7: Victim or Player?

If you work in a large company, sooner or later, you will be sent to a leadership program or some other ‘personal development’ program. The intent of the company is to ‘improve’ you, but the main achievement is likely to enable you to make some good friends and meet people who are doing jobs you had no clue existed.

There are exceptions. The best program I went to, a few years ago, was given by an Argentinian called Fred Kofman [1]. His main idea, which I give full credit to him and enlightened me, is that you can always take ownership of your choices, always, because the word Responsibility means that you have the ability to respond.

Is a simple, and deep, concept.

He gave this example of people arriving late at meetings (resonated well with me at the time) and blaming the traffic, or other people who held them back, or some other story they built that made them feel OK: you arrive late at a meeting because you did not plan well upfront. For a meeting with the Pope or the President of the United States it would be unlikely you would miss it, why? You would make sure you get there on time!

There is nothing wrong in arriving late to a meeting, as long as you take the ownership of your delay: then you are a player, not a victim. This is one of endless examples where we can decide whether we play the role of player or victim.

I have used the content of this training for many years in my career, self-taught myself the content and even given it to some of my direct reports. Everything that happens, happens because of you and even if you did not cause the issue, you can deal with it: the player, rather than blaming someone else (the market, colleagues, competitors, economy, etc…) takes ownership, the victim blames someone or something external to them.

I did not like the term ‘victim’, I felt it would not be the right word, and I have tried to find a synonym to it because ‘victim’ has a broader connotation, but I could not find a better word and the idea stands beautifully.

It means that in life you should not act as a victim but as a player so you should not look at events around you like a passive spectator, but rather make yourself the actor in the movie of life.?Being a victim is easier because it involves blaming others, being a player is hard because it involves accepting our pitfalls and often other people’s pitfalls and dealing with them, no ifs, no buts.

In business I have heard many reasons why things happened late, turned out differently or did not happen at all [2]. I have myself been a ‘victim’ of stocks not available, prices too high, supply disruption, inflation, deflation, market not growing as planned, market moving faster than planned, ‘economy not performing’ (eg reality was worse than we thought), market not responding to our actions (eg customers don’t like our stuff/promo/message), competitive setting (eg competitors are beating us with their offer, sales professionalism, drive,…), rarely ‘we did not think that x would happen or that it would take longer for activity x to come together, or we are not yet good enough at this’….

As Fred Kofman says, better be a player, influence what you can and feel empowered by it. When you look at our circumstances, there is more that we can influence than we think.

[1] For a full story about Victim/Player you can check this or other vidoes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXdN5kMioRQ

[2] For a good list of examples of victim v. player mentality, check also this one. https://spin.atomicobject.com/player-mindset/

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