Responsibility

It's my call to make it your call

“The buck stops here.”

As a kid, I imagined “the buck stops here” as a slogan for a hotel with deer clientele.

As leaders, we can and should get input from others. But the decisions are still our responsibility.

But wait a minute! Sometimes this buck-stops-here responsibility seems to contradict the idea that we should be delegating to and empowering our people—letting THEM make more of the decisions.

And the fact is—it’s a balancing act.

Choose competent people to take charge of different components of your team’s projects. Trust them, but make sure they still keep you up-to-speed. Have their backs, even when they choose to do things differently than you would… as long as their way is A right way, it does not need to be THE right way (which is, of course, defined as the way *I* would do it).

As the leader, you are still ultimately responsible. If things start going off the rails, work with your people to fix them. Don’t throw around blame or sit back and let a problem become a crisis. Be there as backup. Set your people up for success. Grow the competencies and experience levels of your people, and you can make the decision to empower them to make more decisions themselves, and they will make you proud.

(image generated using Midjourney)