A lot of times it seems that others make us responsible for problems that appear.

Take the trainer who is made responsible when his team loses a match. Take the boss who notices a problem and assumes that one of his team members is responsible for it. While both situations may include some truth, making someone responsible for a problem usually is nothing else than blaming someone for an outcome without a clear correlation between the outcome and the ability to influence it.

Blame is an effort to get rid of one’s responsibility.

Taking responsibility for a problem that appeared may not be so straightforward either. The trainer who resigns after losing a match, the team player who decided that the problem is his fault, chose to accept the blame. Sometimes it’s even done in the belief that it protects others.

It’s accepting a sense of injustice to please others.

In both situations, what is left out is to determine how to share the available responsibility and to know what was within one’s control.

It requires effort and willingness to be honest with oneself and the other. It requires honesty to decide what can be in one’s responsibility. The challenge of such a decision is to trust one another, that is to align abilities, consequences, and relationship. This also means allowing both their own responsibility, instead of focusing on whose fault it was.

Taking responsibility moving forward requires the same understanding. However, as the action has not yet taken place, there is an opportunity to align with one another with a simple step. Most of the time it involves verifying if there is a common understanding of how responsibility is shared and thus authority is distributed. This allows one to choose the next step and to repeat the process as often as needed.