We’re (hopefully) taught some important things as children:
[Spoilers ahead, for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame]
One of the greatest things about being a leader, for us, is building deep, enduring relationships with the people and teams we work with.
One of the hardest things, for us, about being a leader is leaving the relationships we’ve built. This is a sad, painful process. We love people a lot, and we keep leaving, maybe because there are always more dragons to teach people how to slay.
There is freedom and peace and pride in being truly good at something.
Not to seem good.
Not to check off the boxes of good.
But to actually be good.
Everyone should have the freedom to be actually good.
Establishing governance philosophy in an enterprise is a tricky combination of “how much do we trust our people?” and “okay, but how much do we actually trust our people?” The fact is, people are going to screw up. Some of them might deliberately try to screw something up, but mostly they’ll just make mistakes. If the organization can’t handle mistakes, that’s a problem with the adaptability and flexibility of the organization, not with its people. This means that people’s potential mistakes are not a reason to default to not trusting them.
Accountability and responsibility sound like the same thing. They definitely represent the same concept – ownership.
In fact, the concepts of accountability and responsibility are very close. There’s one main difference, though:
Accountability is ownership by an individual. Responsibility is ownership shared by a group.