Posts Tagged ‘personally accountable’

If you’re trying to find good examples of personal accountability, the current news cycle may not be the best place to look. The blame game surrounding the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has gone back and forth – between CEOs, government officials and agencies, and others. The same sort of shenanigans take place every day in politics, business, and elsewhere.

As an entrepreneur, at the end of the day you are ultimately responsible for what goes on in your business. And while that means you can take credit for the successes, it also means you have to take the blame for the failures. An entrepreneur with integrity holds themselves personally accountable at all times.

Playing the blame game is easy to do. It’s simple to think of all the things that should have happened or could have happened. Many of us are quick to play out in our minds a million different scenarios of what happened, and then imagine alternate universes where it didn’t happen.

Even if you’re a business of one, you may want to blame your customers, the Internet, natural disasters, or any other number of faultless things. In reality, there’s an issue with your product, your customer service, your website, or something else.

When dealing with a crisis, and trying to establish your own personal accountability, take some time to answer these questions:

• If this situation were to arise again, what would your responsibilities be? What role would you play?
• What is or isn’t being done to deal with the current situation?
• Is there anything about this situation that is outside of your control? What about this situation is within your control?
• How does your mission statement or vision statement address this issue? If it doesn’t, is there a change/addition to me made?
• What can you do right now to influence the outcome of this situation?
• What needs to be done differently in the future to prevent similar results?

Once you take some time to analyze the situation, you’ll be better prepared to solve the current problem and prevent future ones.

Again, the upside of this is the ability to take credit for the good things that happen (although you need to be sure to give credit where credit is due, or else your relationships will suffer.) But holding personal accountability in high regard will benefit you and your company for years to come.