To accept a responsibility, task, or challenge; to employ someone.
To accept or agree to do a task, responsibility, or challenge that requires effort; or to hire someone for a job. For example, if you take on extra work, you agree to do it, and if a company takes on new staff, they employ them.
Type
Separable
Collocations
take on responsibility — accept a new duty
take on a new role — begin a new position
take on more work — agree to handle additional tasks
⚠️ Watch out
Don't confuse this with the competitive sense of 'take on', meaning to challenge or compete against someone (e.g. 'take on a rival team') — the surrounding words usually make the meaning clear.
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In January 1942, just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt {{convened|verb-various-tenses|medium}} his advisers and made an {{extraordinary|adjective|medium}} commitment: America would produce 60,000 aircraft, 45,000 tanks, and 20,000 anti-aircraft guns within the year — figures that most industrial experts privately considered impossible. The country's factories were still largely configured for peacetime production. Roosevelt {{nonetheless|connective|hard}} directed the full conversion of American industry, a challenge of {{staggering|adjective|hard}} logistical complexity. Henry Kaiser, a businessman with no shipbuilding experience, responded by applying assembly-line methods to ship construction at his Richmond, California yards. By 1943, his workforce was completing a Liberty cargo ship in an average of just 42 days — down from 355. The industrial output the United States achieved by 1944 {{exceeded|verb-various-tenses|easy}} the combined production of Germany, Japan, and Italy. {{So|connective|easy}}, Roosevelt and the ordinary workers behind him demonstrated what it truly means to {{take on|phrasal-verb|medium}} an {{enormous|adjective|easy}} responsibility: not simply agreeing to it in word, {{but|connective|easy}} committing the resources, the ingenuity, and the will to see it through.
To 'accept / handle' a responsibility, task or challenge means to agree to be in charge of something and manage it going forward. It implies a conscious decision to take ownership of work, duties or difficulties.
Type
Transitive verb phrase (verb + object)
Collocations
accept and handle responsibility — most common neutral pairing, used in professional and journalistic contexts
accept and handle a workload — refers to a volume of tasks, common in workplace discussions
accept and handle new clients — used in business and service-industry contexts
accept and handle a challenge — slightly more formal tone, suits opinion writing and LinkedIn
accept and handle the role — used when someone agrees to occupy a position with defined duties
⚠️ Watch out
Because 'accept' and 'handle' are two separate verbs, writers sometimes use only one of them, which can subtly shift the meaning — 'accept' alone emphasises agreement, while 'handle' alone emphasises management. In neutral writing, pairing them ('accept and handle') most closely mirrors the full meaning of the phrasal verb 'take on'. Avoid over-explaining the phrase; in natural neutral English it should appear without commentary.
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When the team leader resigned on short notice, nobody was sure what would happen to the department's ongoing projects. Most of the senior staff were already stretched, and the timeline for hiring a replacement was unclear.
Eventually, Marcus volunteered to accept and handle the coordination work on a temporary basis. He wasn't angling for a promotion — he simply didn't want months of solid work to fall apart because of a gap in leadership.
It wasn't easy. There were late nights, a few difficult conversations with clients, and one week where everything seemed to go sideways at once. But Marcus found that once he committed to accept and handle the role properly, the team rallied around him. By the time a permanent hire was made, the projects were back on track.
CAREER PIVOT AT 40: ONE WOMAN'S STORY
When Diane Summers left her position as a secondary school teacher after sixteen years, most people assumed she was heading toward an easier chapter. Instead, she enrolled in a business management course, rebuilt her CV from scratch, and spent eight months applying for roles in a sector she had never worked in before.
"Everyone kept asking me if I was sure," she says, sitting in the open-plan office of the Edinburgh-based consultancy where she now works as a client services coordinator. "And honestly, the question I kept asking myself was whether I was genuinely ready to accept and handle a completely different set of demands."
She was. Within her first year, Diane had built a portfolio of long-term clients and earned recognition from senior management for her calm approach during a particularly chaotic product rollout.
Her advice for anyone considering a similar move is straightforward: be honest about your capacity before you make any commitments. "There's a real difference between wanting a new challenge and being operationally ready to accept and handle one," she says. "I spent those eight months making sure I was actually the second thing, not just the first."
Diane's story is increasingly common among professionals in their late thirties and forties — people who are not running away from their careers, but deliberately redesigning them.
In professional contexts, 'assume' or 'undertake' means to formally accept or commit to a responsibility, task, or challenge, often implying deliberate agreement and accountability. These verbs are standard in corporate, legal, and business English when describing the acceptance of duties or obligations.
