The Nature of Responsibility
And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O LORD my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.”
-1 Chronicles 21:17, ESV
In October 2008, two senior leaders were fired for something that happened on the other side of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force when it was discovered that four nuclear missile fuses had been mistakenly shipped to Taiwan from Hill AFB, Utah in 2006. To make matters worse, the Air Force was still reeling from a 2007 incident in which six nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot AFB, North Dakota to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. Even though the official report from that incident placed the blame on base-level leadership and below, the two incidents taken together proved that the issues were much more systemic. This highlights important truths about the nature of responsibility, which is a crucial but often overlooked component of leadership.
Leadership Require Responsibility
Responsibility is integral to leadership first because it is integral to any job. To have any duty is to have responsibility, which means that in formal leadership, to assume a position of leadership is to take on the responsibility of performing all of the required duties of leadership. In an informal sense, leadership can be defined as taking responsibility for those around you. Therefore, as Simon Sinekpointed out, leadership in a very real sense is responsibility. In my leadership paper I showed that good leaders care for those they lead in addition to coordinating their efforts for the good of the organization, so a leader is responsible for the people and for the job. In other words, leadership is taking responsibility, so without taking responsibility for others you cannot be a leader. Authority therefore exists to enabling leaders to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and the organization, so legitimate authority cannot exist without responsibility.
Since responsibility can be described as duty, everyone at every level has some measure of responsibility. And just like in leadership, every duty requires a certain amount of authority. This means that to delegate a task is to delegate both the responsibility for the task and the authority required to complete the task. To give people responsibility without authority is a recipe for failure and discouragement. Unless people the authority required to do the job, can we really claim they have the responsibility to do the job? The responsibility rests with the one who has the authority, so a leader who fails to delegate authority is responsible for the team’s failures. It is therefore unjust for leaders to hold subordinates responsible for tasks they did not have the authority to properly complete. But by the same logic authority is inherent with delegated responsibility, so as a former boss of mine once said, “always assume the authority to do your job”.
Individual and Shared Responsibility
This brings up an interesting question about responsibility: when you delegate it do you relinquish it? To answer this, we must look at the concept of shared responsibility. In our individualistic culture, it is easy to focus on individual responsibility. In this view, an individual who gives responsibility does not retain it. But responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so when it is given it is still retained. The subordinate has responsibility to do the job, but the leader still has the responsibility to ensure the job gets done. Furthermore, the leader is responsible for the subordinate. Therefore, they both share responsibility. So when things go wrong it is proper to hold both individuals and leaders accountable for the particular ways in which they all failed to fulfill their responsibilities. We are all responsible for our individual actions, words, responses, and negligence. We are all responsible for the decisions we make and must therefore own the consequences of those decisions. In essence, we are responsible for ourselves as well as anything and anyone we have authority over. Both W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran famously place responsibility of “the system”—and therefore the vast majority of issues—on leaders. This means that while all workers are responsible for the work they do, the leaders are responsible for the tools, training, processes, policies, facilities, environment, organizational culture, and everything else they need to do the job. When something goes wrong it is often appropriate to point to both workers and leaders, sometimes appropriate to point only to leaders, and almost never appropriate to point only to workers.
With this in mind, let’s look again at our nuclear incidents. In the Taiwan incident, various workers were responsible for mistakes in identifying, pulling, and shipping the fuses, so they were justly held accountable for their negligence. At the same time, the incident was in large part caused by various factors that were outside of the control of those workers and therefore the responsibility of leaders at various levels, so they were also justly held accountable. Similarly, the Minot incident involved many personnel failing to properly prepare, load, and inspect the warheads, leading to rightly-deserved adverse actions. But the organizational culture that allowed this perfect storm to happen was the responsibility of leaders at various levels who were also rightly held accountable. Both incidents together pointed to enterprise-wide issues, which were the responsibility of the Secretary and Chief of Staff, meaning that they were rightly held accountable as well. To borrow the analogy we discussed here, there were bad apples (individuals), bad barrels (units), and a bad barrel maker (the Air Force as a whole). Properly solving the problem therefore required people at all levels to be held accountable for what they were responsible for.
