Accountability In The Workplace Quotes

How power is used in organizations determines whether it unites us with trust or divides us with fear

Bias in the workplace is a form of tribalism – you’re either in or out

White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions. Regardless of whether a parent told you that everyone was equal, or the poster in the hall of your white suburban school proclaimed the value of diversity, or you have traveled abroad, or you have people of color in your workplace or family, the ubiquitous socializing power of white supremacy cannot be avoided. The messages circulate 24-7 and have little or nothing to do with intentions, awareness, or agreement. Entering the conversation with this understanding is freeing because it allows us to focus on how--rather than if--our racism is manifest. When we move beyond the good/bad binary, we can become eager to identify our racist patterns because interrupting those patterns becomes more important than managing how we think we look to others. I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don't have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary.

EQ is so critical to success that it accounts for 58 percent of performance in all types of jobs. It’s the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence.

It hadn’t happened in a moment, but a series of moments, as slow and insidious as the melting of the ice caps. Women had been ushered out of the workplace, so subtly that few noticed until it was too late. There had been no grand lowering of an iron curtain, with passports voided and bank accounts emptied. There had been a few men in sharp suits quoting scripture with silver tongues, but it was cursory, just enough to wrangle part of the Christian vote. Really, they were afraid of women. Or hated them. Wasn’t that much the same thing? The country saw those angry men as a fringe movement right up until one was elected president.

Work like a professional. Don’t sweat. Don’t complain.

In the workplace, Japanese women have low participation and low pay. Participation declines steeply with increasing level of responsibility. Whereas women account for 49% of Japanese university students and 45% of entry-level job holders, they account for only 14% of university faculty positions (versus 33%–44% in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, and France), 11% of middle-level to senior management positions, 2% of positions on boards of directors, 1% of business executive committee members, and less than 1% of CEOs. At those higher levels Japan lags behind all major industrial countries except (again) South Korea.

As you, my fans, know I’m scheduled to play in Greensboro, North Carolina this Sunday. As we also know, North Carolina has just passed HB2, which the media are referring to as the ‘bathroom’ law. HB2 — known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act — dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use. Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden. To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress. Right now, there are many groups, businesses, and individuals in North Carolina working to oppose and overcome these negative developments. Taking all of this into account, I feel that this is a time for me and the band to show solidarity for those freedom fighters. As a result, and with deepest apologies to our dedicated fans in Greensboro, we have canceled our show scheduled for Sunday, April 10th. Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them. It is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.

Overall, on average, happier people earn more money, get higher performance ratings, make better decisions, negotiate sweeter deals, and contribute more to their organizations. Happiness alone accounts for about 10 percent of the variation between employees and job performance.

There is a vast difference between being a Christian and being a disciple. The difference is commitment. Motivation and discipline will not ultimately occur through listening to sermons, sitting in a class, participating in a fellowship group, attending a study group in the workplace or being a member of a small group, but rather in the context of highly accountable, relationally transparent, truth-centered, small discipleship units. There are twin prerequisites for following Christ - cost and commitment, neither of which can occur in the anonymity of the masses. Disciples cannot be mass produced. We cannot drop people into a program and see disciples emerge at the end of the production line. It takes time to make disciples. It takes individual personal attention. Discipleship training is not about information transfer, from head to head, but imitation, life to life. You can ultimately learn and develop only by doing. The effectiveness of one's ministry is to be measured by how well it flourishes after one's departure. Discipling is an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip, and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ. This includes equipping the disciple to teach others as well. If there are no explicit, mutually agreed upon commitments, then the group leader is left without any basis to hold people accountable. Without a covenant, all leaders possess is their subjective understanding of what is entailed in the relationship. Every believer or inquirer must be given the opportunity to be invited into a relationship of intimate trust that provides the opportunity to explore and apply God's Word within a setting of relational motivation, and finally, make a sober commitment to a covenant of accountability. Reviewing the covenant is part of the initial invitation to the journey together. It is a sobering moment to examine whether one has the time, the energy and the commitment to do what is necessary to engage in a discipleship relationship. Invest in a relationship with two others for give or take a year. Then multiply. Each person invites two others for the next leg of the journey and does it all again. Same content, different relationships. The invitation to discipleship should be preceded by a period of prayerful discernment. It is vital to have a settled conviction that the Lord is drawing us to those to whom we are issuing this invitation. . If you are going to invest a year or more of your time with two others with the intent of multiplying, whom you invite is of paramount importance. You want to raise the question implicitly: Are you ready to consider serious change in any area of your life? From the outset you are raising the bar and calling a person to step up to it. Do not seek or allow an immediate response to the invitation to join a triad. You want the person to consider the time commitment in light of the larger configuration of life's responsibilities and to make the adjustments in schedule, if necessary, to make this relationship work. Intentionally growing people takes time. Do you want to measure your ministry by the number of sermons preached, worship services designed, homes visited, hospital calls made, counseling sessions held, or the number of self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus? When we get to the shore's edge and know that there is a boat there waiting to take us to the other side to be with Jesus, all that will truly matter is the names of family, friends and others who are self initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus because we made it the priority of our lives to walk with them toward maturity in Christ. There is no better eternal investment or legacy to leave behind.

