Truly Understanding your Influence requires that you focus on the shadow side of leadership.
One characteristic of leadership - RESPONSIBILITY - can involve a number of shadowy components. As a leader - whether of your life, family, business, or community - there are a number of ways that having inadequacies in your sense of responsibility can show up and create concerns, issues, even big problems. Often camouflaged by carefully orchestrated (defensive) methods, you can 'seem' or 'feel' as if you have an effective sense of responsibility, only to discover (with exploration) that there is room for improvement.
How does an Inadequate Sense of Responsibility Look?
In short, you will notice deficits in accountability, ownership, and integrity.
People, as well as organizations, with this kind of 'leadership theme' can appear to be quite functional, often disguised with a constant flow of new ideas and initiatives, yet there is little follow through or success. The cause of failure is difficult to pinpoint and the approach tends to be superficial. Within business you might see that responsibility is centralized in key people who function as the “glue that holds everything together”, or perhaps there are overlapping/unclear job descriptions. (Who reports to whom? Who is responsible for what?) In this case, it looks and feels like people are being very responsible and helping each other out (common in family businesses), but the unfortunate result is that there is no singular ownership and therefore real accountability is impossible.
In Terms of the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that you see in leaders with inadequacies in their sense of responsibility are:
A lack of follow through
They believe the cause of all their frustrations is something 'outside of themselves'
They make excuses and avoid making commitments
Knowingly, or unknowingly, they identify with victimhood
Does this sound like familiar? Everyone of us is guilty of these things from time-to-time, but does this feel like a pattern in you, or someone you know? Not sure...?
Questions to Consider:
Do you always do what you say - are you consistent with follow-through?
How often do those around you drop the ball and make excuses? Do you?
Are you aware of how you contribute to conflicts and/or frustrations?
Want to explore this further? Find out more about your shadow areas - awareness opens a world of possibilities. Once you know, you have the power to change.
What you can do right now - Make a commitment to self-responsibility.
The most important things to know about yourself are often the hardest to see.