Properly solving the problem also required an immense amount of pain and effort for everyone in those units and across the Air Force for years. Many people who were completely uninvolved suffered the consequences of these incidents and therefore bore responsibility as well. This may seem unfair to our individualistic culture, but this is the reality of shared responsibility. Though not responsible for causing the problem, everyone in the organization has a responsibility to help fix the problem and ensure it doesn’t happen again. It is therefore appropriate to hold the entire organization responsible for fixing problems but it is wholly inappropriate to punish everyone for the actions or negligence of a few. This is an important distinction that is often neglected, leading to two errors.
The first error is to treat shared responsibility the same as individual responsibility, punishing people for things they did not do or neglect. This is the error of the Left in general and Critical Theory in particular, where shared responsibility is so emphasized that individual responsibility is essentially denied. By this view members of oppressed groups are the result of their circumstances and are therefore not responsible for their actions, whereas all members of oppressor groups are responsible for those circumstances and should therefore be collectively punished until all of the disparities between the groups cease. In addition to being grotesquely unethical and incredibly detrimental to society, this view neglects the very core of responsibility. Remember that while shared responsibility is possible, individual responsibility is always present, so regardless of circumstances all people are responsible for their actions regardless of whether or not they belong to some “oppressed group”. Plus, shared responsibility is not about guilt but about fixing problems, so conflating the two perverts justice by presuming guilt rather than innocence. For the Christian, Scripture is abundantly clear that such perversion of justice is an abomination to God, as all people are responsible for their own sins and not the sins of others (Deuteronomy 24:16), so a Christian cannot hold Critical Theory without disregarding Scripture. Individual responsibility cannot be ignored, so responsibility can only be shared in a limited sense, meaning Critical Theory is detrimental and abhorrent to God.
But shared responsibility does exist, contrary to the second error: the assumption that all responsibility is individual. In response to the Left’s distortion and abuse of the concept of shared responsibility, the Right often denies shared responsibility entirely. While we are individuals and therefore individually responsible for our actions, we are also members of various groups. As such we are responsible for understanding the groups we are in and the historical problems of those groups as well as taking the appropriate steps to solve those problems and prevent their recurrence. The Right often neglects this by emphasizing individual responsibility such that systemic problems are ignored and thereby often perpetuated. Instead, we must deny shared guilt while still acknowledging shared responsibility (e.g. Daniel 9:3-19). Remember that responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so acknowledging shared responsibility absolves no one of individual responsibility. Both are valid forms of responsibility, so we would be in error if we deny individual responsibility (as the Left does) or shared responsibility (as the Right does). Scripture teaches both, so we must acknowledge both.
A Portrait of Responsibility
There are many examples of people rightly taking responsibility in the Bible—and many examples of people trying to avoid it. The latter was a major component of the Fall. Adam and Eve both tried to avoid their responsibility by blaming others, but God still held them—and Satan—accountable for their own sins. A great example of the former is David, who he became a leader by taking on the responsibility for the entire nation by volunteering to fight Goliath (1 Samuel 17). More importantly, while he sinned in some egregious ways, he was quick to repent when confronted. In his response to Nathan’s rebuke about Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12), he owned his sin and the consequences. Starting with the death of his unnamed son, he was fully aware that others were suffering the consequences of his sin, which bothered him for the rest of his life. After his eldest son Amnon violated his daughter Tamar her brother Absalom murdered Amnon (2 Samuel 13). David’s sense of responsibility likely played a major role in him welcoming Absalom back from banishment following the murder (2 Samuel 14). Absalom ultimately conspired to overthrow David, forcing David to flee Jerusalem. David and his men were elite and experienced warriors and Jerusalem was very defensible, so they could have held off an attack from Absalom. This means that David’s decision to flee was in large part to prevent death and suffering of innocent people in Jerusalem. He left allies in Jerusalem specifically for the purpose of undermining Absalom without risking innocent lives (2 Samuel 15:33-37). As a good leader, he understood his responsibility for his people and made decisions with that in mind. This sense of responsibility was also evident in David’s restraint when Shimei cursed him while he was fleeing (2 Samuel 16:5-14) and his immense sorrow at Absalom’s death in the ensuing battle: “And the king was deeply moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept. And as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”” (2 Samuel 18:33). He realized that while his son had committed murder and led a bloody insurrection, the entire event was ultimately the result of David’s sin. This drove him to pardon his enemies who had joined Absalom (2 Samuel 19).