In one tragicomic incident in October 2017, a Palestinian laborer posted to his private Facebook account a picture of himself in his workplace, alongside a bulldozer. Adjacent to the image he wrote “Good morning!” An automatic algorithm made a small error when transliterating the Arabic letters. Instead of ysabechhum (which means “good morning”), the algorithm identified the letters as ydbachhum (which means “kill them”). Suspecting that the man might be a terrorist intending to use a bulldozer to run people over, Israeli security forces swiftly arrested him. He was released after they realized that the algorithm made a mistake. But the offending Facebook post was nevertheless taken down. You can never be too careful. 29 What Palestinians are experiencing today in the West Bank might be just a primitive preview of what billions will eventually experience all over the planet.

Gradually it dawned on me how much people in America depended on their employers for all sorts of things that were unimaginable to me: medical care, health savings accounts, and pension contributions, to name the most obvious. The result was that employers ended up having far more power in the relationship than the employee. In America jeopardizing your relationship with your employer carried personal risks that extend far beyond the workplace, to a degree unthinkable where I came from.

The administration’s denial was also egregiously manifest in its response to the massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic, who three and a half years later still has not been brought to trial. The Fort Hood terrorist successfully infiltrated the American military and despite open expressions of hatred against the West was promoted to U.S. Army Major. The Obama administration’s Kafkaesque response to an obvious case of Islamist violence against the U.S. was to classify the terrorist attack as an incident of “workplace violence,” and thus to hide the fact that Hasan was a Muslim soldier in a war against the infidels of the West.

If collaboration is a headache for learning in the workplace, it’s hard to know where to start with schools. First, most schools don’t call it ‘sharing’ anyway – they call it ‘cheating’. Think about it for a moment: the kids who are now in school will be entering a workplace where internal and external collaboration is the work. We prepare them for this interconnected world, by insisting that almost everything they do, every piece of work they submit, is their own work, not the fruits of working with others, because every student has to have an individual, rigorously assessed, accountable grade – if they don’t, the entire examinations system collapses like a deck of cards.  Except it doesn’t.

Society, Burke believed, depends upon relations of affection and loyalty, and these can be built only from below, through face-to-face interaction. It is in the family, in local clubs and societies, in school, workplace, church, team, regiment and university that people learn to interact as free beings, taking responsibility for their actions and accounting to their neighbours. When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

