Responsibility

Do you ever go home feeling that you’ve spent the whole day doing jobs on other people’s to-do lists instead of your own? Do you feel that you’re doing more but accomplishing less? When you allow the problems of others to become your own, you’re doing volunteer work. Stop accepting responsibility for other people’s problems. Instead, help the person define the problem and ask him or her to come up with an idea of how to solve it. Ask the person to accept full ownership of the problem, and schedule a time to check in with a progress report. You might be surprised how well people can do on their own with just this little bit of support.