Responsibility, Accountability and Growth: More than a Personal Mission

Three big words: Responsibility, Accountability and Growth, and a personal reflection. Tighten up the belt, because we’re taking a walk back about seven years to a time when I wrote something. It looked like a personal creed filled with too much wisdom. I must have adapted it from somewhere; partly from How to Act Like a CEO and partly from author H. Jackson Brown Jr. Then I infused my context therein.

Last Thursday, the creed popped on my screen from the archives, and it hasn’t left my mind since. It forms the basis of today’s column.

When I wrote those words, I probably thought I was being profound. I was also, as most of us are at various points in life, sufficiently confident that I had figured out a few things. Turns out I had not.

The creed began with a mission: to raise my family, teach my children, lead my organisation, be a good friend, feel good about myself, continue to grow, and help others grow.

To be bold in my pursuits, while balancing courage with consideration. To be a great companion to my wife, to love her and care for her, but not caretake her. To build a loving home that encouraged interdependence. To have good friends with whom to share life. To keep learning. To be responsible and accountable to myself first, and society second.

And then came the line that, even seven years later, still catches me: To live so that when my children think of fairness, caring, and integrity… they think of me. These were Brown Jr.’s words, I think.

There is only one small problem, for me, with the last part. I am yet to have a wife or children.

Seven years later, the family part remains in the future. The very near future. But even then, I have not interpreted that as a licence to put the rest of the creed on ice. I am still growing, and becoming a better version of myself every day. And that, I think, is the real work, more than the roles.

Looking at Things Differently

When I wrote that creed, I was thinking largely about responsibility as something attached to roles. Be a good father, husband, leader or friend. Being useful to an extent. Simple enough.

Interestingly, one can acquire titles, responsibilities and even impressive LinkedIn descriptions without necessarily becoming the person those responsibilities require.

Leadership is not merely the ability to tell people where to go. Marriage is not finding someone who agrees to tolerate your nonsense indefinitely. Parenthood is certainly not about producing smaller versions of yourself who can eventually troubleshoot a PC update issue.

The role is the easy bit. It is more like a label. In essence, real work happens to the person underneath.

Over the past seven years, I have grown intellectually, socially and emotionally. Not in a neat upward trajectory, of course. Growth rarely behaves like a well-funded infrastructure project. There have been advances, regressions, detours, potholes and the occasional spectacular collision with my own ego.

But there has been growth. And much of it has come from learning to look inward.

Responsibility begins where excuses end

I have increasingly come to understand responsibility differently. It is not simply accepting blame when something goes wrong. It is the willingness to recognise that my choices, behaviour, attitudes and omissions have consequences, whether I intended them or not.

It is easy to say, “I didn’t mean it that way.” Sometimes that is true. It is equally true that the person on the receiving end may still have experienced it that way. Intent matters, as does Impact.

Personal accountability, therefore, has become central to how I navigate my present life.

It means asking uncomfortable questions. What part of this is mine? How did I contribute to this outcome? What am I avoiding? What am I pretending not to know? Where have I behaved below the standard I claim to hold?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable one: What if the problem is not everybody else but me? I take care not to develop some unhealthy obsession with self-blame, but I also refuse to outsource agency by any means.

Courage and consideration

One part of my old creed has become particularly important: to be bold in my pursuits, but balance courage and consideration. I still believe ambition matters.

We should pursue difficult things. Take risks. Build things that have never existed. Speak when silence is convenient but wrong. But courage without consideration can become recklessness. And consideration without courage can become cowardice dressed as politeness.

The balance is difficult.

Sometimes leadership requires saying the uncomfortable thing. Sometimes friendship requires telling someone they are wrong. Sometimes love requires giving someone space rather than solving their problems for them.

Sometimes helping someone means allowing them to struggle. This one is particularly difficult for those of us who like being useful. There is a strange satisfaction in rescuing people. It makes us feel needed.

But I have realised that people don’t always need rescuing. Sometimes they need companionship, maybe truth or just an open door. Other times they need us out of the way.

This is why the distinction I wrote years ago- care for, but don’t caretake- still resonates. Healthy relationships require interdependence, not dependency. We need one another. But we should not make ourselves responsible for another person’s entire existence. That is not love. That is administration.

The future family is still part of the mission

I have not abandoned the original dream. I still want a great companion to share life with. I still want a home characterised by love, care, laughter, learning and enough healthy disagreement to keep everybody intellectually alive.

I still hope to raise children who understand that fairness is more than getting an equal slice of cake. I hope they learn that integrity is what you do when there is something to gain from doing otherwise.

I hope they learn that caring for others does not mean abandoning themselves. And I hope that, one day, when they think of fairness, caring and integrity, they might think of me.

I am working to be that future husband before the marriage happens. That future father before the children come. I have always prepared for the leadership, the mentorship, and the inspiration parts well in advance.

From personal creed to collective practice and responsibility

Now, here is something most significant so far. My old creed has grown beyond me. I no longer want responsibility, accountability and growth to remain merely personal aspirations. I want them to influence how I show up in totality.

These values should be visible in how I lead, collaborate, volunteer, treat people who disagree with me, respond when I am wrong or even how I use whatever influence I have.

More importantly, they should be seen in how I encourage other people to undertake their own internal work. You know why, because transformation cannot be outsourced.

Accountable organisations cannot be built with unaccountable people. Compassionate communities can only be created when people examine their own behaviour. We cannot demand integrity from leaders while making exceptions for ourselves.

It is not enough to say society needs to change while conveniently excluding ourselves from the definition of society. The work begins painstakingly close to home. With me. With you. With us.

I want to carry that principle of self-accountability and integrity into the organisations I work with and lead, and into the spaces where I volunteer. Not as a sermon. God knows we have enough sermons. But as a way of working and living.

I hope to cultivate a culture where people are encouraged to grow, where responsibility is shared, where people can challenge one another with respect, and where doing the right thing is not treated as a heroic act worthy of a commemorative plaque. It should just be a normal way of life.

So, what now?

I do not have a perfect system. In fact, I am not writing this from some imaginary mountaintop where I have achieved enlightenment and now spend my afternoons dispensing wisdom to people who have not yet figured out that I am right.

I am still learning. Still getting things wrong and discovering parts of myself that require work. Occasionally I lose arguments with people who are not even in the room because I am replaying the conversation three days later.

Growth, it turns out, does not eliminate your nonsense. It makes you increasingly aware of it. And perhaps that awareness is a good place to begin. So, I am carrying the creed forward, but with a slightly wider horizon.

Responsibility to myself. Accountability for my choices. Growth as a lifelong discipline. Care without control. Courage with consideration. Leadership with humility. Service without saviourism.

And an increasing commitment to making these not merely characteristics of the person I want to be, but principles of the organisations and communities I am/will be privileged to participate in.

This is my invitation to you as well, my dear reader. You do not have to agree with me. Forget even the creed.

Just do the internal work. Ask yourself what responsibility means in your life, where you have surrendered your agency, what you are blaming other people for that you may need to confront in yourself, and whether the values you publicly advocate are visible in the small, inconvenient decisions nobody applauds.

And then do something about the answers.

Perhaps the transformation we keep waiting for in our organisations, communities, countries and relationships does not begin with somebody else finally getting their act together. It begins with each of us becoming a little more accountable, a little more courageous, a little more considerate and a little more willing to grow.

Seven years ago, I wrote a personal mission. Today, I see it less as a destination and more as a way of walking. I am still on the walk. Perhaps you are too.

Ultimately, I believe the goal is not simply to arrive somewhere better but to become the kind of person and help build the kind of organisations and communities that make the journey worthwhile.