A Story About Taking Responsibility for Yourself

For the third time I explain why it cannot be done.

Opposite me sits Carla, who has been working with me for six months. Her notebook is closed; she simply listens. I am warming to my theme. The collaboration between my area and sales has been sticking for months, and I have the reasons ready like a price list. The management gives no clear direction. The system rewards anyone who defends their own silo. And I have no time anyway, everyone here knows that.

I am head of engineering at a supplier of drive technology. Two hundred people, an old company, narrow corridors, a plant that has stood in the same spot for forty years. I know my patterns. Carla and I have looked at them often enough these past months. I know that I like to name what is going wrong and push the cause outwards while I do it. I know it, and I do it anyway, right now, in this sentence.

“As long as the people upstairs don’t settle who’s in charge, there’s nothing I can shift at that interface.” I lean back, almost satisfied. The case is clear. The fault lies elsewhere. I have packaged it neatly and laid it at Carla’s feet.

She is silent for a moment. Then she asks calmly: “And what part of it lies in your hand?”

I open my mouth to answer and notice that I am back at the management again. At Ralf in sales, who never calls back. At the processes nobody tidies up. I talk, and I listen to myself talking, and for the first time this afternoon it sounds thin. I have all the insights. I can explain my pattern to you while sitting right in the middle of it. And that is exactly the problem: I understand everything, so that in the end nothing moves.

I know this question. Carla has asked it in other forms often enough, and every time I have answered cleverly. I know how taking responsibility works; I could give a talk about it. It is only that I have always saved it for tomorrow, for the day when the conditions are finally right. That day does not come. That is the quiet part of this realisation: it has been sitting inside me fully formed for months and by itself changes nothing at all.

Carla does not press. She simply lets the question stand in the room, and the room goes quiet. Outside a forklift drives past, the familiar beeping as it reverses. I think of Ralf. Of the business with the delivery dates that has hung in the fog between our areas since the spring. I have been waiting for months for somebody upstairs to put us round a table. I wait, and I explain why the waiting is not my fault.

What lies in my hand? The answer is smaller than I want it to be. I could call Ralf. Today. Without an instruction, without a mandate, without anyone telling me to.

The thought is uncomfortable because it is so simple. There is no good excuse for not doing it. I notice myself already dodging again: first I would have to sort the figures, first I would have to think about how to phrase it, first the meeting with the management would have to be out of the way. First, first, first. That is the language in which important things die with me.

I pick up the phone. Not later, now, with Carla in the room. My thumb hesitates over Ralf’s number, the way it always hesitates when something slides into my responsibility. I dial anyway.

He picks up on the third ring, surprised. “What’s happened?” “Nothing,” I say. “I just wanted to sort out something that has been lying between us for months. Do you have twenty minutes tomorrow morning? Just the two of us, no slides, no big meeting. I’ll start with the delivery dates.” A pause. Then, almost relieved: “Sure. Eight o’clock, my office.”

That was all. Twenty seconds. No concept, no approval, no reform. One phone call I have been putting off for six months and for which I have blamed the circumstances the entire time.

When I hang up, I look at Carla. She does not smile in triumph, she only nods. “How does that feel?” “Unspectacular,” I say. “And honest.” I have not moved anything big. But for the first time in months I am no longer standing at the edge of my own problem, pointing at it. I am standing in the middle of it, and I have done something.

Tomorrow morning’s meeting will not solve everything. Perhaps it will be tough going, perhaps Ralf will come with his own list full of reasons. But the interface is moving for the first time, because I am moving it, without waiting for the circumstances to change first.

I pack up my things. The corridor is empty, most people have already gone. On the wall hangs the values poster we put up years ago, “Collaboration” in large letters. I have walked past it often and thought that the others should finally read it. Today I walk past and think: I could have started long ago. The tool was there the whole time. What was missing was my hand on the phone.

Right at the beginning there was once the question of the nonsense we tell ourselves. I heard mine today, on the third attempt, in a sentence about the people upstairs. Change begins in the moment when recognising turns into doing. Everything else is the story I tell myself while everything stays as it is.