A Radically Different Take on Responsibility

A small shift in beliefs that can have a big impact

You might well know the old, cynical restaurant anecdote in which a customer flags down a server who’s passing his table and politely asks for another glass of water.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the server replies, “but you’re not in my section.”

This story is symptomatic of the shoulder-shrugging unwillingness to take ownership of anything that’s not directly our “duty”—at best, customers get bad service. At worst, companies and communities come apart. 

Stories, as I’ve written any number of times in recent months, are beliefs made manifest. I’d like to tell you stuff like this only happens in poorly-run restaurants, but the reality is that it reflects a widely held belief. Most people, in most companies, and in most countries, have been led to believe that they are only responsible for themselves—accountable only for their own work assignments. As a result of which, customers get shunted from one office to the next. One department blames the next, one party points at the other. Stas’ Kazmierski, who taught us the visioning process back in 1993, used to tell the story of a company he worked for: “When you asked who was responsible, people would essentially cross their arms over their chests and point in either direction. We called it the company ‘salute.’ It was always someone else’s responsibility.” 

This essay is about the opposite belief. The radical idea that we can all start by taking on total responsibility for everything of which we’re a part. While we are responsible for our own actions, our organizations would be healthier and happier places if we each were to skip the blame, defensiveness, and finger pointing and instead act with a sense of grounded, caring ownership. This small shift, I believe, is a powerful one that can have a meaningfully positive impact on mindsets, energy, and outcomes. Over time, it can change company cultures. It is a big part of ours. While it might seem like “more work,” it works the other way around—when it’s done well (by both the individual and the organization), people feel more empowered, more engaged, and, in the process, they gain a greater sense of purpose. 

Over the course of the last few years, through ZingTrain, I’ve found myself working with some organizations that have, unintentionally, got me thinking this all through in greater depth. On the surface, they seem to be doing well. Many have already adapted some of our approaches, along with a host of other ideas that they’ve picked up from around the progressive business world. While all have had some good success, they are also, as they tell me, feeling frustrated: “We do so much for our staff, but they don’t seem to appreciate it. We’ve made all these changes to help them, but all they seem to want to do is show up, do their jobs, and go home. We’re trying to make this a great organization, but mostly people just want to punch in and out.” 

I can certainly relate to the feeling of frustration. And yet, over the years, I’ve learned to push past it. Blaming staff for being unappreciative helps nothing. In Freedom and Accountability, Peter Block and Peter Koestenbaum write, “To blame others merely means making a decision to avoid the responsibility which ultimately and inescapably is one’s very own.” 

I grew up, like many people, learning how to do all the blaming, finger pointing, and deflecting—our family dinners were all too often about engaging in endless arguments. I’ve tried, instead, to reground myself in the maxim Paul taught me 40 years ago: “When furious, get curious.” Which made me wonder… Why are companies who care about their staff, who are giving so much, finding that they get back so little? As I reflected on what wasn’t quite working, I started to realize that this belief about personal responsibility might be a big piece of the organizational puzzle. There’s something here in our culture that we don’t talk a whole lot about, but I realize is making a bigger difference than I’d given it credit for. It’s the sort of thing that, as Peter Block describes,

… [C]an be thought of as peripheral vision: you look at something, say a picture on the wall, and on the edges of your field of vision are images that are definitely there, but difficult to see definitively and clearly.

Here, we believe that we are each, fully, 100%, responsible for everything of which we’re a part. 

This is not something we invented. I was reminded of that the other day while I was reading through a tome entitled, appropriately for the moment, Managing in Turbulent Times. Although the title might lead you to believe that it probably came out in the last couple of years, the book has nothing to do with Covid, attacks on the American Capitol, or the war in Ukraine. Managing in Turbulent Times was written 40 years ago by longtime leadership guru Peter Drucker. 

Reading Drucker’s work helped me realize what was missing in some of these organizations where frustration with staff runs so high. Staff members are cared for, but they don’t care as deeply as someone who feels fully responsible for their organization, their department, their colleagues, or their work community. They’re asked only to do tasks, and that is what they do. The sense of belonging that goes with feeling fully responsible for the whole goes missing. The typical employee, Drucker explains, “is held responsible neither for his ownership power nor his knowledge power. And that, at bottom, explains his unease, his discontent, his psychological hollowness. … he has function but lacks status. He lacks responsibility.” As a result of which, Drucker writes:

The employee in most companies … is basically “underemployed.” His responsibility does not match his capacity, his authority, and his economic position. He is given money instead of the status that only genuine responsibility can confer—and this trade-off never works. 