these models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about which data to pay attention to—and which to leave out. Those choices are not just about logistics, profits, and efficiency. They are fundamentally moral. If we back away from them and treat mathematical models as a neutral and inevitable force, like the weather or the tides, we abdicate our responsibility. And the result, as we’ve seen, is WMDs that treat us like machine parts in the workplace, that blackball employees and feast on inequities. We must come together to police these WMDs, to tame and disarm them. My hope is that they’ll be remembered, like the deadly coal mines of a century ago, as relics of the early days of this new revolution, before we learned how to bring fairness and accountability to the age of data. Math deserves much better than WMDs, and democracy does too.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has provided a preliminary estimation that between 16,400 and 18,800 civilians were in the WTC complex as of 8:46 am on September 11. At most 2,152 individual died in the WTC complex who were not 1) fire or police first responders, 2) security or fire safety personnel of the WTC or individual companies, 3) volunteer civilians who ran to the WTC after the planes' impact to help others or, 4) on the two planes that crashed into the Twin Towers. Out of this total number of fatalities, we can account for the workplace location of 2,052 individuals, or 95.35 percent. Of this number, 1,942 or 94.64 percent either worked or were supposed to attend a meeting at or above the respective impact zones of the Twin Towers; only 110, or 5.36 percent of those who died, worked below the impact zone. While a given person's office location at the WTC does not definitively indicate where that individual died that morning or whether he or she could have evacuated, these data strongly suggest that the evacuation was a success for civilians below the impact zone.

An extensive biomedical literature has established that individuals are more likely to activate a stress response and are more at risk for a stress-sensitive disease if they (a) feel as if they have minimal control over stressors, (b) feel as if they have no predictive information about the duration and intensity of the stressor, (c) have few outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor, (d) interpret the stressor as evidence of circumstances worsening, and (e) lack social support-for the duress caused by the stressors. Psychosocial stressors are not evenly distributed across society. Just as the poor have a disproportionate share of physical stressors (hunger, manual labor, chronic sleep deprivation with a second job, the bad mattress that can't be replaced), they have a disproportionate share of psychosocial ones. Numbing assembly-line work and an occupational lifetime spent taking orders erode workers' sense of control. Unreliable cars that may not start in the morning and paychecks that may not last the month inflict unpredictability. Poverty rarely allows stress-relieving options such as health club memberships, costly but relaxing hobbies, or sabbaticals for rethinking one's priorities. And despite the heartwarming stereotype of the "poor but loving community," the working poor typically have less social support than the middle and upper classes, thanks to the extra jobs, the long commutes on public transit, and other burdens. Marmot has shown that regardless of SES, the less autonomy one has at work, the worse one's cardiovascular health. Furthermore, low control in the workplace accounts for about half the SES gradient in cardiovascular disease in his Whitehall population.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

I’d met Madison, as I’ve already mentioned, two months earlier, in Budapest. I’d been at a conference. She’d been there with some girlfriends. We’d got talking in the hotel bar. An anthropologist, she’d said; that’s … exotic. Not at all, I’d replied; I work for an incorporated business, in a basement. Yes, she said, but … But what? I asked. Dances, and masks, and feathers, she eventually responded: that’s the essence of your work, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’re writing a report on workplace etiquette, or how to motivate employees or whatever, you’re seeing it all through a lens of rituals, and rites, and stuff. It must make the everyday all primitive and strange—no? I saw what she was getting at; but she was wrong. For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday. In his key volume Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the twentieth century’s most brilliant ethnographer, describes pacing the streets, all draped with new electric cable, of Lahore’s Old Town sometime in the nineteen-fifties, trying to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity—of local colour, texture, custom, life in general—from nothing but leftovers and debris. He goes on to describe being struck by the same impression when he lived among the Amazonian Nambikwara tribe: the sense of having come “too late”—although he knows, from having read a previous account of life among the Nambikwara, that the anthropologist (that account’s author) who came here fifty years earlier, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, was struck by that impression also; and knows as well that the anthropologist who, inspired by the account that Lévi-Strauss will himself write of this trip, shall come back in fifty more will be struck by it too, and wish—if only!—that he could have been here fifty years ago (that is, now, or, rather, then) to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, saw, or failed to see. This leads him to identify a “double-bind” to which all anthropologists, and anthropology itself, are, by their very nature, prey: the “purity” they crave is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation and analysis, are lacking; once these are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject in the first place vanishes. I explained this to her; and she seemed, despite the fact that she was drunk, to understand what I was saying. Wow, she murmured; that’s kind of fucked. 2.8 When I arrived at Madison’s, we had sex. Afterwards,

SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.

