How sense of responsibility motivates in IT

We might feel that some kind of behaviors are OK, we accept them and want to practice. Why?

Responsibility is one of the biggest issues in adult life. People always say: when you grow up, you need to go work and be responsible. But nobody really says what it means and why it is so important. Sense of responsibility isn’t the same as responsibility itself. I think, the biggest difference is that sense of responsibility is our need and responsibility is what people demand from us. Sense of responsibility isn’t something we think about or establish. It is the result of our approach. We might feel that some kind of behaviors are OK, we accept them and want to practice. Why?

Responsibility itself, is social feeling that we have learned during our lives. When it is already implemented, it makes us feel right when we do something correct. But the clue to understand responsibility is to understand the concept of when we do ‘something correct’. We feel sense of responsibility only if we know that correct is ‘something’ important to us or our co-workers. So basically, there is an emotional connection between sense of responsibility and issues we decide to work on.

Emotions, feelings, sense of responsibility. How can we talk about these in conjunction with  work? To answer this question we need to ask another one: what motivates people in IT mostly? And the answer for both of these is… People of IT.

We work in specific organizations because of the people we work with. We decide to stay in some companies no matter of the salary, because we feel that we want to work with specific people. And the reason is almost every time the same: specific people believe in specific values, and they build the organization they work for in line with these values.

So we get to the point, when we know that the main reason we work in specific place is people. It means that we have a lot in common with them, not only in professional domain. We often have one goal – the project, but mostly we have the same hobby, sense of humor and interests. And if we understand that these people (we spend one third of our lives with them and we should like them) are important for us and we don’t want to let them down, we can define what the sense of responsibility really means at work.

People motivate us, improve our work and define our approach. We want to be a better gearwheel in machinery team, because we feel comfortable this approach, we feel it is appropriate.

To sum it up, we are the part of team with common goal. We don’t want to let anybody down, because we really care about colleagues. We feel sense of responsibility for our tasks and issues. We are motivated because our part is the part of common entirety. We are Agile.

And this is how sense of responsibility motivates. In SIENN.

Agata Sobek
Scrum Master/Agile Guide