If you are a manager, one of the first thing you need to learn is that everybody’s responsibility is nobody’s responsibility. You have to identify each task and assign the responsibility to a member of your team so that you can take that member to task if the job is not done to specifications within the deadline.
We may not take this seriously at this stage, but it is likely to put you in awkward situations particularly when each member of your team was capable of doing it but none of them did it simply because it was assigned to no one.
Now here is a story that I would like to narrate to illustrate my point:
There were four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. An important job came up and everyone was confident that somebody would do it. In fact, any body could have done it but, incidentally, nobody did it. When the deadline was over, the boss lost his cool. He got worked up because a job that could have been done by anybody was done by nobody.
The boss knew that everybody could have done that. Yet, nobody thought that it was their job. So, the boss took everyone to task one-by-one. Everyone had their own explanations as to why they did not do the job. In fact, each of them slipped through his fingers and he could do nothing. At the end of the day, the boss cold fix responsibility on no one because he had not assigned the job to anyone in particular.
The point is: everybody knew that anybody could do the job and they assumed that somebody would certainly do it. But nobody felt that it was their responsibility to do the job. In order to bail themselves out of the situation, everybody tried to blame the others for not doing the job.
The moral of the tale is: If you do not assign a job to someone, that somebody cannot be taken to task if the job is not done. So, it is very, very important to assign each job to someone in particular and communicate this in very clear terms.
Otherwise, we may have to console ourselves by accepting that everybody’s responsibility is nobody’s responsibility.
