‘MANAGING THE FUTURE’: WHAT IS RESPONSIBILITY AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

What is responsibility?

Pavel Khotiushin, Head of Legal Department: Responsibility is an ability to stick to promises and arrangements, admit mistakes, account for failures, demand a lot from yourself, achieve better results, take into account risks, and use resources efficiently when performing tasks. If you’re irresponsible, you won’t build a company. Responsibility has always been associated with keeping your word. This is true to both external business communications and intra-team relations.  As a rule, tasks involve several people and therefore can be performed in time and adequately only if everyone has a responsible attitude towards their tasks.

Elmira Guluyeva, Consolidated Information Analyst: My work responsibility consists of two elements. The first one is simple and based on universal human values ​​that have been relevant since the time of the mammoth hunt: don’t let your colleague down, stick to deadlines, make every effort to avoid mistakes, but if you did, get ready to admit and undo them. The second one is the responsibility to consumers, i.e. people who are out there, at a distance of delivery by rail or even by sea. For me, product quality control is an important part of a company’s reputation and a contribution to the win-win strategy within customer relationships. It’s hard—and sometimes impossible—to make common cause without responsibility. We all do our job, while our results make up a single big project. A team where not everyone is responsible for results seems to be putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but it simply puts some of the pieces by touch, with their eyes closed. It’s important to trust your colleagues’ results and be aware that my contribution is weighty and shouldn’t make the overall picture worse. The ideal isn’t attainable, but we strive for it at Recycling Solutions. I’ve been with the company for seven years, so I can surely rely on my team outside work as well.

Aleksandr Nesterenko, Head of Coal Combustion Products Service Ultimately, responsibility is an ability to manage the future. I evaluate my team’s responsibility in terms of their ability to offer solutions to problems. You can freely inform a responsible team about a problem, and any solution—even a tough one—will be a team’s solution. This is how we create our future together. Good breeding is a key to each person’s responsibility. A well-mannered team is a key to well-coordinated teamwork. Each team member’s responsibility enables you to manage a company as a whole that consists of sections, divisions, and departments. This is a systems approach we use to achieve our goals.

Pavel Khotiushin: The systems approach makes sure each element is coherent and efficient and therefore helps achieve key goals set by the company’s shareholders. Consequently, only a team that shares responsibility and sticks to rules can achieve results. For example, efficient teamwork encompasses interdependence and interchangeability as well as delegation and teamwork. The legal team at Recycling Solutions is no exception, as this category is our priority. And it’s the only way it works.

Responsibility for mistakes—our own and those of others Admitting your mistakes is a way to develop a sense of responsibility. Of course, it seems easy to shift the responsibility onto someone else or a conjuncture of events. But if you want to progress, you need to show courage, take your wrong steps, draw conclusions, and move on. If we talk about professional mistakes, probably one of the first mistakes was the fact that I wasn’t ready to take part in court sessions. A colleague of mine—a lawyer—handled that case. He asked me to ‘just attend the session that won’t consider anything and most likely will be adjourned’. However, the judge didn’t adjourn anything and proceeded to consider the case on the merits—I wasn’t ready for that at all.  Lucky for me, that session didn’t bring anything irredeemable, but—after that incident—I’ve made it a rule to review case files before attending any session.

Elmira Guluyeva: I’m learning to learn. I think this isn’t a skill where you can reach the right level and stop. I made different mistakes, so I learned a lot of useful lessons: typos in Excel formulas teach you to be more careful and let someone review your work, incorrect accounts teach you to ask your colleagues from the accounting department for help, and letters you lost in a vortex of the postal service teach you to trust only those companies that are ready to take responsibility. And this is probably the key lesson I learned.

Pavel Khotiushin: All leaders have to deal with the mistakes their teams make. But you can’t have a simple ‘blamestorming’ algorithm. Many factors, such as the error type, consistency, causes, consequences, team member’s psychological type, etc., must be factored in. Sometimes you’d better not react to a mistake, while silence can be sometimes perceived as connivance. Sometimes you need to talk about mistakes one-on-one, but sometimes you need to discuss them with the whole team. Sometimes you’d better do that immediately, but in some cases, you need to postpone that until an annual meeting. Therefore, leaders must primarily aim to detect a mistake and choose the right way to deal with it. Responsible leaders must be the first to do that job. It’s crucial for them to find out whether they cause their team members to make mistakes. This can be their actions or inaction, incorrect tasks, and wrong decisions. First of all, they probably need to mend their ways.