Responsibility And Support

Harry Truman used to keep a desk sign on his desk as president which said “The Buck Stops Here”. Often, he referred to the desk sign in public. In an address in December 1952, he said, "You know, it's easy for the Monday morning quarterback to say what the coach should have done, after the game is over. But when the decision is up before you -- and on my desk I have a motto which says The Buck Stops Here' -- the decision has to be made." In his farewell address he referred to this concept by saying "The President, whoever he is, has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job.”

There are many people promoted to management level positions who tend to forget that they ultimately are the ones responsible for what goes on under their leadership. The successes and failures of their employees are theirs alone. If they walked into a bad situation on the first day, they’re not supposed to allow the situation to remain that way for the next year. If they notice the team isn’t working as a team, it’s up to them to right the ship.

Think about sports as a metaphor for the workplace. When the team plays bad, the coach is the one replaced. During training camp each year, no matter what the sport, it’s the coach who has the responsibility for deciding which players will stay on the team, and which ones need to be let go. But the coach’s responsibility doesn’t end there. During the season, they constantly practice, even the bad teams, trying to get better, trying to find that edge that will help them improve so that they’ll be competitive in the next game they play. And they know that at the end of the season, if they did well, they’ll probably have a job the next year; if they didn’t, they’ll join the unemployment line.

In business, there are many managers who get positions and don’t really do anything with them as far as trying to be effective leaders. They tend to think of the position as a stepping stone to their own greater glory. They see the people in their department as their competition, not as their co-workers. They see other managers as competition, and want to find ways to make themselves stand out. But often they go about it the wrong way.

What most managers need to learn is that the glory of the department is the glory of the manager. No person is an island; it takes others to really achieve the greater success, whether you work alone or work with hundreds. You may have the ideas, but you can’t carry them all out by yourself. You need the help of others in the department, which is why you ended up with the position in the first place.

At the same time, you need to support those people who work for you in many different ways. It’s not good enough to encourage people, though that’s a major step forward in working with employees in today’s world. You need to make sure they have all the tools needed to do the job as efficiently as possible. You need to make sure they have all the education that’s needed to do the job as knowledgeably as possible. And you need to make sure you have their backing and respect, because if they don’t offer you that then the other two won’t matter.

How do you get that? Something that’s talked about infrequently is how you support your employees by standing behind them and by them when it’s needed. They’re not always going to tell you when it’s needed; you need to be cognizant of the environment at times, step forward and do the right thing. You have to be willing to go that extra mile, even at the expense of possibly alienating others outside of your department.

I like to tell the story of my first day at one employer as director of a department in a hospital. When you take a job at a hospital, you have to have some kind of physical, if you haven’t had a recent one at your physician’s office. I had to go through registration, because physicals were done in the emergency room at this particular hospital. The person who registered me finished the registration, then walked me back into the emergency room to one of the rooms. Once there, she did something odd; she pulled out a sheet and actually dressed the bed; I’d never seen that done by someone in her position before. But I didn’t think anything of it at that moment, and went through with the physical.

Later in the day, I noticed other people in the department every once in awhile answering the phone, then leaving the area, and they would be gone for what I thought was a significant amount of time. I finally decided to ask one of the people in the office what was going on. I was told that whenever anyone in the hospital needed a medical record delivered, they called the registration department, and it was their job to go to medical records, pull the record, then deliver it to whomever had asked for it.

Now I had heard during the time I was being interviewed that people were bailing out of this department, and the other department I was going to be over, and I could see why. For those of you who are uninitiated in the process, this type of thing isn’t the responsibility of a registration department anywhere; at least it’s not supposed to be. This department had lost its sense of identity. Their sense of pride in their job was gone because others throughout the hospital had taken it from them. They didn’t know who they were responsible to, and it would seem that my predecessor had never stood up for their rights.

I learned a few more things that first day, and I knew I had to affect a change, and quickly. I decided to take advantage of my honeymoon period that very same day. I sat down at my desk and wrote a memo to the entire hospital. I wrote in that memo that effective immediately, any requests made of the registration department had to go through me personally. I added that any requests for their time or presence that had nothing to do with the job they were hired to do would be reviewed by me, and that any contact to them directly would not be allowed without my permission. I printed up a copy for every director level and above person in the hospital, and I printed up a copy for every person in the registration area.

I gave the memo to the employees who happened to be in registration before I went to find the mailboxes for all the directors so I could put a copy of the memo in every box. When I came back to the department, I could feel a change of some kind, though I really wasn’t certain what it was. After all, I really didn’t know these people, as this was still my first day there. That evening, about 10 minutes before I left for the day, I received a call from the CEO of the hospital. He said that he had read my memo and he would stand behind me fully. He said that it looked like a very positive step towards bringing some balance back to the department, and said that he welcomed me as a positive presence to the hospital.

I can tell you this. In the next few days I noticed that there was a spirit in the employees of that area that I hadn’t seen on the first day. They seemed to relish being able to transfer phone calls to my office that they received from people outside the department who hadn’t been told what was in the memo. They got a spark out of seeing the faces of those few directors or supervisors from other departments who came to my office trying to plead their case, but having me strike it as saying that not only was it not their jobs to do, but they were violating either patient confidentiality or safety. And I could back each complaint up. You could tell they weren’t ready for someone like me; but my employees were.

Over the next week I started to make some drastic changes in procedures because, well, efficiency and standards were lacking greatly. But they accepted every recommendation and every new rule with no complaints. I had stood by them, supported them by letting the rest of the hospital know just how important they were, and now they were willing to do whatever it was going to take to help me look good. All it took was one memo to get the process started; sometimes, all it takes is one small, positive step.

If you’re not ready to step forward, accept responsibility for what happens with your department, and support your personnel in whatever their needs are, you should step down as a manager. Remember, the buck stops here.

Responsibility And Support - To learn more about this author, visit T.T. Mitchell's Website.

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