For What It's Worth

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Responsibility

(10 minute read)

Key Takeaways:

• Responsibility starts within. Culture shifts when individuals choose ownership over excuses.
• Servant leadership gives organizations their soul. Influence rooted in service builds trust, credibility, and long-term impact.
• Accountability is proactive, not reactive. True leadership means holding yourself to a higher standard before holding others to one.
• Culture is built through daily choices. Small, consistent acts of courage and integrity shape teams more than grand declarations ever will.

“The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first.” –Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership

In Being a Game Changer 1 we explored what it means to become a true influencer—not in the social media sense, but as someone who meaningfully shapes culture through inner commitment and principled action. We argued that being committed to truth grounded in reality, rather than reduced to opinion or personal feeling, was important. Ultimately, we are free to embrace commitment and courageous truth-telling as a foundation for lasting influence in a fragmented world.

Principle #3: Being the Soul of an Organization

In his book Servant Leadership, Robert K. Greenleaf tells of a community meeting of twelve religious leaders and theologians and twelve psychiatrists and physicians. The chairperson opened with a question: “We are all healers, whether we are ministers or doctors. But what are we doing for our own healing?”

Healing is an interesting word, Greenleaf writes. It means “to make whole,” and that is a process that takes time. Organizations are made up of people, so they can only be as “whole” as their members. If we are each a work in progress, then our organizations are, too—and they are not yet whole either.

Outside of civic and non-profit organizations, it is rare to find business leaders committed to helping workers become whole. Leaders usually focus on the betterment of the organization, incentivizing workers to land the next contract, client, idea, sale, or widget. Those goals matter for survival. Yet studies show that when workers feel valued, appreciated, and seen as individuals, they are happier and more productive.¹

Robert K. Greenleaf’s concept turns the American system of doing business on its head. He argued that a great leader is a servant first—a far cry from the toxic masculinity on display in many organizations today.

Greenleaf was a 20th‑century American executive at AT&T. Over four decades there, he studied management, development, and education and witnessed the rise of a domineering leadership style. Convinced there had to be a better way, he left corporate America and founded the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, which continues his work more than three decades after his death.

Until recently, the stereotype of American leaders was the strong, silent type—the rugged, independent cowboy from western movies, ruthlessly decisive and celebrated as a risk-taker and captain of industry. Many openly embraced ideas like “greed is good” and “the one with the most toys in the end wins,” often at the expense of the very workers who built their empires.

Greenleaf was one of many who championed a better way to lead, beginning with becoming a servant–leader. Aristotle was another.

“He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.” – Aristotle, Politics, Book III

Another translation of Aristotle’s idea is that whoever is to be a good ruler must first have been ruled. A good leader has to know what it is like to be a good follower. That takes humility—something often missing from the toxic, hyper-masculine leadership we see today.

Toxic leadership is a management style driven by rigid, hyper‑masculine norms such as physical toughness, emotional suppression, and a need to dominate. Its climate is one of control, where emotions are dismissed, hyper‑competitiveness is rewarded, misogynistic behavior is tolerated, and diversity and inclusion are rejected.²

Leaders have enormous influence on the very environment they are charged with overseeing. We have seen what happens when toxic leadership takes hold of an organization.

In a healthy environment, all members are given the opportunity to realize their potential. A leader’s ethical role is to create and protect an environment that fosters that growth.

I think of this ethical role as being the “soul of an organization.”

When I taught public relations in higher education, we spent a great deal of time on ethics. For many reasons, the word “ethical” should regularly be attached to the discipline’s name—Ethical Public Relations.

To some, that may sound disingenuous. Plenty of public relations professionals are not trusted, and critics would argue that calling the field “ethical” is egregious or laughable. Hollywood portrayals, television storylines, and daily headlines about PR stunts only deepen the perception that the industry is crooked.

Public relations, in other words, has a PR problem.

The only real way to address that problem is for a new generation of professionals to enter the field and refuse to participate in the usual spin‑doctor routine. That requires education, character, and determination. I was doing what I could to prepare students for that work.

Accepting this role means being willing, at times, to offer gentle correction. When an organization acts contrary to its mission, the PR professional may have an opportunity to point it out and encourage change. How an organization is perceived by the public is part of the PR practitioner’s responsibility. Being the soul of an organization means occasionally reminding leaders that success is not measured only by profits and losses.

The good news is that we can begin right where we are. We may not feel like the most qualified, but a willingness to consider this role—and the imagination to keep learning—is a meaningful start.

Assessment

To become something, we first have to know what it is—and how close or far we are from it.

