2.9 Personal Responsibilities at Work

Personal responsibility refers to an individual’s willingness to be accountable for what they feel, think, and behave. Whether we are talking about our attitudes, our thought processes, or physical/communicative behaviors, personal responsibility is simply realizing that we are in the driver’s seat and not blaming others for our current circumstances. Sometimes external factors may impede our success. Certain people may have a leg-up on life because of a privileged background. However, personal responsibility involves differentiating between those things we can control and those things that are outside of our control. For example, I may not be able to control a coworker who decides to yell at me, but I can control how I think about that coworker, and how I choose to respond to that coworker. Here are some ways that you can take personal responsibility in the workplace:

• Acknowledge that you are responsible for your choices in the workplace.
• Accept that you are responsible for your behavior at work.
• Use formal language in written language and pay close attention to workplace expectations of interpersonal communication with coworkers and supervisors.
• Treat all coworkers fairly and equally.
• Avoid engaging in verbally aggressive behaviors such as name-calling, insults, rumor mongering and putting people or their ideas down without consideration.
• Praise coworkers more than you criticize them.
• When expressing judgment, focus on the ideas rather than the person.

This section is adapted from Interpersonal Relationships at Work in Interpersonal Communication – Simple Book Publishing Copyright © by Jason S. Wrench, Narissra M. Punyanunt-Carter, and Katherine S. Thweatt licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.