Personal Accountability
For 8 years I served as a Human Resources Manager for a marquee video-game manufacturer. Every week, employees came to my office and told me with 100% certainty who in the organization wasn’t pulling his or her weight, wasn’t up to the job, wasn’t managing as he or she should have been.
Now an independent external trainer, I hear weekly from one or more participants that “my boss (my colleague, my staff member) is the one who needs to be learning this—not me!”
Recently, I was facilitating a leadership series for a corporate client, and the group was so focused on their frustration with the next level of management that we weren’t making progress in the session. Finally I said, “Look, your organization has made an investment in this learning for you. You have a choice. You can bemoan the fact that you’re frustrated with your managers and wish they were here learning with you, or you can focus on the only thing you actually have influence over: YOUR behaviors, YOUR actions, YOUR decisions. You can be open to engaging in this process, focus on learning something that will make you more effective, and actively look for what you can do to make your organization better—or you can continue to complain among yourselves about people who aren’t in this room. What is your decision?”
When we work in the same organization for many years, even the best of us develop mental models that explain which internal divisions, departments, levels of management, and individuals aren’t doing what they should be doing to support the company’s mission.
These “certainties” regarding whom is to blame for organizational shortfalls help us justify our own shortfalls in the results department. We complain about other departments and individuals within the safety of our own internal tribes, and in doing so, we let ourselves off the hook for any shortfall in collective results, for not trying new approaches to old problems—who can blame us when our colleagues are the insurmountable obstacles to success? When these beliefs are pervasive, it can be a significant organizational stumbling block.
“We will focus on what we can do.” Was the answer from the group in the story above. This came after a short stunned silence that followed my “tough love” speech.
Whether I’m offering a 4-day leadership series to middle managers in a high-tech firm, offering a 1-day teambuilding session for a manufacturing firm, or a 4-hour session on managing up for a non-profit, I feel my real contribution to these companies is shifting the participants to a place where they are willing to consider what they themselves can do differently to support their staff, contribute to the team, or strengthen the relationship with their managers.
When we shift people to a place of personal accountability, we accomplish something more powerful than simply sharing a new tool or teaching a new skill: We leave a group that will spend more time taking positive action back at work than pointing the finger away from themselves. And that—especially in these tough economic times--is worth the investment of your people’s time and your training budgets.
As you look at how you’ll spend your training dollars in 2009, don’t forget that personal accountability is the foundation of personal--and ultimately organizational--effectiveness.
