Taking responsibility for your actions is something you get told to do as a kid. When you break something, yet lie to your mother's face even though she saw you do it, your young mind thinks you can get away with it by blaming the dog or a sibling. Take responsibility, don't lie, your mother will say. It's something many people forget about as they progress through their career, especially as a junior. Your under this impression that a mistake is something bad, something inconceivable as a professional. There's no room for failure, especially when you start and even more so the further you go, meaning you can never fail. That's at least how it feels when you start, that's how I felt when I first started. I needed to be this perfect developer, who always knew what he was doing, always had the answers, never introduced bugs into production. Well, I've done all that and I've still got a job and it doesn't make me any less of a professional software engineer. In fact the more you make these kinds of mistakes, the more you learn. I broke a production database in my first year on the job, I introduced a migration that wasn't properly tested and then pushed it to production like an idiot, to then have a client pull out his hair because the customers were ringing him up asking him “what the fuck is going on?”. I freaked out and for good reason, I broke production so bad that customers were unable to use the product. It took hours to fix and with the help of a more senior developer, we fixed it. I took responsibility in fixing it, owning up to my mistakes, learning and moving on.

There have been many other times when I've made mistakes but I’ve made it a habit to take responsibility for anything I produce. I could deny ever doing it, blame someone else, deny it's even a problem or blame the gods but more than likely someone will find out anyway. It's going to cause a lot more harm to your reputation when someone finds out that you're the dickhead who keeps breaking things and not fixing them like that kid in kindergarten who comes around and smashes your Lego right as your completing it, only to run away and deny it when you confront them or talk to a teacher. These are the people you hate to work with, the lone Ranger who goes off and rewrites a whole bunch of code then commits it and it breaks everything. The guy who then blames the previous developers for writing terrible code, for he was only fixing that of lesser developers. The same person who fights tooth and nail for a project direction, only to hightail it when it goes south. One sign of a great leader is someone who can take responsibility when they make a mistake. A leader that can stand there and say “I dropped the ball, I take responsibility” or “this project didn't meet the deadline because I couldn't lead the team effectively enough”. When the leader succeeds, the leader praises the team, when the team fails, the leader blames themselves. The team can only be as good as the sum of its parts but the leader is the multiplier on those parts. To become a truly inspiring leader you must take responsibility to become a great teammate. You have to take responsibility for everything you do.

Taking responsibility is the key to having a long and successful career, so start doing it.

I’m always learning something new and with Pluralsight I can have unlimited access to all things programming. But hold on, it’s not just programming. There’s photoshop, visual communication, manufacturing and design. There's a whole bunch! Sign up today and get a free 10-day trial!