…

The employee on all levels … needs to be given genuine responsibility for the affairs of the … community. … He must be held responsible for setting the goals for his own work and for managing himself … he must be held responsible for the constant improvement of the entire operation. … He must share responsibly in thinking through and setting the enterprise’s goals and objectives, and in making the enterprise’s decisions. 

When we accept responsibility for the whole of our work, what we create, Drucker says, “is citizenship.” While the word is well known, the approach is the inverse of what exists in most companies. Instead of citizens, the typical business quietly sees staff members as “subjects.” The leader—very much like a sovereign ruler, a king, or a queen—is the one who is, patriarchally, responsible for the health and well-being of all. The staff member is accountable only for their own work, but is neither empowered nor expected to take responsibility for the whole. This approach, Drucker demonstrates, will often lead to apathy. At its worst, the unwillingness to share responsibility creates alienation, anger, blame, bias, and burnout.

We did not consciously have Drucker’s directive in mind when we opened the Deli, but Paul and I both believed that we and everyone we hired would work in the way that Drucker describes: People who worked with us ought to have a meaningful say in what we were doing. And, at the same time, they would take total responsibility—as we felt ourselves—for what was going on. We weren’t trying to be radical. It just seemed like the right and obvious way to work. I don’t know that we talked much about it in those early beginnings, but taking responsibility was informally woven into what we do every day. It’s a way of being in the world of which I was reminded again this past weekend when Bill Russell passed away at the age of 88. For Russell, the long-time star of the Boston Celtics, and an active campaigner for civil rights throughout his life, the focus was always on the health and success of the group. As columnist Jim Rohn writes, “Russell was a player who wanted to take responsibility for the success or failure of his team.”

The mindset that Russell brought to the Celtics is what we want, and have always wanted, for our organization. In more turbulent and less turbulent times, it’s our hope and intent that all of us here take total responsibility for what’s going on. By embracing the whole, taking responsibility for the ecosystem and everything and everyone in it, we have a shot at making something magical happen.

I still remember when I realized that this unspoken hope could be hard-wired into the way we work. While I might well have read it first in Peter Drucker, I wasn’t savvy enough to see the power that a shift in responsibility could have until I came upon Gay Hendricks and Kate Ludeman’s 1997 book, The Corporate Mystic. They list “7 Radical Rules for Business Success.” Number 2 blew my mind: 

Always take 100 percent responsibility for any activity you're involved in. If you are in a leadership position, take 100 percent, not 200 percent. Require that each participant take 100 percent. Equality is only possible through meeting at the 100 percent level.

I must have read the statement something like ten times trying to let the concept sink in. It certainly didn’t mesh with what my 8th grade algebra teacher had taught me. And yet, it totally made sense in a belief-altering way. What had I believed up until that point? I’d probably just gone along, unconsciously with the “obvious norm” of what I’d been taught underlay all equity. We would share responsibility the equitable way: “50-50.” It felt fair and the math worked out. Unfortunately, though, that model just doesn’t actually work. It leads to the kind of blame and finger-pointing that Stas’ had taught me about. When I would inquire about something that had gone awry, it nearly always seemed to be the “50%” of the other person, almost never of the one I was asking. As Hendricks and Ludeman say:

The ordinary definition of responsibility: Whose fault is this?
The successful person’s definition: “How can I respond to this so everybody wins.”

Someone else who has challenged these old beliefs about responsibility for decades now is Peter Block. In his book Community, Block writes, “Choosing to be accountable for the whole, creating a context of hospitality and collective possibility, acting to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center—these are some of the ways we begin to create a community of citizens.” Block, too, talks about citizenship:

A citizen is one who is willing to be accountable for and committed to the well-being of the whole. … a citizen is one who produces the future, someone who does not wait, beg, or dream for the future.