What is our purpose, mission, or role in the organization? What are we doing well, and where are we falling short? How can the organization help us become better contributors? In turn, what can we offer our company? Finally, how committed is the organization to its community, and what can we and our organization do to deepen that involvement?

Implementing

Being the soul of an organization sometimes means being willing to hold someone’s feet to the fire.

Many organizations have long‑established mission statements. Unfortunately, they often become wall art or a quick talking point in new‑employee training, then are rarely revisited. That is a missed opportunity, because the mission statement is often the one artifact meant to reflect everything the organization does. It can also be the evidence we gently point to when the organization has drifted off course.

Sometimes being the soul of an organization means reminding it of its purpose. We may need to act, gently, as its conscience. Objectivity matters here. If we are clear about our motivations and know we are advocating for what benefits everyone, we can be confident that we are speaking in good faith—and that we are on the right track. 

Becoming the soul of an organization may sound lofty, but it is not mystical. It is grounded in practical truth and everyday application. Each of us has a different role to play, and each contribution is uniquely our own.

We are all healers to some extent—and we are limited far more by our thinking than by our titles.

Principle #4: Accountability

“The more difficult the task, the more uncertain the outcome, the more costly talk will be and the farther we run from actual accountability.” – Ryan Holiday, Ego Is The Enemy

Accountability in a democratic society is foundational. Structures for ethical and effective governance ensure transparency, protect citizens’ rights, and support systemic compliance.

Holiday focuses on personal accountability—the responsibility we choose to carry. At its core, it means owning our actions, decisions, and the outcomes they produce, both intended and unintended.

Every day we are pulled in many directions. In Ego Is The Enemy, Holiday argues that today’s norm is more talk, less action. Many of us inhabit what can feel like an alternate universe of social media, where constant sharing is expected. For some it feels unreal; for many, it is simply everyday life. Tweet, post, snap, scroll—whatever you choose, the message is: let the world know what you’re doing.

Skip a post? No problem—online silence can feel deafening. There is even a name for the anxiety it can provoke: FOMO (fear of missing out). Forget to check your social platform of choice? Social media will gladly remind you, pinging your phone and calling you back.

(Standard text message and data rates may apply.)

While social media platforms are often criticized for shallow interaction, they deserve credit for their roles in social and political movements (see The Arab Spring). They allow governments, nonprofits, and public institutions to quickly share data, emergency alerts, and timely information, and to provide constituents direct channels to officials in real time.

Stoic thinkers such as Holiday remind us that one of the deepest forms of accountability is to ourselves. Many of us are taught to be accountable to people, institutions, and rules. But to ourselves? What might that look like in practice, and what does it genuinely mean?

There is a quiet strength in choosing to be accountable to our own ideals and values. Honest self-reflection—truly “knowing ourselves”—is a crucial first step. Who do you aspire to be? Picture the person you hope to become 25 years from now. How does that version of you live and act?

Can you imagine your ideal self—the person you are deliberately aiming to grow into? Being accountable to that future self is essential, and only you can define it. This is a personal, developmental project that often begins privately and unfolds over time.

Less talk, more action.

A few gentle prompts to support that work:

• Being accountable to yourself.
• Being accountable to the company you keep. You can’t be an agent of change if you are linked to anything that hinders your ideal–self. It is a compromise not worth taking.
• Being accountable to seeing change in yourself and others. Hold your own feet to the fire before holding others.
• Being committed to seeing change for our generation. It only takes one committed individual to say no more to poor practices and inspire others to do the same.

Responsibility, servant leadership, and accountability are not abstract ideals; they are everyday practices that shape an organization’s character. When we choose to own our impact instead of making excuses, to serve others instead of chasing status, and to hold ourselves accountable before pointing outward, we help create cultures in which trust and integrity can emerge and endure.

Being the “soul” of an organization is not about a title. It is about how consistently we show up for the people and purposes we say matter. When we lead from that place—even when it is uncomfortable—we become a steadying presence that can influence rooms, teams, and, over time, entire organizations.

The invitation is simple and demanding: start with yourself. Ask where you can take one more step toward responsibility, one more act of service, one more moment of honest accountability. This is how we move from talking about the culture we want to actually living it—one choice, one conversation, one courageous act at a time.

¹ See Bellet, Clement and De Neve, Jan-Emmanuel and Ward, George, Does Employee Happiness have an Impact on Productivity? (October 14, 2019). Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. See also Weir, K. (2024, June 18). Employees really value making a difference at work. American Psychological Association, June 18, 2024.

² See PJ Henry’s, What Exactly Is Toxic Masculinity?, Psychology Today, December 6, 2023, retrieved 6/20/2026.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published from 12/14-12/27, 2022 in a five part series called Becoming a Game Changer. It has been condensed and edited for continuity and clarity.