How responsible are you?

Here is a six level responsibility pyramid ​provide some kind of a framework to assess your current level of responsibility so that you could shoot for more as you want to grow in your career.​

R1 – Individual contributor

You are responsible for your task. You are given specific tasks and you need to deliver on those, typically within a deadline that is already provided to you. Your success or failure is dependent on how well you perform that task and nothing else. You are more or less self-sufficient in doing that task and need very little teamwork. You don’t know where the input for your task came from or where the output will go.

You are the ‘proverbial’ cog in the wheel…. Most of us start our career with these types of roles so don’t despair yet….

R2 – Work product responsible

You are responsible to deliver a work product that may involve several team members and several tasks need to be executed till that work product can be made ready. Since you are responsible for the end work product you now have the onus of breaking the deliverable into tasks, assigning it to several folks in the team, accepting the task output, integrating them back to create the work product. You are starting to see how that work product is ultimately going to fit into the big project, you don’t see it clearly yet but you get some picture….

That sounds like progress isn’t it? You now are responsible not only for your own tasks but also for other people getting their tasks done right as well. Great… welcome to year 3-4 of your career..

R3 – Project responsible

Yes… you are the boss… you need to deliver on this project… ultimately it is your glory or your shame… engage with stakeholders, understand the needs, set up a team of L2s and L1s, make progress on the project, keep stakeholders informed, manage project risks, budget etc. etc. the whole nine yards..

if you made it this far in the first 5-6 years of your career you are doing well… you have missed the boat if you haven’t made it here after 8 years of your career… better wake up and do something about it….

R4 – Customer Responsible

You are responsible for a customer (could be one group within a client in a large B2B IT services set up, could be an internal customer if you are in a captive set-up, could be a customer base/segment if you are in a software product company). You are responsible for understanding customer needs, create proposals that outline the solution, get buy-in from all stakeholders, integrate that with other initiatives within the organization, and then deliver using your L1/L2/L3 teams. Your success here is closely tied to that of your customer and it is starting to become difficult separating your team from the customer team…

These roles are fairly responsible and are typically not awarded on a ‘years of experience’ basis, but really need a different level of business knowledge, skill set and attitudes. If you have made it to one of these roles… congratulations…. The expectation of the world from you has just gone up… bar has been raised…

R5 – Business Responsible

You are responsible for a line of business of your company and are the owner of the P&L – you bring in the business, you are the fall guy for the customer, you build teams that execute to it, you incur the costs and finally contribute a part of your organization’s bottom-line. This line of business could be an ‘industry’, a ‘geography’, a ‘specific service’ or simply some kind of a ‘cluster’ of clients who make up a logical unit of business for your firm.

Congratulations… you are virtually a CEO of this part of the business…

R6 – Organization Responsible

Well… you are at that place where everyone else wants to be as the CEO of your company. They are, of course, unaware of the complexities of the role and the associated responsibility… all they can see are the privileges 

How responsible are you?

You are not only responsible for bringing food home for your employees but are also responsible for external stakeholders like media, public, board, shareholders etc. this does not have to be a large company but could be your own 5 people start-up but the roles and responsibilities are the same and may even be tougher.

Welcome to the loneliest job in the world…

Now what?

Now that you know have a framework to assess your level of responsibility within your organization… what are you going to do about it? Well.. one thing would be to read my earlier article on ‘career growth’ again.

Authored by:- Mr.​ ​Tapan Rayaguru​, ​Executive​ ​Director at Sunstone Business School

© Technuter.com News Service

How responsible are you?

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