A healthy work environment will be characterized by a number of factors. Including - Quality team members, effective communication skills and procedures set in place to facilitate regular communication, trusting relationships, common vision and goals among team members, standardized processes and procedures including standards to be met and on-going monitoring of performance, healthy methods for correction and conflict resolution, clear lines of responsibility, including accountability and rewards for results. the more these characteristics exist in an organization, the more likely the organization will meet its goals and the team members will enjoy their work.

While we agree with and support the need for workers being held accountable for their responsibilities, we also believe that collegiality in the workplace, helping one's team members, leads to more successful organizations. When our focus is on getting ahead personally or reaching one's goals, regardless of the impact on others, internal tension often sabotages growth. True leadership requires a willingness to serve others, either one's customers or one's collegue.

Similar to the adage that people do business with people they like and trust, employees go the extra mile for leaders they like and trust and feel liked and trusted by. Oxytocin goes both ways, reinforcing when the feeling is perceived mutually.

The adage “seeing is believing” in this case is actually backward. More accurately, we see what we already believe.

The best way to inspire an employee to be receptive is by being comfortable yourself.

The initial feelings of newness are not a sign that you shouldn’t embark on the change, but rather a sign that you are courageous enough to create change.

The most predictable way to get results is with consistent 100% effort, and the upcoming Results Model will virtually guarantee you will be able to get that effort.

The physical symptoms of being triggered are meant to fade as an angry mammoth retreats or a pressing deadline passes. Unfortunately, many humans have become accustomed to operating under low-grade stress (constant cortisol).

The problem with the brain’s automated association-response feature, specifically in the workplace, is that while we save ourselves from exhaustively re-figuring out how to do every task or re-evaluating how to respond to every person, automated loops kill our curiosity.

The purpose of feedback is to let an employee know what to improve and be inspired to do so.

There was thought put into creating the values, and so too should there be thought on how to practically demonstrate them.

To avoid this unnecessary and damaging aspect of traditional accountability, Inspiring Accountability is focused on results and is designed to incentivize, reward, and hold employees accountable for their effort and contribution toward results. After all, getting full and consistent effort from employees provides the best chance at getting consistent results, regardless of how many unforeseen outside circumstances continue to get in the way.

Use perceived capability as a tool to create possibility, not to ask the impossible.

We must experience enough good rewards to keep enduring disappointment of “failure.

We want to move from labeling our interactions as confrontations and instead have conversations.

What if the same human traits that are responsible for the lack of loyalty, engagement, and accountability in some employees are also an asset toward improving those factors to get results? What if the answers are not in fighting the problem but in using these challenges to inform solutions?

What once seemed like accountability-avoiding excuses become results-getting gold. Once you hear what your employee perceives as obstacles, you can help the employee clear them, avoid them, or proceed despite them.

What you don’t address, you approve.

What you haven’t been addressing, you’ve been allowing. Having company values written on an office wall that you don’t actively Revisit doesn’t activate accountability. We can only productively hold people accountable for contributing to a specific result with a previously asked and agreed upon expectation paired with active Revisiting.

When employees feel set up to succeed, they love working. Work becomes a major source of personal fulfillment and satisfaction. Generally, employees would prefer to engage in meaningful and proportionately challenging work rather than to sit at their desk and scroll on social media all day. Employees want to put their abilities to use when the impact is seen and celebrated. They want that bucket of berries they foraged for to be noticed and enjoyed by others. Otherwise, what is the purpose? They want to experience how good it feels to meet expectations and be seen as contributing, competent, and important. It’s how we’re wired.

When employees get what they need, your organization gets what it needs.

When people are in self-protection mode, the adrenaline-triggered state so commonly associated with traditional accountability, they will spend their energy defending themselves instead of discovering possibilities and rational solutions. They will fight to prove they are good enough, valued enough, and important enough. They will choose to protect their needs instead of making decisions that protect what’s best for your company and customers.

When we feel confident and optimistic that we can figure it out, exploring solutions can actually be one of the best ways for employees to feel engaged, contributing, and competent.

