All cards on the table, please!

“Responsibility? What’s that?” The name of a pop song by the band MXPX that pretty much outlines the wrong way to go about being responsible. The more responsible you are, the easier you are to work with.

Being a responsible person entails many things, but above all it means that you are one sided; always liable to tell the truth. Ultimately, this will outwardly reflect on to your reliability. If your constituents can count on you to tell the truth, you can be counted on to tackle bigger endeavors.

Telling the truth will always improve the level of respect you receive, but what will get you even further is taking responsibility for when you’ve made mistakes. Admitting when you are wrong is one of the hardest things to do, but it shows character.

Whoever you have unfortunately wronged or let down will appreciate the acknowledgment of error rather than blaming the mistake on someone else or ignoring it all together. The obvious next step would be to fix the problem as fast and accurately as possible. This also needs to be practiced on the corporate level as well.

I can't tell you how many times I've been told that in PR, your reputation is nearly all you have. If you ruin it, you ruin everything. It can happen by being caught in a simple lie.

The VP of McDonalds realizes the importance of corporate social responsibility as he outlines the company’s stance on the issue in her blog “Open for M(Golden Arch) Discussion.” Bob Langert says that it is time for companies to start doing rather than saying. The old saying of “actions speak louder than words” is the key here. This is why it is so important to fix the problem after the apology.

That attitude that says “I don’t want to know about it, ever have to think about it,” is what’s getting companies all over the scale into serious trouble. They need to find the source of error and acknowledge it, weather it’s the organizations fault or not. This looks great on a company’s corporate social responsibility.

The author of Crisesblogger illustrates how admitting fault can have a direct impact on repercussions. Although I think in some cases mistakes can be forgiven, most that involve a person’s health can’t be overlooked. Someone is always going to want to profit when a doctor makes a mistake.

Look at John Ritter’s, the late actor, widow. she is suing his doctor because John died. Should the doctor be held responsible? In some respects, yes; in others, no way! There are some things that can’t be accounted for, especially when dealing with life and death; everybody has to die sometime.
So, my point is, doctors can’t just say sorry and not expect to get sued. Life and death means too much to people. Although it is sad that we put our caregivers in that position that says: help me, but if you screw-up, I’ll sue you!