Getting increased clarity around complex, messy topics and/or situations is one of the most important focal points of my Coaching work with my clients. One of the best tools I use here is to ask them to carefully examine their thinking and see where they might find some sticky points. To click down further, where might we be able to make some helpful distinctions that will serve to both untangle the stickiness and to open up more space for better informed action?

Some previous examples of how making helpful distinctions can be found in my previous posts on “The Boss” vs Leader, Complex vs Complicated, and Fundamental vs Significant. All three of these posts do similar things – illustrate how what seems to be one sticky thing is better understood as two similar but separate things that are better appreciated independently. In other words, similar but different, with the emphasis on different.

Responsible FOR vs Responsible TO is another distinction that parses out a critically important differences that simply using “responsibility” as a blanket term misses. More appreciation on how FOR and TO are different might help you see the situation in front of you more clearly, understand your choices more thoroughly, and then act with more intention according to a clearer sense of “responsibility” in int actual definition as “ability to respond.”

Responsible FOR is what we hear about all the time, but upon closer examination, is much better reserved for only very specific occasions where there are clear and obvious capacity limitations for other folks involved. For example, you are indeed responsible FOR the vast majority of your children’s needs such as food options, screen time exposure, and dental check-ups. You may also be responsible FOR supervising people and/or projects at work, ranging from onboarding the new hire all the way up through project management and into the C-Suite for full company performance. These are all examples where you have obligations of control and accountability that come with FOR.

Responsible TO, on the other hand, is very different. Here the dynamic is less reactive and instead calls for more autonomy and allows more freedom of action in choosing HOW to respond. For instance, your partner’s challenges at work, your employee’s struggles to perform at the required level, and your boss’ push for an unrealistic deadline are all things you are responsible TO, but not necessarily responsible FOR. You are indeed obligated to “show up” in these situations, and perhaps do something in response, but you aren’t the one that can, or should, be the one to “fix” it. I know this distinction in inherently sticky, so I’ll unpack each of these examples a bit to try to further disambiguate them.

Say your partner comes home from work really frustrated with her coworkers’ lack of meaningful contribution to a project. She’s upset about multiple things here and vents to you for a full 20 minutes about all the facets of the issue. If you mistakenly imagine that you are responsible FOR her problems with her coworker, her team, or even her current emotional state, then you might err and try to “fix” these things.

These '“fixing” attempts will not only fail, but will probably make things worse.

If, on the other hand, you correctly understand that you need only be responsible TO her in the moment, then you proceed differently. At a minimum, you could simply empathize and validate her emotional state of being, something like “Wow, that sounds really frustrating, I can totally see why you’d be upset about that.” Often, that’s all you need to do. You are simply seeing her reality and responding TO it with an appropriate degree of care and understanding. See the difference? No fixing, no efforting, no 20 questions to analyze the details.

With the employee that is struggling to perform to expectations it’s very similar. If you think you are responsible FOR their success, then you might start all kinds of unhelpful interventions like making underinformed suggestions, assigning more training, or even issuing warnings. And sure, those things might have some degree of effectiveness. However, if you see through the lens of responsible TO then you might schedule a chat where you simply state “I notice you are struggling in your performance. What can I do to help you here?” They might just ask for suggestions or additional training like above, but here you are responding TO them directly, and will likely get better results much quicker and with greater respect and rapport getting built along the way.

Finally, with the example of the boss pushing an unrealistic deadline, things might feel a bit more intense but the same principle applies. If you make the wrong choice and reflexively imagine you are responsible FOR meeting it at all costs then you might unfairly push yourself and/or your team to work much harder than would be reasonable. Additional costs will be born by your team here, icluding more stress and frustration with the boss, with the company, and with you too.

However, if you approach this through the responsible TO mindset then you have other options open up in front of you. You could circle back to your boss and ask them which of the other existing priorities they want to sacrifice in order to fast track the one they are currently pushing. You could check in with your team to find the absolute soonest realistic deadline and bring that to your boss as the best you can commit to under the current circumstances. You might even be savvy enough to simply say “Sure, but we’re going to need 2 more people on the team and additional bonus monies or overtime approval to make that happen.” The point here being that you can still take what’s given but then respond TO it with a range of reasonable options for trying to work with it.

The responsible TO framing is all about increasing your autonomy in the moment, and increasing your agency over your future. In other words, increasing your “ability to respond.”

And of course, the boss may reject all of that and tell you to get it done as they slam the door. But that just gives you a new question to consider – how do you want to respond with more autonomy and agency TO a boss that treats their employees this way?