Here’s the description of the Responsibility Theme from the Gallup Business Journal:
“Your Responsibility theme forces you to take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and whether large or small, you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion. Your good name depends on it. If for some reason you cannot deliver, you automatically start to look for ways to make it up to the other person. Apologies are not enough. Excuses and rationalizations are totally unacceptable. You will not quite be able to live with yourself until you have made restitution. This conscientiousness, this near obsession for doing things right, and your impeccable ethics, combine to create your reputation: utterly dependable. When assigning new responsibilities, people will look to you first because they know it will get done. When people come to you for help — and they soon will — you must be selective. Your willingness to volunteer may sometimes lead you to take on more than you should.”
One of the key challenges for people with high Responsibility is the ability to say “No” to tasks and responsibilities. Taking on responsibility an delivering on their word would energise them, but taking on an excess of responsibilities would bring them down a dangerous spiral.
By taking on too much responsibilities, they would be unable to to deliver on all the tasks they had taken on to the degree of fulfilling their promise. This would make them feel bad, and they may try to do everything they can to deliver, to the detriment of other important things in their lives.
I had a leader who had high responsibility who told me, “Alex, you know that I will try to take on and do everything myself as far as possible. And when I ask you to do something, it means I really need help, and I need you to just do it.” That’s a sign of overuse of the Responsibility Theme that led to overload.
If you have high Responsibility, it might be useful for you to review all the things you are responsible for, prioritise and examine if you are able to deliver on all that you had committed yourself to. And it may be good to get yourself released from some of these commitments (it won’t be easy for someone with high Responsibility to do, but ironically, that’s the responsible thing to do!), and also to check on your existing commitments before volunteering or taking on more. Sometimes, one needs to learn how to say “no”.