Instead of looking to leaders, bosses, teachers, politicians, or professors as either heroes or villains, we can take a deep breath and realize that we are all, like it or not, in this together. None of us have full control, but we can each work to make the kind of company, and/or community, that we want to be part of. If we do that work well, we create an ecosystem in which people will speak up, voice concerns caringly and constructively, participate in pushing for improvement, actively work to innovate, and come together when things go wrong. The sort of place where, rather than talking behind people’s backs, people calmly call meetings to have difficult conversations. Spots in which cynicism still starts up, but is relatively quickly nipped in the bud through effective self-management. The kind of place where, no matter who you ask for help, it’s always “their section.” 

For those of you who write job descriptions, please know that none of this is meant to suggest that particular people aren’t also fully responsible for particular things. To be effective, we need to know who’s doing what. AND, at the same time, we are also, all, 100%, responsible for the whole. Responsibility for the whole can be written right into the job description. It’s a prerequisite for having a healthy, inclusive, equity-based, organization in which people participate fully. When we step up and take full responsibility for what we’re a part of, we grow stronger both individually and collectively. I’m inspired by what historian Keisha Brown writes about civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s “bold message—that each of us has the responsibility to work toward the just and equal society we envision.”

All these years later, the idea of taking 100% responsibility is embedded, ever imperfectly, in dozens of places here in the ZCoB. It’s an explicit expectation that’s written into our Training Compact. It’s a critical part of Open Book management and of why most all our meetings are open. It’s supported by our work with staff ownership and Staff Partners. And it’s at the heart of Secret #22, in which I share my belief that everyone in the organization is responsible for leadership. Taking 100% responsibility is also essential to the work we do to teach effective self-management, in our recipes for Customer Service, and on how to have caring conversations. And, it’s written clearly into our Statement of Beliefs: 

We believe we’re each 100% responsible for the health of the ZCoB, of which we’re a part. 

All of this is a way to shift power away from the people at “the top” and put it where I believe it really belongs—in the cultural soil of the organization. Peter Block suggests that it invites us to invert old school, hierarchical models that most of us are used to. Instead, we enter a world where we begin to see that power is moving in very different ways from what we’re used to imagining. In this new model, where everyone takes full responsibility, we are at the same time also dependent on, and empowering of, each other. It’s an inspirationally inside-out world in which, as Block puts it:

- The audience creates the performance.
- The subordinate creates the boss.
- The citizen creates its leaders.
- The student creates the teacher and the learning.

Does everyone at Zingerman’s avail themselves of these empowering options? Of course not. All of us, me included, can slip back into cynicism, or start to watch passively from the sidelines as if we have no say. But there’s a big, big difference I’ve learned over the years between freely choosing not to participate and the more commonly encountered alternative where you aren’t allowed to.

How can we expect people to take responsibility for what they can’t control? Natural Law #13 reminds us that “Everything is out of control; all we have are varying degrees of influence.” This push to take 100% responsibility for our work, for our boss, for our peers, and for the performance of the whole organization, means that we need to accept this Natural Law and then move forward anyway. After all, as Peter Block says, “the willingness to accept responsibility and blame for all our acts is a central ingredient in an authentic existence.” Asking people who work in an organization to take 100% responsibility for the whole only works if people also have access to power. If people have no say in how things go, it’s hard to honestly ask them to take responsibility. 

How big of a scale can this concept of everyone taking 100% percent responsibility work at? I don’t know. I do know that all social change starts with people accepting responsibility for the group. The other day I saw a clip of Ukrainian young people organizing a rave party during which they started to rebuild a bombed-out building while DJs spun discs and blasted tunes.

What are the practical implications of this work? My belief is that it quietly helps us to create what writer Bankole Thompson, a regular at the Roadhouse, told me last month: “You've created an alternative reality here!” If we do it well, we can build the kind of balanced relationship and responsibility that I wrote about in Secret #29. The first two of the twelve tenets of anarchism reflect this. (Tenet 1. All for One—Bringing Out the Best in Each and Every Individual in the Organization. Tenet 2. One for All—Individual Responsibility for the Organization’s Success.) When we do it together, good things come from it. As adrienne maree brown reminds us, “It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.”