Whether or not you discover a more realistic meaning or fabricate your own, what matters is that changing the meaning of the behavior changes how you feel about it.

While meanings make sense of a moment, beliefs are generalized to make sense of related moments forever, and they are applied to every future moment with a similar context.

With Inspiring Accountability, effort is defined as the conscious and subconscious choice to apply an amount of capability through attention and action. Trying to hold someone accountable for not getting the result when they’ve put in 100% effort does not acknowledge effort contributed, discouraging the most important behavior you need from any employee. It also doesn’t acknowledge factors outside of the employee’s influence, creating resentment and disempowerment. This misguided approach is the ultimate engagement killer.

To be engaged, employees always need a way to win with you

Woodism - “We are all people of value, no matter our titles, roles, positions, or bank accounts. Value yourself more than any opportunity or asshole.

Many Palestinians are unaware of how the occupation has been privatized because it makes no difference if a state officer or private individual harasses or humiliates them. Neither entity is accountable to those over whom they rule. I saw this constantly when working and traveling across the West Bank beginning in 2005. Many checkpoints through which Palestinians are forced to travel to access their schools, workplaces, or Israel if they are fortunate enough to get one of the few work permits handed out by the Jewish state, use facial recognition technology and biometric details to document their every move.

NeuroDiversity is the next frontier in Diversity & Inclusion. If your D&I program doesn't take all NeuroDivergent people into account, it's already obsolete.

…Company culture values should reflect a clear, unified definition of the company’s standards.

…The leader sets the limit on an employee’s possibility ceiling, defined as the limit on what one believes is possible, especially in relation to an employee’s potential, abilities, and competence. For better or for worse, possibility ceilings generally become performance ceilings.

…heavy praise loses its value when disproportionate to the effort it took to achieve it.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” The creature brain must have been holding the pen when that old maxim was written.

A hesitancy on how to move forward creates hesitancy to move forward.

A lack accountability often indicates a lack of empowerment.

A leader’s competency is better revealed by the questions they ask than the solutions they offer.

Additionally, focusing on the past and what went wrong may seem like a necessary step to understand the problem and prevent it in the future. But similar to Albert Einstein’s suggestion that “You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created the problem,” teams and leaders that focus on problems are stuck in the same thinking that created the problem.

Although fear of not being competent can be temporarily motivating, it’s motivating for all the wrong reasons. We are likely being motivated by the negative neurochemicals, which actually deteriorate our resourcefulness, health, and well-being. Fear motivates employees to sabotage others, hold the company back to keep looking as competent as possible, or withhold information and opportunities.

An excuse only remains a barrier to results when left unspoken. Only when what’s in the way is brought to light can we ask what’s possible. From here, excuses become an essential part of navigating the solution. Once expressed, excuses become a tangible tool to incorporate into the solution, either through removing, reducing, or adapting to what’s in the way.

Approaching someone with dignity, gratitude, understanding, and, more specifically, soothing the triggered creature brain before delivering feedback isn’t parenting or babysitting. It is the most effective approach to getting the result you want. You’re not only fulfilling their needs, you’re also better fulfilling your business’ needs.

As we saw with the envelopes, the task might not change, but the meaning of the task can be highlighted. This is enough to convert a menial experience to a meaningful one. (260) Be it related to behaviors, changes, outcomes, or goals, success is inevitable when Revisiting is unavoidable.

As we saw with the envelopes, the task might not change, but the meaning of the task can be highlighted. This is enough to convert a menial experience to a meaningful one.

Be it related to behaviors, changes, outcomes, or goals, success is inevitable when Revisiting is unavoidable.

being stern or too serious will communicate this is more punitive than positive

Blaming, shaming, and guilting takes time away from creating solutions. Sometimes, employees will use getting stuck in guilt to prove how sorry they feel. Guiding your employees to care about the solution is a more productive way for them to show this concern.

Change the meaning you make, and it changes the experience you have.

Clarity in expectation becomes clarity in demonstration, allowing you to offer “You did it!” serotonin rewards, which become incentives to continue demonstrating the desired attitude, mindset, and behavior.

