Responsibility and Accountability

I had a very difficult day at work yesterday and I am going to use this post as an opportunity to vent some frustrations. One of my fellow counselors received a phone call from a very irate client. In a nutshell, this person used quite a few expletives in explaining that we ruined their business and the advice we provided is driving their company to bankruptcy.

This happens every so often in our field of work. We have clients who want to start businesses, or who are already in business, and they expect us to tell them everything they need to know to be successful. We do our best to help, but sometimes things don’t work out. While we can provide technical assistance and offer best practices clients should consider, we cannot guarantee success. We also can’t conceivably think of everything a business must know before beginning their business. Every business is different and has different needs.

Yet when things go wrong, the blame game begins and sometimes we become the chief culprit. It’s certainly not a pleasant position to be in, but I can live with the fact that I am sometimes going to be a scapegoat if things don’t go well for a client who sought advice from our Center.

Still, every time there is a problem, I look for the lesson learned in the situation. In this particular case, I believe the lesson learned is something that I have already discussed in a previous post – small business owners need to learn to accept responsibility and accountability for what happens to their businesses.

I remember a time back when I owned my first two bagel stores. I was at my Pennsylvania store and I was having a really bad day. My baker messed up our wholesale deliveries and I had to deal with a very good, but very irate customer. On top of this, I really didn’t like the way our bagels were looking. Some bagels were too light, some were too flat and some were too wrinkly.

I was in a foul mood and I was complaining to Anthony, one of my partners in the business. “Dave really sucks,” I said, “he can’t follow simple instructions, he doesn’t pay attention to detail and he just doesn’t care about the quality of his work.”

Anthony just smiled at me and said, “Who was the idiot who would hire someone that bad?” Needless to say, that shut me up quickly. I mentioned in an earlier post how I learned to take responsibility and accept blame for everything that went wrong with my business. On this particular day, I forgot that lesson learned for a moment. With just one simple, not so rhetorical question, Anthony reminded me about the true root of the problem; I was placing blame rather than accepting responsibility for a problem that I, myself, created.

For the most part, I have been much better at accepting responsibility, but I have to admit there are times that I have fallen off the proverbial wagon. I try to catch myself, but I guess it is just human nature to try to avoid accepting responsibility at times. Well, maybe it is just Rick nature, but in any case, I know that little gets accomplished when we place blame, and quite a bit gets achieved when we accept responsibility and start focusing on solutions.

I truly am sorry for all the mistakes I have made and it hurts to know that I may have been responsible for other's misfortunes. I know my regrets are not going to fix the problem, so all I can do is ask for another opportunity to be part of the solution.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is attributed with authoring the “Serenity Prayer” which has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. I cannot think of a better way to conclude this posting:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”