Blog posts

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Life with accountability

The theory of transactional analysis states that when two people speak to one another, there are actually six people involved in the conversation because each of us has three modes through which we converse, the Parent, the Child, and the Adult. The Parent judges, nurtures, and tells others what to do; the Child either plays to the needs of others or is rebellious; the Adult comes through when we speak to one another as equals.
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Wrong, Not Bad

I have said a lot about accountability in recent months – how to hold yourself and others accountable, the benefits of accountability, etc – but something I haven’t really discussed is the impact of personality on accountability. As mentioned in the past, accountability requires clear expectations, but people have different standards when it comes to a concept such as clarity. A ‘thinker’ will need measurable targets, specific instructions and a set workflow, but a more creative person will perform best when given wiggle room, space and time to understand a given task on a deeper level and the flexibility to approach it from different angles.
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Accountability vs Psychological Safety

In our discussions of accountability, I recently touched on entitlement and its impact on the workplace, but when managing someone else’s entitlement by holding them accountable, we need to be wary not to act entitled ourselves. An example of this is the response “Because I said so”, under no circumstance does that phrase ever improve a conversation. The reason for that is that entitlement destroys any sense of psychological safety.
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Identifying Entitlement

On the road to accountability, entitlement is often encountered, but rarely is it properly acknowledged and discussed. Entitlement is, in its simplest form, a sense of being inherently deserving of something – privileges, benefits, special treatment, higher status, etc – without necessarily having earned or worked for it.
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Accountability; What You Need to Know

It is one thing to hold someone accountable; a task or project can be handed to someone, they can be briefed, given a due date, and that’s that; but before we can hold others accountable, and before they can even hold themselves accountable, they must first take ownership.
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Responsible Autonomy

Accountability is a two-way street, when you hold someone accountable, they need to hold themselves accountable too. Recently, we discussed what it is to take ownership of a given task or project, more just about ticking boxes, taking ownership of a task is about responsible autonomy. Taking on autonomy is often more difficult than it may first seem, we don’t know what we don’t know – a given task might have steps we are unaware of or don’t know how to complete, or it may require a working knowledge of tools and workflows that we don’t have, or, far more commonly, we don’t know what the common pitfalls and issues are and where we will encounter them, kneecapping our ability to solve or avoid them.
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