I'm going to make an exception to one of my practices: I normally refrain from publicly using the Leadership Gift to analyze current affairs. It would be so easy for me: every day some prominent journalist or blogger bellows, "When will [insert reviled public figure] stand up and take responsibility for this mess?!" and I could cite it and show...

When you feel obligated, you are doing something you don't want to do but feel you have to. Feeling like you "have to” generates resentment that you either bottle up or release at unrelated or inappropriate moments, and the resentment produces unproductive or at least wasted thoughts and action. The Responsibility Process shows us that the feelings of obligation are...

Leaders who are relatively new to learning about the mind's internal Responsibility Process™ often ask: "What about the person who is too responsible?" One such question landed recently after I co-presented a webinar with Zach Nies (VP Products, Rally Software) called The Best Kept Secret of Agile Software Quality. Our message was that quality is a 3-legged stool of process,...

The question usually rolls out like a plea for help: What does the Responsibility Process say about someone who takes on too much? I think I’m too responsible because I take on more and more even though I can’t handle more.

Because I can be a little slow, it took me years to figure out that the very best response from me was a probing question. I now reply with “Why do you take on too much?” I now predict with better than 90% accuracy what the leader will say: No one else stepped up and I felt bad it wasn’t going to get done, so I had to do something.

This headline just reported by The Onion (picked up from Twitter. By the way, The Onion's Twitter id is "theOnion", mine is "christopheraver"): Top Story On John McCain Run Out Of Obligation | The Onion - America's Finest News Source It's an hilarious spoof on the mindset of "obligation" in the Responsibility Process™. It truly portrays what miserable performance we...