Taking responsibility if you don't have a boss

Responsibility is holding oneself accountable for commitments. It is as easy to take less than full responsibility, by blaming externalities such as other people, partners, or the market as it is to take more than full responsibility–for not anticipating something unforeseeable, for doing an under performer’s work for them.

For founder CEOs, who frequently don’t have a direct boss, a helpful concept is to imagine if you had two people living in your mind. One of them is you, the other is your boss–also, you.

Think about the implications for a minute. I’ll wait…

What would your boss think of how you’re doing your job? Remember, you can’t hide from yourself. You can tell your cofounders or team that you’re going to spend more time on go-to-market and less, say, working with new AI tools or designing new product features. But are you? You can tell your team that you had an important last minute meeting, when perhaps you just slept in and missed a key customer call–but are you also lying to yourself?

Dividing yourself into a boss and worker is a helpful trick to conceptualize taking responsibility, especially when you don’t have an actual boss.

Many companies fail to take responsibility, and it usually starts from the top. It manifests itself in many different ways, but none more so than blaming. I’ve heard CEOs complain about how a bad executive hire led to missing revenue numbers, or how a poorly run customer success motion led to churn in customers. One CEO blamed another leader because his finance team had failed to bill for any renewals–by April of that year.

CEOs who blame others for their company’s failures create a culture of blame, which is more or less the opposite of a culture of taking responsibility. If you as CEO let that bad executive fail to hit numbers quarter after quarter, taking responsibility for that will help you avoid it the next time. If your finance team failed to bill for any renewals for one third of the year, taking responsibility for having the wrong people in finance and a lack of metrics or attention will prevent it happening again. If, instead of taking responsibility in front of your team, you blame others–you are telling your team “It’s ok to screw up, as long as you have someone else you can blame for it.”

Creating a culture of responsibility is crucial to success. If the rules we all play by are human constructs, how companies operate are even more so–and usually they are derived explicitly and implicitly from the founder CEO. There is no “right” way to manage, or “perfect” culture,  but if you don’t take responsibility as a founder or CEO, who will?

Taking responsibility does not mean taking the blame. If a salesperson tried something tactical and lost a big sale, but that same tactic worked on the last 9 sales, you can hardly blame yourself for hiring that person, approving the strategy, or say you are responsible for that lost sale. Nor is blaming that salesperson productive. But you can reflect, with that salesperson, on the tactics. Was the loss due to the tactic foreseeable? Should we change our tactics in the future? Should I as CEO find a different salesperson, or put this salesperson on certain accounts and not others? Taking responsibility is not the same as assigning blame, even to yourself.  If you’ve created a culture of blame, conversations like this are impossible. Instead of being open and honest, your salesperson will get out her blamethrower and try to roast everyone around her so she can keep her job.

It’s more fun to succeed than to fail and blame other people for failing. Success also leads to better outcomes–by definition.

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