Type
Transitive verb
Collocations
assume responsibility — used when formally accepting accountability for a role or outcome
assume oversight — used when taking charge of a supervisory or monitoring function
undertake a project — used when committing to complete a defined body of work
undertake duties — used in contracts and job descriptions to describe accepted obligations
assume the role of — used when stepping into a named position or function
⚠️ Watch out
Avoid using 'assume' in contexts where it could be misread as meaning 'to suppose or presume', as this creates ambiguity in professional writing — always ensure context makes the meaning of acceptance clear. 'Undertake' is slightly more formal and task-focused than 'assume', so choose accordingly: 'undertake a project' is more natural than 'assume a project'.
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When the operations manager resigned unexpectedly, no one was sure who would step in. After a brief internal review, the leadership team asked Priya to assume the role on an interim basis. She had reservations — the workload was considerable — but she agreed, knowing the team needed stability. Within days, she had restructured the weekly schedules and rebuilt communication channels across departments. She also agreed to undertake a formal review of the supplier contracts that had been left unfinished. Colleagues quickly recognised her calm authority. By the end of the month, the interim label had quietly disappeared from her job title.
The boardroom on the fourteenth floor had seen its share of difficult conversations, but the meeting called for a Tuesday morning in late September felt different. Three senior managers sat around the table with printed copies of a restructuring proposal that had been in development for six weeks. At its centre was a question no one had wanted to ask aloud: who would assume leadership of the newly merged division?
The division brought together two previously separate teams — one focused on digital infrastructure, the other on client delivery — and the role required someone who understood both worlds fluently. After a thoughtful discussion, the committee agreed that Helena Marsh, currently Head of Digital Strategy, was the strongest candidate. She had the relationships, the technical literacy, and, crucially, the respect of both teams.
Helena was invited into the room shortly after midday. The proposal was placed in front of her. She read it carefully, asked three precise questions about budget authority and reporting lines, and then looked up.
'I'm willing to undertake this,' she said, 'provided we agree on a clear mandate from the outset.'
The committee exchanged brief glances. It was exactly the kind of measured, deliberate response they had hoped for. The restructuring, at last, had its leader.
In academic English, 'adopt / engage with' means to formally accept, assume, or commit to a responsibility, task, or intellectual challenge, often within a scholarly, institutional, or professional research context. The expression conveys deliberate and considered action, implying that the subject has consciously chosen to take responsibility for something demanding.
Type
Transitive verb phrase (two near-synonymous options: 'adopt' as a single transitive verb; 'engage with' as a prepositional verb phrase — both followed by a noun phrase object)
Collocations
adopt a responsibility — used when formally accepting an assigned or chosen duty
engage with a challenge — emphasises active intellectual or professional confrontation with difficulty
adopt a role — used in institutional or research contexts when assuming a defined function
engage with the demands of — signals deliberate commitment to complex or multifaceted requirements
adopt a framework / approach — extended use in academic writing when a methodology or stance is formally chosen
⚠️ Watch out
A common error is using 'engage with' without a clear object, which can make the sentence feel vague or incomplete in formal academic writing — always ensure the responsibility or task is explicitly named. Additionally, writers should avoid conflating 'engage with' (implying active commitment) with 'engage in' (implying participation in an activity), as the two constructions carry subtly different meanings in scholarly prose.
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Dr Osei had spent years focused exclusively on his own research, but when the faculty board asked him to lead the newly established ethics review panel, he knew it was time to engage with a challenge well beyond his previous experience. The role required not only subject expertise but considerable diplomatic skill. He chose to adopt the responsibility carefully, restructuring his weekly schedule and seeking mentorship from a senior colleague who had chaired similar bodies. Within a semester, the panel had reviewed fourteen proposals. His decision to engage with the institutional demands of the role, rather than defer them to others, earned him lasting professional respect across the university.
The question of who, within a research institution, should adopt the most demanding and politically sensitive responsibilities is rarely settled by formal policy alone. In practice, such decisions emerge from a complex interplay of personal disposition, collegial expectation, and structural incentive — factors that institutional research has only recently begun to examine with the rigour they deserve. A substantial body of work in organisational behaviour suggests that individuals who possess high levels of what Spreitzer (1995) termed psychological empowerment are more likely to adopt leadership responsibilities voluntarily, particularly in contexts where such roles carry uncertain rewards and significant time costs. Yet this finding, while theoretically compelling, obscures an important dimension of academic life: the persistent and unequal distribution of invisible labour. Studies consistently demonstrate that women and scholars from underrepresented groups are disproportionately called upon — and often feel disproportionately obliged — to engage with the administrative and pastoral responsibilities that sustain institutional functioning but rarely appear on promotion criteria. This structural inequity raises urgent questions not merely about individual career trajectories, but about the deeper values that research institutions enact through their everyday allocations of burden and recognition. Any serious attempt to reform academic workload culture must begin by examining honestly who is asked to engage with its least visible, most taxing demands, and why.