Change your ways

Getting your managers to take responsibility for what they do isn’t always as easy as it should be. Maybe that’s your fault.

So suggest the principles of responsibility-centered management put together by Transformational Consultants International Inc. of Northwest Columbus. If you’re empowering your managers but aren’t holding them accountable for the empowered decisions they make, that’s not encouraging anyone to be more responsible. In fact, it takes quite a few elements to create a responsibility-centered manager. Here’s the list:

1. Personal responsibility or the willingness to exercise personal volition, both individually and collectively.

2. Personal accountability or the willingness to claim ownership for results, individually and collectively, without fault, guilt or blame.

3. Personal empowerment or the capacity to perform at or above an established level of expectation. Removing internal and external limitations expands this capacity.

4. Collective responsibility or the theory that we are totally responsible for our individual contribution to the team and totally responsible for the results produced by the team.

5. Responsible communication or communicating with intent, integrity and truth.

6. Responsibility accepting delegation, which means understanding your specific responsibilities, what you will be accountable for, what your authority is, what organizational support you can expect to receive and what skills and abilities are needed to do the task.

7. Responsible delegation, which means managing employees only to the extent they are not personally empowered, providing an empowering environment and clearly stating expectations.

8. Diversity thinking or the ability to identify who does what best in your organization and assigning them to appropriate tasks, knowing how to treat each employee to make him or her most productive and understanding how each employee needs to work, again, to maximize productivity. How to reach: Transformational Consultants International, 538-5434