Peter Drucker was not an anarchist, and he saw the need for hierarchy in ways that might not be fully aligned with what I would advocate. And yet, half a century ago, he still saw that everyone in an organization taking responsibility was essential to the health of the organization and to everyone in it as individuals:

The task of building and leading organizations in which every man sees himself as a “manager” and accepts for himself the full burden of what is basically managerial responsibility: responsibility for his own job and work group, for his contribution to the performance and results of the entire organization, and for the social tasks of the work community.

Time to Stop in to
Try Some Tteokbokki?

This spicy Miss Kim classic can make your day

Since we opened the Deli in 1982, we have focused on making full-flavored, traditional food. Our work at Miss Kim is no exception. Thanks to managing partner Ji Hye Kim’s in-depth research work, we’re exploring a bunch of traditional, but little-known in the U.S., Korean recipes. Over the years, Ji Hye’s cooking has deservedly gotten more and more attention. In 2021, she was named one of Food & Wine’s best new chefs in America! She was also nominated for a James Beard Award. Her work with bibimbob was featured in Food & Wine this past June as well. This December will mark the restaurant’s eighth anniversary!

Throughout those eight full-flavored years, tteokbokki has been one of the best sellers on the Miss Kim menu. What was once barely known by folks who don’t have roots in Korea or Korean cooking and culture, has become one of the most talked about dishes in the ZCoB. If you already know tteokbokki well, we’ll let this enews be a bit of extra encouragement to come to Miss Kim and get a plateful. Here are some notes from Ji Hye about her culinary-historical explorations:

If you're familiar with Korean food beyond the most iconic dishes like bibimbob, or took a trip to Korea, the chances are that you've encountered tteokbokki. It is the most ubiquitous street food in Korea, after all, with street carts, outdoor vendors, and hole-in-the-wall places specializing in this spicy dish with chewy rice cakes (well, more like chewy rice noodles shaped like batons than cakes, actually). But this humble street food actually originates, not on the street, in high courts of Chosun, the last Korean kingdom before Korea is hastily pulled into modern times with the Japanese colonization, two World Wars, and the Korean War. Rather than stewed a long time in spicy sauce, the mid-19th century cookbook shieu-junsuh (시의전서) noted that theok (the aforementioned rice noodles/batons) are sauteed quickly first, then braised with an array of vegetables and mushrooms in soy sauce. It is only after the Korean War that the dish was simplified to what it is now, with not a whole lot of vegetables and with chili paste sauce.

We use gochujang paste made with rice instead of wheat—a cheaper and less traditional substitution for rice that became popular during the poor years following the Korean War. We take the paste and add garlic, scallions, sesame seed, sesame oil, and sugar to turn it into a versatile sauce. Initially, we made the sauce as a marinade for grilled pork shoulder and chicken, but the sauce was so good that now we use it for everything. It is also the sauce we use for tteokbokki!

If you like spice and you like rice cakes, this Street Style Tteokbokki is the dish for you. Tender rice batons cooked in a spicy sauce laced with small bits of tender pork belly. (Sometimes I describe them as rice “gnocchi.”) It’s a spicy, sweet, salty, fatty, crispy, chewy, and tender masterpiece that will pique your interest at first bite and leave you coming back for more time and time again. 

It turns out that tteokbokki was one of Ji Hye’s favorite foods growing up. No surprise—her childhood passion has now been converted into one of the signature dishes at her nationally-acclaimed restaurant. It’s warming, it’s wonderful. Come by and be comforted by one of Korea’s classic street foods.

Carolina Gold Rice Bowls from the Roadshow

A tasty new carryout item hits the ground running

This super-tasty and immediately popular new menu item at the Roadshow came, in part, out of our effort to spread the word about the historically fascinating, exceptionally flavorful, organic Carolina Gold rice we’ve been serving at the Roadhouse for nearly 19 years now. While the rice has long had its loyal fans, it remains still a bit of a secret. From the outside, to the casual eater, it looks like regularly available “white rice,” but the full flavor, and the enthralling story behind it, are amazing. This new Carolina Gold Rice Bowl puts the rice where I believe it belongs—front and center in a starring role! 

