Responsibility eTip for December 2006
Nick* was a long-time cherished supplier to APLUS, my client organization celebrating 60 years in business (and record growth, profit, and morale) at a luncheon yesterday. “Yes, we offer quality, price, and on-time delivery, but everyone competes on those” said Nick. “What makes our business relationship uniquely successful is how each party steps up to and takes responsibility for problems wherever they are.”
“For example” offered Nick. “I got stuck with a container-load of material and APLUS took it off my hands. They didn’t have to, but they were in a position to help me avoid an expensive problem.”
Ah, music to my ears.
Then Jerry offered his experience as a long-time cherished — and now the largest — customer to APLUS. “I was looking for a new supplier to replace these APLUS bozos when Joe took over as General Manager” admitted Jerry. “Joe flew out to meet me and asked me to give him six months to establish a pattern of manufacturing improvements before I made my decision.” Jerry continued, “That was five years ago. Today, they are 10X better than Six Sigma and we send APLUS 20 times the business we were doing back then. And it will increase by a factor of 20 again over the next three years. Why? Because we have a deep partnership where together we face the brutal facts, confront the truth, and respond to problems head on.”
Ah, a symphony of Responsibility Redefined now played in my ears!
What’s the moral here? In this value chain of an East-coast supplier, a Central-states manufacturer, and a Mountain-states customer, the words “when will someone take responsibility around here” have been replaced with “I will.” It’s a nationwide growing refrain of Responsibility Redefined.
Responsibility Redefined Challenge: Remove all permutations of When will someone take responsibility around here? from your vocabulary and notice what happens to your willingness to re-examine and maybe even confront problems around you. Then notice your performance results.
* The story is true. The names are contrived.
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Re:’When Will Someone Take Responsibility Around Here?’ Great story. It is a derivative of: When people say, “Something should be done.”, nothing happens. When people say, “Someone should do something.”, something might happen. When someone says, “I must do something.”, then, something happens.
The first portion of Serenity Prayer by –Reinhold Niebuhr is quite popular and is typically recited as:
God grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can and the Wisdom
to know the difference.
I was fascinated to read the following info shared by Reinhold’s wife, Ursla:
“Often the prayer is not quite as he wrote it. The form he preferred was as follows:
God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
I was moved by the difference in the middle line–the energy and action and responsibility feels different in the traditional to the change the things I can compared to the things that should be changed- I have also heard as the things that must be changed. Given that many of us think of our possibilities as limited, I see many lost opportunities to find that courage within to step up and change the things that must be changed.”