A short leadership-focused talk by Chad Silverstein arguing that responsibility should be the top core value for leaders. He emphasizes leaders must own outcomes (including faults they didn't directly cause), avoid blaming others, model accountability publicly, look inward when frustrated with others, and take practical steps to address underperformance rather than gossiping about it.
Chapters
When I did, my core values at my company, my number one core value was responsibility. And the reason it was always number one and I made such a big deal out of it, is because I believe every leader needs to take full responsibility for anything that they're part of. And since I was running my company and I was part of pretty much everything that was going on, at least having people at least report to me that I had to own a lot of things that I necessarily didn't even do. But I always felt it was important that the company saw me take responsibility and never shift the blame. And every leader has to own it. They have to own their part. And everyone is so quick to blame other people. Shift the responsibility to someone else because they don't want to look bad or because they're so scared of what might happen if people find out that they're not perfect. And what they miss is that it's attractive to people to see people take responsibility and own it. You know, it's easy to stand up in front of people and share all the good news and celebrate when you're breaking records. It's another thing to take responsibility when you screwed up and something got hurt, whether they were people, whether they were paychecks, whether they were client relationships, whether it was equipment, whatever it is, and to just own it and be real, it's just rare. And you gotta take responsibility for everything you're involved with. And when you are frustrated with people on your team and you're frustrated with others around you that work for you or work above you, you need to look inward and be the change. Take responsibility for what you're doing and stop pointing the finger at other people. Yes, there are other people who are going to be the problem. There are always going to be people who are underperforming, people who are not meeting expectations, not hitting the bar. So what? Deal with it and figure out what your part of that is. And if you could do something about it, do it. And if you can't, shut up and just keep your mouth closed and don't get caught talking about it, because nobody needs that and it doesn't help. And it just pretty much adds logs onto the fire and makes the problem worse. So be the change that you want. Take responsibility for what you're involved with and make sure that you model the way and own it by being transparent about the things that you need to take responsibility for.