I’ve written a lot over the years about this rice—its history, its exceptional flavor, and more. This piece came out in Zingerman’s News in 2019: 

Rice is certainly one of the most prominent places in American history in which race played a particularly prominent part. While South Carolina was being converted into one of the world’s most prestigious rice-growing regions, it’s also true that the rice—and the knowledge of how to grow it—almost certainly came from Africa. As Judith Carney writes in The African Origins of Carolina Rice Culture, “only West African slaves knew the wet rice farming system.” While much of New England was colonized by Europeans seeking religious freedom, South Carolina was mostly about money. Rice growing became prominent only after other attempts to make large amounts of money failed. Slave traders selling into the South Carolina market spec’ed out men and women from the rice-growing regions of West Africa. English planters in South Carolina used that rice and that knowledge to build a booming export economy. Carolina Gold rice was shipped across the colonies and the royal courts in Europe. The enslaved people received NONE of the enormous economic benefits of the rice growing. When the enslaved were freed by the Emancipation Declaration, they were (grudgingly and very reluctantly) in most cases allowed to go on their way, but without ever being compensated for their work, let alone be given a share of the profits that the rice growing produced. 

Carolina Gold was completely out of production from 1920 until about 2000, when seeds were found in a seed bank in Arkansas. In the last 20 years, Carolina Gold rice has made a bit of a small-scale comeback. For those who love great food, culinary history, and complexity of flavor, this rice is back. And it’s delicious! 

Along with the bowlful of Carolina Gold rice, we add sliced avocado, pickled carrots from the Brinery, and the Roadhouse pulled pork—whole hog barbecue, smoked over oak for about 15 hours on the pit. We add on some of those pecans from the folks in San Saba, Texas, along with some lovely pickled zucchini from Madison, Wisconsin. Then the rice bowl is finished off with a bit of the Red Rage barbecue sauce. Oh yeah—I almost forgot to mention the tasty little arugula microgreens that we add at the end! 

The pickled zucchini comes to us from the folks at Quince & Apple, founded in 2009 by Matt and Clare Stoner Fehsenfeld to craft artisan pickles and preserves. It’s packed under their Forward Provisions label; a concept that came up a few years ago as a way to help local farmers make the most of the produce that they were having trouble selling in the early months of the pandemic. Their pickled zucchini is a fun addition to the rice bowl—bright green zucchini and yellow summer squash in a brine of cider vinegar, cane sugar, fresh ginger, garlic, coriander, cumin, mustard, and just a bit of chile. The Roadhouse is retailing the jars of Forward Provisions' Pickled Zucchini, too—you can add them to sandwiches, pizzas, cheese plates, or pretty much anything. 

Only two weeks in, the Carolina Gold Rice Bowl has already become one of the top sellers from the trailer. Swing by soon, snag a Carolina Gold Rice Bowl, and head out to Roadhouse Park for lunch or dinner. Order a glass of wine, beer, or a mocktail and enjoy the complexity of its flavor, reflect if you like on its history, and how, if we each decide to take 100% responsibility for the state of the community of which we’re a part, we might work to rebalance our ecosystem in the coming months and years.

Potato Dill Bread
from the Bakehouse

Super special midsummer Special Bake
coming up August 5 & 6

One of my long-time favorites from the Bakehouse is making a rare special appearance this coming weekend. I figured I’d give you the heads up so you can pick up a couple loaves for your house, same as I’ll be doing for ours. A sourdough base (made with organic wheat flour) that takes about 18 hours to rise is bucked up with broken-up pieces of roasted potatoes, then seasoned with a generous bit of fresh dill and scallions. The loaf has a great lively, full flavor. I like to eat it ripped right off the loaf on the way home from the Bakehouse. Of course, you can also slice it and use it for toast or sandwiches. It is great with the Mackerel Salad I shared last week, with the Creamery’s Cream Cheese or Goat Cream Cheese, or just a bit of good butter.

