
unambiguously.
Doing this involves effort from both the sender of
the message and the receiver.
And it's a process that can be fraught with error,
with messages often misinterpreted by the
recipient.
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Successful Communication



In fact, communication is only successful when
both the sender and the receiver understand
the same information as a result of the
communication.
By successfully getting your message across,
you convey your thoughts and ideas
effectively.
When not successful, the thoughts and ideas
that you send do not necessarily reflect your
own, causing a communications breakdown
and creating roadblocks that stand in the way
of your goals – both personally and
professionally.
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Just the Facts


In a recent survey of recruiters from companies with
more than 50,000 employees, communication skills
were cited as the single more important decisive
factor in choosing managers.
The survey, conducted by the University of
Pittsburgh’s Katz Business School, points out that
communication skills, including written and oral
presentations, as well as an ability to work with
others, are the main factor contributing to job
success.
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

In spite of the increasing importance
placed on communication skills, many
individuals continue to struggle, unable
to communicate their thoughts and ideas
effectively – whether in verbal or written
format.
This inability makes it nearly impossible
for them to compete effectively in the
workplace, and stands in the way of
career progression.
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

Getting your message across is
paramount to progressing. To do this,
you must understand what your
message is, what audience you are
sending it to, and how it will be
perceived.
You must also weigh-in the
circumstances surrounding your
communications, such as situational and
cultural context.
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Communications Skills - The
Importance of Removing Barriers:

Problems with communication can pop-up at every
stage of the communication process (which consists
of sender, encoding, channel, decoding,
receiver, feedback and context - see the diagram
below) and have the potential to create
misunderstanding and confusion.
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49

To be an effective communicator and to
get your point across without
misunderstanding and confusion, your
goal should be to lessen the frequency
of these problems at each stage of this
process with clear, concise, accurate,
well-planned communications.
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Source...


As the source of the message, you need to
be clear about why you're communicating,
and what you want to communicate.
You also need to be confident that the
information you're communicating is useful
and accurate.
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Message...

The message is the information that you want
to communicate.
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Encoding...



This is the process of transferring the information you
want to communicate into a form that can be sent and
correctly decoded at the other end.
Your success in encoding depends partly on your ability
to convey information clearly and simply, but also on
your ability to anticipate and eliminate sources of
confusion (for example, cultural issues, mistaken
assumptions, and missing information.)
A key part of this is knowing your audience: Failure to
understand who you are communicating with will result in
delivering messages that are misunderstood.
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Channel...


Messages are conveyed through channels, with
verbal including face-to-face meetings, telephone
and videoconferencing; and written including letters,
emails, memos and reports.
Different channels have different strengths and
weaknesses. For example, it's not particularly
effective to give a long list of directions verbally,
while you'll quickly cause problems if you criticize
someone strongly by email.
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Decoding...


Just as successful encoding is a skill, so is
successful decoding (involving, for example, taking
the time to read a message carefully, or listen
actively to it.)
Just as confusion can arise from errors in encoding,
it can also arise from decoding errors. This is
particularly the case if the decoder doesn't have
enough knowledge to understand the message.
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Receiver...



Your message is delivered to individual members of your
audience. No doubt, you have in mind the actions or
reactions you hope your message will get from this
audience.
Keep in mind, though, that each of these individuals
enters into the communication process with ideas and
feelings that will undoubtedly influence their
understanding of your message, and their response.
To be a successful communicator, you should consider
these before delivering your message, and act
appropriately.
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Feedback...



Your audience will provide you with feedback, verbal
and nonverbal reactions to your communicated
message.
Pay close attention to this feedback, as it is the only
thing that allows you to be confident that your
audience has understood your message.
If you find that there has been a misunderstanding,
at least you have the opportunity to send the
message a second time.
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Context...


The situation in which your message is
delivered is the context.
This may include the surrounding
environment or broader culture (i.e. corporate
culture, international cultures, etc.).
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Removing Barriers At All These
Stages




To deliver your messages effectively, you must commit to
breaking down the barriers that exist in each of these stages of
the communication process.
Let’s begin with the message itself. If your message is too
lengthy, disorganized, or contains errors, you can expect the
message to be misunderstood and misinterpreted. Use of poor
verbal and body language can also confuse the message.
Barriers in context tend to stem from senders offering too much
information too fast. When in doubt here, less is oftentimes more.
It is best to be mindful of the demands on other people’s time,
especially in today’s ultra-busy society.
Once you understand this, you need to work to understand your
audience’s culture, making sure you can converse and deliver
your message to people of different backgrounds and cultures
within your own organization, in your country and even abroad.
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Time Management
Part Three
Time Management Tips

1. Write things down

A common time management mistake
is to try to use your memory to keep
track of too many details leading to
information overload. Using a to-do list
to write things down is a great way to
take control of your projects and tasks
and keep yourself organized.
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Time Management Tips

2. Prioritize your list

Prioritizing your to-do list helps you
focus and spend more of your time on
the things that really matter to you.
Rate your tasks into categories using
the ABCD prioritization system
described in the time management
course.
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Time Management Tips

3. Plan your week

Spend some time at the beginning of
each week to plan your schedule.
Taking the extra time to do this will
help increase your productivity and
balance your important long-term
projects with your more urgent tasks.
All you need is fifteen to thirty minutes
each week for your planning session.
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Time Management Tips

4. Carry a notebook

You never know when you are going to
have a great idea or brilliant insight.
Carry a small notebook with you
wherever you go so you can capture
your thoughts. If you wait too long to
write them down you could forget.
Another option is to use a digital
recorder.
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Time Management Tips

5. Learn to say no

Many people become overloaded with
too much work because they overcommit; they say yes when they really
should be saying no. Learn to say no to
low priority requests and you will free
up time to spend on things that are
more important.
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Time Management Tips

6. Think before acting

How many times have you said yes to
something you later regretted? Before
committing to a new task, stop to think
about it before you give your answer.
This will prevent you from taking on
too much work.
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Time Management Tips

7. Continuously improve
yourself


Make time in your schedule to learn
new things and develop your natural
talents and abilities. For example, you
could take a class, attend a training
program, or read a book.
Continuously improving your
knowledge and skills increases your
marketability, can help boost your
career, and is the most reliable path to
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financial independence.
Time Management Tips

8. Think about what you are
giving up to do your regular
activities

It is a good idea to evaluate regularly
how you are spending your time. In
some cases, the best thing you can do
is to stop doing an activity that is no
longer serving you so you can spend
the time doing something more
valuable. Consider what you are giving
up in order to maintain your current
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activities.
Time Management Tips

9. Use a time management
system

Using a time management system can
help you keep track of everything that
you need to do, organize and prioritize
your work, and develop sound plans to
complete it. An integrated system is
like glue that holds all the best time
management practices together.
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Time Management Tips

10. Identify bad habits

Make a list of bad habits that are
stealing your time, sabotaging your
goals, and blocking your success. After
you do, work on them one at a time
and systematically eliminate them from
your life. Remember that the easiest
way to eliminate a bad habit, it to
replace it with a better habit.
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The End

Questions/Comments
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