I might be showing my age here — or maybe just leaning into a bit of nostalgia — but I’ve been thinking a lot about responsibility lately. Not in a legal sense. Not in a job-description sense. But in a personal, lived-experience sense. The mainstream media headlines speak to this post.
When I was starting my career, responsibility felt straightforward in that if it was yours, you owned it. If it wasn’t, you passed it to the person who did own it. Clean lines, clear expectations, and little or no ambiguity.
Somewhere along the way, that clarity feels like it has softened.
What I’m increasingly hearing and seeing in both professional and personal contexts is something like this:
“Yes, that was my responsibility… but the negative outcome wasn’t my fault.”
Or:
“It was out of my control.”
“There were external factors.”
“I couldn’t influence the result.”
Now, let’s be honest, sometimes those statements are true. We operate in complex systems, markets shifts, regulations changes. Or other people make poor decisions, or technology fails. There are countless variables none of us can fully control.
But here’s the question that keeps coming back to me: If you accept responsibility, what exactly are you accepting? Is it just the authority? The title? The upside when things go well?
Or does it include the uncomfortable part — the consequences when things don’t?
To me, responsibility has always meant ownership. Not ownership of blame, necessarily — but ownership of outcome. Ownership of the response and more importantly, ownership of the fix.
In leadership roles — whether as a CEO, COO, CCO, board member, or simply as a colleague — responsibility isn’t a selective agreement. You don’t get to claim the success and distance yourself from the fallout. If the file sits on your desk, if the team reports to you, if the mandate falls under your remit, then it’s yours.
That doesn’t mean you caused the issue. It means you’re accountable for addressing it.
There’s a subtle but important difference between fault and responsibility. Fault is about cause. Responsibility is about stewardship. I’ve seen situations where something clearly wasn’t caused by the person in charge — perhaps it was inherited, systemic, or the result of someone else’s oversight — yet the leader stepped forward and said, “This sits with me. We’ll fix it.” That response builds trust. It builds credibility. It builds culture.
Conversely, when someone says, “Yes, it was my responsibility, but not my issue,” something erodes. Your teams notices, clients notice, Boards notice and over time, that gap between words and ownership creates cynicism.
Maybe this is generational. Maybe expectations around accountability are evolving, or maybe the world has simply become more complex, and people feel exposed to risks they genuinely cannot control. I can accept that as a possibility.
But I also believe that clarity around ‘responsibility’ has never mattered more — especially in governance, risk, and compliance environments. In regulated industries, responsibility cannot be diluted. If something falls within your mandate, regulators won’t be overly interested in how many contributing factors existed. They will ask: who was accountable?
That’s not meant to be harsh. It’s meant to be real.
I include myself in this reflection. It’s easy to write about responsibility. It’s harder to consistently live it. There are moments when deflecting is tempting. When explaining feels safer than owning. When saying “not my fault” seems rational.
So, I’ve had to remind myself: walk the talk.
If I speak about responsibility, I need to embody it. If I expect it from others, I need to demonstrate it first. That means accepting the uncomfortable conversations, the reputational hits and the clean-up work, however valuable lessons are learned.
Responsibility, to me, is not about perfection. It’s about posture.
It’s the posture of saying: “If it’s mine, I own it. If it’s not mine, I pass it to the right person — clearly and transparently. But once I accept it, I stand behind it.”
Perhaps that sounds old-fashioned. Perhaps it is, but I’m not convinced it’s outdated.
In fact, in a world where accountability can feel blurred, maybe returning to that simple principle is exactly what strengthens leadership and culture.
I’m genuinely curious how others see it.