Wedding Business Solutions

Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem!

• Alan Berg, CSP, FPSA, Global Speaking Fellow

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0:00 | 9:42

Are you truly taking ownership of every issue that comes your way? What would happen if everyone on your team treated problems as theirs to solve? In this episode, I explore why passing the buck hurts your business and how empowering your team to act on issues leads to better results, happier customers, and more satisfaction at work.

Listen to this new 8 minute episode for a push to embrace responsibility in your company and discover how that mindset can make your business stronger.

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com  

View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/


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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks. 

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site: 

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com 

Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem. Ooh, where did this come from? Listen to this episode. See where I'm going. Hey, it's Alan Berg. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I'm listening to the book Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, and this just came up as something that's on the walls, or at least at the time of the writing of that book was on the walls at Facebook. Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem. And it just really hits home for me because I've always been taught and I've always tried to live.

I shouldn't say always, but as often as I can remember, I'm trying to live that everything that happens on my watch is my responsibility, and it is my responsibility to get fixed. Now I can't fix everything, right? When I was VP of sales at The Knot, problems that bubbled up to me, I didn't cause them, but they were my responsibility. If they landed on my desk, my responsibility to get fixed. When I was publishing wedding magazines, it was the same thing. When I was managing a retail store, it's the same thing.

But even not as the boss, if it lands on your desk, it's your responsibility to see that it gets fixed. And again, you can't fix everything, right? If you're the manager of a wedding venue and there's a maintenance problem, it's not necessarily your responsibility to fix the maintenance problem, but it is your responsibility to find whose it is and to get that fixed.

I was today somewhere in a very, very large building. I go to the restroom and you know how sometimes the automatic paper towel dispensers spit out three inches of paper towel? Well, this one spit out about two and a half to three feet of paper towel every time you tore off a paper towel. I thought the person before me had just kept waving their hand and it kept spitting out more. No, it spit out that much. Then it had little red lights blinking on it.

I'm thinking, this is an incredible waste of paper. So I said something to someone, and the person said, “Hey, some of these don't work at all.” She tried the one that was closest to her and it worked fine. It was about a foot worth or whatever was enough to dry your hands on. I showed her the other one. She said, “Yeah, that's right.” She wasn't going to fix it, but she was going to go tell somebody.

She said, “I'm going to go tell the maintenance people about this.”

And that's the thing. You have to own that. It's called the Ritz-Carlton way, also. If you haven't heard stories about Ritz-Carlton hotels, anybody who gets asked anything has to see it through. As a matter of fact, theirs is even to the extreme where they can spend up to $2,000 without asking anybody to fix a guest's issue.

Have you ever been to a Trader Joe's and asked someone where something is? They don't point. They don't say, “No, it's over there.” They get up from cutting boxes and stocking shelves and walk you over to what it is. Everybody there does it. That's what it is. Everybody does that.

So it's the same thing here. Nothing is someone else's problem.

If you're constantly shirking responsibility, that says something about you as a person and as a leader because you're not taking responsibility. Maybe I'm on a soapbox right now, but I don't think you should take credit for your successes if you're not willing to accept the problems. If you're not willing to do that.

But I also say that if you're a manager, if you're a boss, if you're an owner, you can't give somebody responsibility without authority. If they have responsibility to get a certain result, you have to give them the authority to get to that result. You can't handcuff them by saying, “You're responsible for those results, but you can't make decisions.”

You're never going to stop putting out fires yourself, and that's your fault.

I remember when I was VP of sales, I said if I did my job well, hired the right people, trained them the right way, and gave them the tools they needed, it should always look like I'm doing nothing because I put the right people in the right places.

If I'm always putting out fires—occasional fires happen—but if you're always putting out fires, you have to sometimes look in the mirror and say, “Why am I always the fireman here?” Fires are going to come up, but why am I the one always putting these out?

Maybe it's because you didn't give the authority to the people below you to fix those problems, to nip them in the bud, to solve those issues.

You can listen to an episode I did. I also wrote a book chapter about this called “What Would You Pay to Make It Go Away?” talking about solving a customer's problem quickly to avoid a bad result. Yeah, it might cost you something now, but we know about the pain of the bad review. We know how long that lasts for you. So we can solve that.

But this quote—nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem.

Can you own that in your business? Can you own that in your life?

I half-jokingly say that everything that happens in my house, in my marriage, is my fault, even if I had nothing to do with it. And that's why I'm happily married, because I just say, “Okay, great. Let me fix it.”

That's it. We don't have problems. We only have solutions. It's the same thing I did at work. We don't have problems. We have solutions.

One of my sales reps would come to me and say, “I have a problem.”

I'd say, “No, you don't. But would you like to discuss your customer with me?”

They'd be confused at first, and they'd say yes.

I'd say, “Okay, let's talk about it.”

We'd talk about what happened, and then I would always ask, “What do you think we should do about it?”

They're like, “You want to know what I think?”

Yeah. It's your customer. I want to know what you think because you're closer to them, you understand them, and if you tell me this is what will make them happy, I'll question you about that.

“Are you sure that'll make them happy?”

And if it's something we can do, I say, “I want you to fix that.”

Because then they come to you, not to me.

You as an owner, manager, or director can't be everywhere. And if you've empowered your people, they'll also be happier at work because they feel like they have that authority along with that responsibility.

People don't mind responsibility. They don't mind authority either.

Once they own that and say, “Okay, I have the power to fix this,” things change.

I found very often my sales reps would give customers less than I was willing to give them because they were very close to them.

They'd say, “Okay, what if I do this?”

I'd say, “That's it? That's all it took to make them happy?”

“Yeah.”

Because we also know that most of the time what customers really want is to be heard. They want to be heard. I mean really, really be heard.

We all have that human nature. We just want to know that someone is actually listening.

So when you listen to someone's problem, when you repeat back, “Is this what happened? Is this what I heard? Did I get this right? Did I miss anything?” and then even say to the customer, “What do I need to do to make you happy?”

Very often they're asking for less than you're willing to do.

Sometimes it's pretty close to what you want, and occasionally it's way more, and then you have a whole different discussion.

So nothing at your company is someone else's problem. Nothing at my company is someone else's problem. We take responsibility for it.

I trust leaders more when they're willing to admit their failures because we are human and we make mistakes, and that's okay. I'm going to do a whole other episode about this.

But nothing at your company is someone else's problem. And that should be true from the lowest-paid person to the highest-paid person. If there's a problem, they should feel ownership.

I'm going to get this fixed, even if it just means telling somebody else who can get that done.

“Hey, if you didn't know, this is going on with the paper towel thing. We're wasting a lot of paper over there. I can't fix that, but can somebody do it?”

Most of the time they're going to be like, “Hey, thanks. We didn't know.”

So take that responsibility. You'll have much more success when you accept that responsibility and get it fixed. There's a satisfaction there as well.

And I'm going to have another episode coming up—maybe the next one—about failures and accepting them too.

So thanks for listening.

I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2026 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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