Instill Responsibility in Your Employees

Leaders make sure others accept responsibility for their actions. Use these five guidlelines to plant responsibility where it belongs:

1. Turn a deaf ear toward excuses. Employees who fail to live up to their commitments may try to shirk responsibility by refusing to treat a problem seriously or by rejecting all solutions. Don't allow them to shrug off their responsibility.

2. Refure to take the monkey off their backs. Some employees may repeatedly try to get you to do the heavy lifting for them. Resist these ploys be always directing responsibility back to where it belongs-to those who can and should produce the desired results.

3. Don't spoon-feed answers to your employees. Challenge them to solve their own problems. If you keep giving them solutions, they may not learn anything on their own.

4. Seal the escape hatch. Some employees make commitments and then give themselves a way out if they can't deliver as promised. Force them to succeed by denying a means of escape.

5. Confront concerns head-on. Don't expcet thorny issues to go away on their own. Example: If an employee misses the first team meeting, investigate immediately rather than waiting for a second incident to occur.

This article appeard in "Leadership Strategies," April 2001