The way to build sustainable relationships, grow as a person and run an organisation
Build Trust, Spread Responsibility, Give Away
Trust is a fundamental need for a human being. Man alone cannot create anything significant, but united can build something incredible. This is a unique feature of mankind and its only strength. Without trust impossible to build a synergistic connection type. Trust conquers the fear of being deceived and overcomes the need for competition. In other words, games in which for one to win, the other must lose.
The person who does not trust builds a Take or Exchange relationship. Afraid of being used person takes using others. If they, even so, did something for another, they explicitly or implicitly expect something in return. That makes you keep a table of “debtors” in your head, and bizarrely, a person begins to believe that all others owed them. Accordingly, they begin to demand special treatment for themselves, which they believe they deserve. Since they do not receive it, they experience injustice towards themselves, which comes from the discrepancy between the fictitious debit and credit.
Trust is nothing but faith in benevolence, so it doesn't depend on anyone but you. Trust stands together with Responsibility. Trust doesn’t mean the transfer of responsibility. If you entrusted something to another person and he did not cope, the burden is still on you. Belief in benevolence does not relieve you of responsibility but is necessary for the transmission of responsibility to happen.
So, how to spread Responsibility? — it means to give away.
When the Responsibility shift happens it’s not yours anymore. By this, I mean not only the responsibility itself but its object. When a person receives an object of responsibility, he receives power over this object and is free to do whatever he wants, bearing responsibility for this.
Responsibility goes with power and no other way.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Let's take a moment to look at the structure of organizations and their leadership. Most managers and employees misunderstood the concept of transfer of responsibility. Because along with responsibility, the manager must give away part of the power. Instead, managers want to throw off the responsibility but keep the power to themselves. This will never work.
To understand why you need to understand how such organizations work.
In this type of organization, a person gains power in exchange for taking on some responsibility and risk that other people don't want to take. People transfer power to some people because they do not want to be responsible for their choices and decisions. A side effect of this is the ability to use virtually free slave labour called “market average” which is the least possible.
In the end, power can absorb a person and he will be punished by the people whom he enslaved because he will be guilty of everything that happens in their lives - they gave him this responsibility, and he took it along with power. Power blinds and makes such a transaction opaque. For both sides, the former does not understand that they give responsibility along with power, and the latter takes it.
In the new type of organization, I am proposing, people need to take responsibility, along with power, for themselves and their decisions. It means understanding cause-and-effect relationships. It doesn't mean there is no structure and leadership, there is but with a different attitude.
The higher a person rises, the more he gives and the more he serves what is below. Not vice versa. It also doesn't make us unequal. Yet, we differ in our unique abilities that are applicable in different places.
This is easier to understand by the example of professional abilities. What distinguishes a supervisor and a subordinate? The subordinate knows some specific places and knows better how to operate there and what to apply, while the supervisor sees the big picture and knows better how to operate precisely in his place. This is one line, without a subordinate one cannot be a supervisor and vice versa, as well as the fact that the supervisor was once a subordinate and is a subordinate to something higher. This is natural growth.
The key understanding here is that the lower the more specific, the higher the more abstract. In each specific place, there is a person who is best able to manage the corresponding workers with the corresponding power and responsibility.
To grow, you must give away power to make room for a new generation. This is essential for organisational and personal growth. There is an expansion and there is growth. Expansion is when you expand through the bottom, it gives rise to conflicts, wars, and competition — to grow you need to take something from someone. When you naturally grow you create something new from nothing through association and synergy.
To make sure you grow, but not expand you need to learn how to be unselfish.
Do a good deed and throw it in the water; when it dries up you will find it.