Taking responsibility: A bitter pill for mgmt. ills

By Chuck Papageorgiou

There's a management ailment going around that can make a good reengineering project go bad or a strong company go south. It's called ZRS for zero responsibility syndrome, and it's reaching epidemic proportions in many companies.

You'll know that a manager suffers from ZRS when he talks about the latest breakthroughs in management strategies but never takes responsibility for making them happen. When a strategy or approach he has se-lected looks like its headed for failure, he quickly looks for someone or something else to blame.

The antidote

Fortunately, there is an antidote: the full responsibility management (FRM) pill. FRM gives you a solid dose of reality, enabling you to understand that you are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of your management initiatives, regardless of outside influences.

Some years ago, I thought ZRS was a rare disease, but I eventually realized it is all too common and its symptoms are consistent.

Take, for example, one of my clients - a chief executive officer who genuinely wanted to change the way her company did business and "blow the doors off the competition." She wrote lots of memos about new management paradigms and even attended a few seminars with her staff.

When nothing happened, she was surprised. First, she complained that nobody listened, then she and her staff looked to assign blame to anyone but themselves. They began pointing fingers at Japan, then the union, later the global economy and, finally, the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

She assumed that because she read the books and understood new management concepts, she didn't have to practice them.

On a crisp fall day, I had a long private session with this CEO. I asked her questions that made her look at the real-world causes of her problems, instead of as-signing blame. How are the competition's management strat- egies better than yours? I asked. How much better, or cheaper, are their products? She did not know. She was laying so much blame, she took her eyes off the competition.

She moaned that her company had to lay off people and again looked to place blame. I asked her instead if she had a hiring plan in place that would take into account a downturn in the market. She responded that when she started the company 10 years before, she believed the business would continue growing with the market and never planned for a downturn.

It went on like that for a while, making it a difficult day for both of us. But she eventually agreed there were many changes she could effect on her own.

FRM is indeed a bitter pill for many managers. Some agree to take the pill but hide it under their tongues. They go back to their business units, spit it out and change nothing.

These are the managers who make my job challenging; they bring a consultant in to help them change their worlds, only to lay the blame on the outsider if the plan doesn't succeed.

Granted, consultants - my-self included - are not always all-knowing, wise, fountains of useful information. Sometimes, we make mistakes and wrong assumptions.

But here again, managers who listen to bad advice without challenging it have come down with ZRS. They need to argue every point with their consultants, debate every idea, challenge every assumption and reach their own conclusions.

Questions to ask yourself

So the next time you decide to become a change agent yourself or hire a consultant to be one, consider these questions: Is your company suffering from ZRS? Are you looking for a consultant to have somebody to blame when things don't work out? Is the FRM pill missing from your company's first aid kit?

If the answer to these questions is yes, be prepared to fight a long battle. Take responsibility for your success, and make it clear that you will accept no excuses for poor results.

Papageorgiou is the managing director for the Atlanta practice of M.F. Smith & Associates, a consulting firm headquartered in Morristown, N.J. He can be reached via the Internet at chuck.papageorgiou@ internetmci.com or by phone at (770) 641-6248.