Responsibility is a privilege

Last week, executive leaders from Automattic’s Happiness team met in Frankfurt, Germany, to improve our leadership and decision-making skills. Automattic is the company I work with, and Happiness owns the support experience for Automattic’s customers. The purpose of the Frankfurt meetup was to help us recognize our potential as an organization and as leaders, to build our sense of ownership and agency, and to feel confident in driving change.

The thing is, I’m not currently an official leader in our support organization, at least not at the executive level. Despite this, I was able to join the meetup because in two weeks I will step in as interim lead of our support operations team, HappOps, while the current lead takes a well-earned sabbatical for three months.

Over the past few weeks, as the start date of her sabbatical grew nearer with every passing day, with every big upheaval, with every big change we want to make, my predominant feeling about guiding the team in her absence has been nervousness. There are a lot of moving pieces. I want to do a good job and help our 35+ support teams achieve our goals. It’s a big responsibility.

Because I want to do a good job at everything I do, this responsibility has been weighing on me. Since the time I agreed to step in several months ago, I’ve started observing dynamics outside my personal segment more closely, along with communications, and initiatives, and all of the parts that go into making things move forward: decisiveness, clarity, what it is that we actually want to achieve. Knowing what success looks like. It’s a lot, and all those pieces aren’t always there. And so the responsibility felt heavy.

During our week in Frankfurt, we talked about all of these things, and we worked through a case study to practice decisiveness, clarity, and defining in specific terms what we wanted to achieve with the initiative in the case study. This all helped me tremendously. By the end of our three days of work sessions, I felt more confident that I can be a safe harbor for the team in our lead’s absence, and will be able to help provide clarity and guidance if we as a leadership team continue to work as well together in the day-to-day back “in the office” as we were on this meetup.

But I was still scared.

To close out the meetup, our head of Happiness, Andrew Spittle, arranged a fireside chat with Shervin Talieh, CEO of PartnerHero, a company that runs and optimizes remote teams for startups. Shervin is funny, passionate, and honest, and he had us all riveted as he spoke about his experiences as an executive. At one point, Shervin told a story about talking to his leadership team about PartnerHero’s responsibility to support communities and team members — and he interrupted himself to say (I’m paraphrasing), “And when I say responsibility, I’m talking about responsibility as a privilege, not responsibility as a burden.”

This was a lightbulb moment for me. I wrote it in my notebook and underlined it. Responsibility is a privilege, not a burden.

At the end of a long string of weeks worrying about being responsible for a large function within our support organization, and responsible to my teammates who I love, and responsible to our heads of support for helping them get shit done, this message from Shervin slotted the final piece into place for me to realize, this opportunity is not something to fear or weigh heavy on me. Being responsible to our teams and my teammates for three months is a privilege. I don’t have to do this, I get to do this. This is a tremendous mindset shift from fear-based thinking to opportunity-based thinking.

That doesn’t mean the fear is gone. But this mindset shift helps a ton. And when I do feel the fear creeping in about whether I’ll succeed or fail, I can practice a Stoic practice I just learned about on my flight home: I may not be able to control the external outcome of my work — we may not get the results we expect, and I’m 100% certain I will make mistakes — but I can show up every day with the goal to do the best work I’m capable of doing.