In my quest to create a star team, owning up is only the first step, that is why it is important to raise the bar of everyone and find a way to fix our mistakes. The first steps is explaining about accountability and allowing the employee to commit to actions that will fix the mistakes (and take responsibility).
The feeling of managing to raise the bar and solving/fixing our mistakes is *amazing*

I hope that doing this enough times will train us to solve the problems before “owning up”, so that I will hear.

“I didn’t manage to reach my goals so I am going to do a.b.c to solve it”

But there is a serious problem with it. I know what the problem is, because I make these points all the time to people and get the same feedback.

Part of that you’re doing here in this post is trying to clarify the English language. You’re setting the record straight. And people hate that; they hate being corrected.

People misuse the English language every day. And like anything else that you do repetitively, if you do it enough you become good at it. People become very adept at abusing the English language. And they hate to be corrected on it.

I don’t know what it is about us humans – why we are this way – but we do not accept criticism very well.

Anyway, what I really wanted to do was answer the question about taking responsibility:

“So what does that mean? Where exactly are you taking the responsibility to? Is there a place where you keep all you unmet responsibilities?”

I know you know this, but people say, “I take full responsibility” because to them the alternative is deflecting the blame. When a mistake occurs and a person knows they are the reason for that mistake then they have one of two reactions: (1) lie or (b) own up to the mistake. Saying, “I take full responsibility”, even if it is grammatically incorrect, at least shows the person is willing to acknowledge that they were the reason the mistake occurred. For me, that is the most important thing. It speaks to the character of the person. I have no use for liars. But a person who is willing to admit their mistakes is at least on the right path.

Now, what you’re talking about is what happens after they admit their mistake. Accountability. That’s a great thing to champion and I applaud you for it, for this post, and for making the effort to explain it.

But in my experience, just finding people who can admit their own mistakes is a much bigger hurdle than getting them to accept accountability and take corrective action.

P.S. I have no idea if you’ve ever seen the HBO miniseries “From The Earth To The Moon”. If so, you have seen the 4th episode, called “Spider”. There is a great scene in that episode about an engineer who screws up some calculations that cause a major malfunction in the lunar excursion module. Check it out if you haven’t seen it. Wonderful show.