Accepting Responsibility: the short and sweet.
What do we mean by accepting responsibility? Let’s break it down. Acceptance means to undertake something that’s offered, and responsibility is the state of being accountable for something. So, when we say you need to accept responsibility as a manager, we mean that you are taking on the duty of being the one accountable in the store.
Now, how do you do that?
- Your acceptance is shown through your
- Being responsible does not mean you are to be blamed for everything that happens. It means you own the solutions and ideas that come from the team.
- You accept input from your team while still maintaining that the end result is going to be yours to answer
- you are the one that everyone will look to when something goes wrong. You will need to develop traits for how to handle the stress that comes with this and know where your resources are. (We at Never Been Trained can be a resource!)
- “Accepting responsibility” does not mean “I can never delegate.” In fact, it’s the opposite. A successful manager knows when to delegate, who to delegate to, and how to own the results of that delegation.
What does that look like in practical terms?
- Your team knows what to do when you’re not in their presence.
- Your team carries out the culture that you’ve established with or without you.
- You delegate tasks that can be delegated and follow up to make sure they’re done
- Your team, staff, and customers are comfortable coming to you because you have accepted that you’re responsible for what goes on.
Let’s look at a bad example and a good example of accepting responsibility. Let’s say you’re running a pizza shop. You have a lot of responsibilities such as placing the order for the store, getting change for the register, taking the bank deposit, creating the schedule, and mediating employee conflict. A manager who is ineffective at accepting responsibility will either end up doing all these tasks without delegating, or they will rely too heavily on their employees to get the tasks done. The latter can also be described as “checking out.”
A good example of accepting responsibility would be the same pizza manager acknowledging that those tasks need to be done, choosing good people to do them, delegating the task, and then following up with the employee to make sure it’s done well. “Jenni, how did the truck order look this week? Did you notice if we had to order more than usual?” And if Jenni does make a mistake under our pizza manager’s watch, that manager takes on the responsibility of training her to do better. They apologize to their superior and give a plan of action. “I’m sorry our order has been at a high percentage recently; I’ve been trying to train another person to do this. I will work with her on doing a better inventory and we will decrease the percentage. If it does not decrease, I will resume doing the order until I am able to find someone else to train.”