Responsible

Responsible: “Obliged to answer for something or for someone”.

The suffix ‘able’, like ‘ible’, turns a verb into an adjective that denotes “the capacity or possibility of”. So from irritate comes irritable, capable of being irritated, or variable, which comes from vary and means having the capacity to vary, to change. And so responsible comes from respond, that is, capable of responding.

When a leader says that nobody has the responsibility, we have a serious problem. Because part of leadership is establishing responsibilities. This person is in charge, and therefore responsible: the one who must answer for what happens, the one who must know what is going on in order to report it to the leader.

On the other hand, the person responsible has to know what to answer for. Being responsible does not mean having to do all the work, as many believe. What’s more, the work may be carried out by others, and you are still responsible. He is the one who answers: if somebody asks how things are going, he has to know where they stand, even if he isn’t the one doing them.

The design of responsibilities is crucial, and we neglect it so often. We don’t define responsibilities or who is responsible, we don’t define what we must answer for, or to whom, and that’s how the problems start.