A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility. Conscious Leadership defines it like this:
\n\n\nTaking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational transformation. Conscious leadership and teams take full responsibility – radical responsibility – instead of placing blame. This means locating the cause and control of our lives in ourselves, not in external events.
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Good leaders are outcome-focused. They are interested in actually succeeding, not in role-playing someone who’s trying to succeed1. Placing blame is an excellent strategy for that kind of role-playing: if you can identify someone else who screwed up, you can claim to be trying to succeed no matter how badly you fail. When you look at people who are genuinely focused on winning, they don’t spend time blaming when things go wrong. They’re always focused on their outs: the remaining pathways to success, however few and narrow.
\nNever placing blame sounds like a kind thing to do. However, I think there’s something a little sociopathic about “radical responsibility”. If you assert full responsibility for your own circumstances, then you’re necessarily not sharing responsibility with anyone else. That forces you to take an instrumental view of the people around you. They’re not peers who you might trust and be disappointed by; they’re either useful assets to be cultivated or useless liabilities to be handled or avoided2. If you rely on someone and they let you down, that’s your fault for being stupid enough to trust them in the first place. You ought to have made better tactical choices.
\nMany successful leaders adopt this mindset because it works. It really does help you win. But I don’t recommend it as a general approach to life. Trusting other people with responsibility is how you treat them like people, instead of like tools. And if you do that, you’ll sometimes assign praise and blame to them, instead of hoarding it all to yourself.
\nIn fact, many people role-play someone who’s trying to win as a substitute for actually trying. Here’s a relevant quote from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: “The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything.”
\n↩\nOr moderately-useful assets who can potentially be steered into usefulness with some feedback — but still never blamed, in the way that you might adjust a misbehaving power tool without blaming it. To my mind, the canonical philosophical treatment of this is Peter Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment, where he describes the “objective attitude”.
\n↩\n“Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text. The core problem with workslop is that the effort involved is asymmetrical, like a denial-of-service attack: it takes almost no effort to produce text with AI, but it still costs effort to read. Here are some ways to protect yourself.
If you have enough authority or social capital, you can and should simply tell them “hey, don’t do that” (for instance, if you’re a senior engineer and an intern starts doing this to you). This is the easiest way to handle workslop. But you probably aren’t in a position to have that conversation with all of your colleagues, and you certainly can’t have it with everyone in your management chain.
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