For many people, potato bread evokes images of comfort and familiarity, but a few hundred years ago, the idea of putting potatoes into bread was rather provocative. Back then, this was a cutting-edge culinary “innovation” advocated by a French pharmacist and agriculturalist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. In Europe in the 18th century, potatoes were not well accepted. Having come back from the Americas as part of the Columbian Exchange in the early 16th century, they were dismissed by scientists (who believed potatoes led to leprosy), the church (which argued potatoes provoked lust), and chefs (who thought they were bland). Parmentier became the potato’s biggest advocate in Europe. Potatoes, Parmentier preached, could help to cut costs (wheat was more expensive) and add flavor. Clearly, his work worked out—today potato breads are staples in the cooking of Ireland, France, Germany, and Scandinavia. And the Bakehouse! The anniversary of Parmentier’s birth (on August 17, 1737) makes this a particularly good month to celebrate his boldness in introducing this new approach to baking. 

Swing by the Bakehouse or the Deli this weekend and score a few loaves. They freeze well, so if you’re a fan you can put a few away to break out this fall for a football game. Reheat in a 350°F oven until they’re hot in the middle and the crust is crispy, and you’ll be very happy you did.

Making Salami and Scrambled Eggs at Home

A simple dish you can do up in about six minutes

When I was a kid, my mother would sometimes make salami and eggs for supper. It wasn’t my favorite, but like so many foods, it’s pretty clear that the problem wasn’t the concept—it was the quality of the ingredients with which it was made. Salami and eggs made with top-notch cured meat and really great local farm eggs is, I now know, pretty darned awesome.

There’s as much difference between well-made artisan salami and what’s generally available commercially as there is between artisan cheeses and factory versions. Mass market salami is made quickly, which means the meat does not ferment properly and the flavor will likely be flat and taste excessively of garlic (used in abundance to inexpensively cover the lack of flavor in the pork). There are a host of high-quality cured salamis at the Deli right now that would work well for this. Here are two that I’ve been into lately:

- Pork Queen Salami is one we get from the good folks at Red Table Meats in Minneapolis, Minnesota, made in the style of the old Crespone salami that’s traditional in the Brianza region of northern Italy—full-flavored pork from free running hogs, spiced with black pepper, a bit of garlic and white wine. 

- Iberico Bellota Chorizo comes from Western Spain. The Iberico breed, and the abundance of acorns the hogs eat before slaughter in late autumn make for some marvelously flavorful meat! Spiced before curing with high-quality Spanish paprika, it’s great with the eggs. The paprika will color the eggs in a lovely way as the dish cooks.

To prep the dish, start by scrambling the eggs—preferably flavorful ones from a local source—in a medium bowl. I like three per person. Cut the salami into small bite-sized pieces. To cook, add a bit of olive oil to a skillet, and when it’s hot, add the salami to the pan. Stir gently for a minute or two until the edges of the salami pieces get golden in color. Take them out with a slotted spoon and set aside. Add a bit more olive oil to the skillet if needed, and then add the eggs. As soon as they start to firm very slightly on the edges, use a rubber spatula to pull them away from the pan to allow raw egg to run under the now cooked edge. After you do that a couple times, add the cooked salami pieces to the eggs. Keep cooking and stirring, slowly, until the eggs are ready. Serve on warm plates with a good fresh grind of black pepper and sea salt to taste.

The salami and eggs make a terrific egg sandwich as well—slices of the Potato Dill bread would be delicious, as is one of those Brioche buns from the Bakehouse, toasted and buttered. Mustard, mayonnaise, and/or dill butter work really well. You can also add a little mustard if you like to the eggs when you scramble them before cooking. If you want to embellish the dish further, you can add fresh herbs, cheese, or top with toasted rye breadcrumbs.

Other Things on My Mind

Food

Aside from all the good stuff here, I wanted to mention that the new harvest Silver Needle white tea from China is in! Super lovely, elegant, and excellent. I wrote it up last year.

Reading

If we want to take 100% responsibility for the state of the planet, The Carbon Almanac, for which Seth Godin wrote a foreword, is a great place to start learning how we can help. 

Ola Hnatiuk’s Courage and Fear is a fascinating book about the diverse cultural history of the Ukrainian city of Lviv.

Listening

In the spirit of the recipe for the salami and eggs dish I shared, L.A. Salami is a British musician who grew up in London. His initials stand for Lookman Adekunle. I first stumbled upon his acoustic Burberry session. An early influence of his was Bob Dylan, and he has since created a style all his own. 

Speaking of England, Fenne Lily is making some feisty rocky singer-songwriter stuff from her base in Bristol. I’m hooked!