Consistent Active Effort offers the best predictability at getting consistent, sustainable results in all roles. Rewarding consistent effort is how to create incentive to continue that effort.

Consistent and quality engagement is our best bet for getting consistent and quality results from our team, strengthening proactive accountability.

Effort isn’t inherently stressful. How confident, clear, and optimistic we feel during the effort determines our experience.

Effort itself isn’t inherently stressful. Effort is our most effective means to contribute meaningfully. It’s not the effort or length of our task list that cues anxiousness. Anxiousness is sparked when we don’t have the clarity, confidence, or optimism to believe there’s a successful end to the task and a reward. When we don’t know how to win, we don’t enjoy playing.

Employees are accountable for “the how,” and leaders are accountable for empowering employees to discover it themselves.

Employees rarely exceed what they believe is possible for themselves to achieve, and what you believe is possible becomes their possibility ceiling.

Employees want to put their abilities to use when the impact is seen and celebrated.

Every “should” can be a question with “could

Everyone can’t be owners unless everyone’s influence and empowerment is equal.

Excuses sound like avoiding accountability, but they actually let you know what you need to account for to successfully get the result. Excuses are like helpful road signs. They tell you what’s ahead, so you can better choose how to get where you’re going.

If it doesn’t feel doable, it won’t get done.

Feedback is an investment in the importance of someone.

Focusing on problems keeps people stuck in problems. By focusing on what’s possible, though, you and your team can start seeing possibilities.

Fulfilling needs isn’t catering to neediness: it’s honoring what makes us human. It’s filling up employees’ fuel tanks so they can do their best work every day. When people feel truly supported and respected, amazing contributions soon follow.

Goals that are vague, half-remembered, or misconstrued provide negligible neurochemical incentive and reward.

How to demonstrate company values is not obvious by default. Often employees have a sense of “what we do,” but the “how we do it” remains subjective to each individual’s default patterns, interpretations, and preferences.

Humans welcome change when expecting it will lead to a positive outcome.

If a task is worth doing, it means there is valuable contribution context waiting to be communicated. What greater success is your employee contributing toward that makes it worth doing in the first place?

If the saying, “Energy goes where attention flows,” carries any truth, do you want your employees’ attention and energy stuck in the unchangeable past, exploring what didn’t work, or engaged, exploring what can be improved and done better? Which is likely to more productively improve results? Which option better inspires engagement and action?

If you care about results, you must also care about the people getting the results.

If you help employees expect success, you will help them be more successful. If you doubt their abilities, you’ll likely cause them to also doubt their abilities. Employees worried about being unsuccessful (a belief) will subconsciously scan for evidence of their own incompetency, leading to lower chances of success.

If your manager came in and said, “I need you to create a report. I don’t want you to include past sales, current sales, or estimated sales.” The likely next question would be, “What would you like me to include?

In a company culture where everyone needs to be seen as working hard versus working well, operating in Anxious Effort practically becomes a company value. When every task is coded as confrontational without enough clear completion points to celebrate and refuel, the stressful cortisol release never ends.

In short, confident workers access greater capability, producing more competent results that meet expectations more often.

In true “teach a person to fish” spirit, the best part about the Results Model is that the questions you’ll be asking your employees are the questions you’re teaching them to ask themselves.

Inspiring leaders…don’t rely on righteously imposing the virtue of accountability without making it as easy as possible for common problems to be avoided in the first place.

Inviting questions are very effective at getting an answer, but not as effective at engaging the brain to produce a meaningful answer. They also don’t create accountability.

It can create confusion, discouragement, and resentment to insist on cultivating a feeling of “ownership” when employees are rarely empowered enough to take initiative and make decisions without being overridden or undermined by higher ups.

It’s also fairly unrealistic to think any human’s default in the middle of a stressful encounter would be to pause, evaluate the company values that could be used in the situation, figure out what they mean, and then resume action. Employees need to know exactly how to demonstrate the value before the situation occurs that requires it.

Just like accountability, a lack of ownership often indicates a lack of empowerment.

Just like what you don’t address, you approve, what you don’t revisit, you approve.