But was David right to claim this responsibility? David recognized that while Absalom was a bad apple, he had come from a bad barrel over which David was responsible. From the beginning of his reign, he had sinned in this way, disobeying the Law by accumulating wives (Deuteronomy 17:17). As we saw here and here, his son Solomon would do this in excess, which would be his undoing, but it started with David. Amnon was the son of one of David’s several wives while Absalom and Tamar were children of another (1 Chronicles 3:1-9). While this did not turn David’s heart toward other gods, it was the cause of his family strife. We have previously seen how the Old Testament strongly discourages polygamy through narratives of its disastrous results, and this is clearly one of them. So while Absalom was responsible for his rebellion, David was responsible for the family drama that had led to that rebellion. We saw herethat the husband is the head of the family and therefore responsible for every member of the family, so David was right to claim responsibility for it, even while Absalom himself was completely responsible for the murder of Amnon and the rebellion he led.
Finally, some have tried to absolve themselves of responsibility by claiming that the devil made them do it. Others could take God’s sovereignty to the extreme and blame Him. Here again, we look to David’s example. Toward the end of David’s life, God caused Satan to incite David to conduct a census (2 Samuel 24:1, 1 Chronicles 21:1). Having relied on God throughout his life and seen numerous victories when outmanned, David was now trusting in human strength. When convicted of this, he repented and was given a choice of his punishment by God: three years of famine, three months of defeat, or three days of pestilence. This grieved David, since all of the options involved the suffering of innocent people, but he chose pestilence as likely to cause the least suffering of innocent people and because it put him at risk. His sense of responsibility for his people was still overwhelming:
And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O LORD my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.”
-1 Chronicles 21:17, ESV
Throughout his life we see that David felt a profound sense of responsibility for his people, being burdened by the pain his sins caused to others. So while his sins are given in Scripture as an example for us to avoid, his sense of responsibility is a trait that should be emulated.
Conclusion
Subsequent kings did not share David’s sense of responsibility. Even righteous Hezekiah, after he had received the prophecy that Judah would ultimately fall to Babylon, was not burdened for his people, Instead, he was happy that this prophecy was good for him (2 Kings 20:16-19). But as with many things David foreshadowed his greater descendent Jesus Christ. He took the ultimate responsibility for His people by taking all of our sins upon Himself and bearing the just penalty for them. Like David, he mourned at the victimization of the people (Matthew 9:36) and wept over Jerusalem (Matthew 23:37, Luke 13:34). As God, He is the one who made us and therefore made us responsible for our sin, but as the perfect man He bore that responsibility for all who trust in Him. During His earthly ministry, He took responsibility for feeding thousands, keeping His disciples in the faith, and ensuring His mother ‘s care after His death. Jesus took responsibility, which is just one reason why He is the greatest leader ever. And it’s not just me saying that. Here’s what we find in a popular secular leadership book:
We agreed that leadership was the skill of influencing people to work enthusiastically toward goals identified as being for the common good….Well, I know of no one, living or dead, who even comes close to Jesus in personifying that definition. Let’s look at the facts. As I stand here today, over two billion people, fully one-third of the human beings on this planet, call themselves Christian….Two of this country’s biggest holidays, Christmas and Easter, are based on events in His life and our calendar even records the years since He lived…I don’t care if you’re Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, or from the ‘Church of What’s Happening Now,’ no one can deny that this person has influenced billions, today and throughout history. There is not even a close second.
-James C. Hunter, The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership, New York, NY: Crown Publishing: 1998: 76-77.
All Christian leaders should strive to emulate Jesus, particularly in the way He assumed responsibility for His people. All leaders should feel a profound sense of responsibility for their people such that they will be greatly bothered by the prospect of their people suffering because of their decisions. One telltale sign of the broken and contrite heart that God loves (Psalm 51:17, Isaiah 66:1-2) is to mourn much more for the impact of our own sin on others than the effect their sin on us. So let us all acknowledge our responsibilities: personal responsibility for ourselves, leadership responsibility for our people, and shared responsibility for fixing systemic problems while trusting in Christ who willingly bears responsibility for us.
