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.

If every black person quit his or her job because someone in the workplace was racist, not many of us would be employed.

A white participant is given the benefit of the doubt; a black woman in the workplace never is, regardless of the circumstances.

When Obligers have the external accountability they need to meet their inner expectations, they don’t experience any sense of limitation or self-frustration—and of course many environments, such as the workplace, tend to supply lots of accountability. When what others expect from Obligers is what they expect from themselves, they have the life they want.

Imagine if Wells Fargo had adopted an agile approach to strategy: the company's top management would then have taken repeated instances of missed targets or false accounts as useful data to help it assess the efficacy of the original cross-selling strategy. This learning would then have triggered much-needed strategic adaptation.

If you don’t improve by 25%, you get the sense you could be replaced. Your manager casually says, “I don’t care how you do it. Just do it.” While this might seem like empowerment (full range to do or try anything), it’s also not supportive for a big, new, and elusive goal. Your manager is removing any of his or her accountability and contribution to the result, leaving you solely accountable for a result that has many factors (and people) beyond your control. This flippant form of delegation makes the task feel more like a threat.

The irony is, in the midst of the pressure this creates for both companies and employees, employees also want a culture of accountability. Cultures with a poor accountability structure create a toxic work environment that under-values star performers, incorrectly rewards poor performers, and leaves leaders feeling confused and overwhelmed. In the end, the best employees leave for a culture with greater accountability so that they are no longer adopting the slack of employees who are not being held sufficiently accountable.

People don’t resist change; they resist being changed.” Humans welcome change when expecting it will lead to a positive outcome.

accountability anchors)

Some employees respond to this scenario by trying to prove themselves, going above and beyond in their contribution with incessant attempts at proving competence, hoping to expand their importance. Usually, this gets annoying to managers who understandably can’t match the effort with incessant gratitude. This stymies the employee because the manager’s response is not neurochemically satiating enough. When humans feel that our contributions don’t reflect our dignity, we can react by doing less as a subconscious defense against doing tasks that, if fulfilled, might validate mediocre contribution, competence, and importance. You’ll learn more about this concept of Self-Protection Effort Withholding in Chapter 12.

The analogy with the environment [crisis] is apt, because both forms of sustainability - human and environmental - have no market value, they cannot be bought and sold. Both fall into the category of what economists call the tragedy of the commons': in an unfettered market, they are subject to its depredations without any accounting for their true value. Just as the damage to the environment has become increasingly clear, so we will see in the coming decades a growing anxiety about the erosion of human sustainability as we witness an exponential rise in depression, stress and anxiety. It is the conditions of our working lives which are one of the main causes.

Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes. According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.

These stolen identities are often referred to as “fullz” by hackers and contain names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, workplaces, bank account numbers, bank routing numbers, state driver’s license numbers, mothers’ maiden names, e-mail addresses, and additional online account names and passwords.

The idea of stewardship in business is not mine originally. Peter Block writes about it in his book Stewardship. In it he explains how irrelevant the management actions of controlling, goal setting with the assumption that people can’t set their own, and shifting accountability to the leader for results are outdated and a disservice to employees. Block writes, “People who leave their minds at home and bring their bodies to work will destroy us.”5 This is the epitome of management that no longer serves in the best interest of the organization and its people. More than that, however, is it’s an insult to employees’ intelligence.

Caroline’s project faces extreme uncertainty: there had never been a volunteer campaign of this magnitude at HP before. How confident should she be that she knows the real reasons people aren’t volunteering? Most important, how much does she really know about how to change the behavior of hundreds of thousand people in more than 170 countries? Barlerin’s goal is to inspire her colleagues to make the world a better place. Looked at that way, her plan seems full of untested assumptions—and a lot of vision. In accordance with traditional management practices, Barlerin is spending time planning, getting buy-in from various departments and other managers, and preparing a road map of initiatives for the first eighteen months of her project. She also has a strong accountability framework with metrics for the impact her project should have on the company over the next four years. Like many entrepreneurs, she has a business plan that lays out her intentions nicely. Yet despite all that work, she is—so far—creating one-off wins and no closer to knowing if her vision will be able to scale. One assumption, for example, might be that the company’s long-standing values included a commitment to improving the community but that recent economic trouble had resulted in an increased companywide strategic focus on short-term profitability. Perhaps longtime employees would feel a desire to reaffirm their values of giving back to the community by volunteering. A second assumption could be that they would find it more satisfying and therefore more sustainable to use their actual workplace skills in a volunteer capacity, which would have a greater impact on behalf of the organizations to which they donated their time. Also lurking within Caroline’s plans are many practical assumptions about employees’ willingness to take the time to volunteer, their level of commitment and desire, and the way to best reach them with her message. The Lean Startup model offers a way to test these hypotheses rigorously, immediately, and thoroughly. Strategic planning takes months to complete; these experiments could begin immediately. By starting small, Caroline could prevent a tremendous amount of waste down the road without compromising her overall vision. Here’s what it might look like if Caroline were to treat her project as an experiment.

Rather, companies improve their quality by defining what the idea means in terms of specific operational measures, then routinely and frequently assessing those aspects of performance, sharing the outcomes with everyone (often in graphical form), and holding people accountable for improving the measures that are under their control. When

When I first joined PMA, I knew its culture—one that balanced caring, empathy, and service with performance—aligned well with my core values and beliefs. Trust is earned. Accountability is expected.

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 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?

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.

Leaders that focus on cultivating employees’ potential instead of pointing out their problems create a fulfilling and inspiring workplace experience. These are the leaders, in the workplace and in the world, that raise possibility ceilings.

Most values are stated too generally to be useful, and undefined values get undefined demonstration.

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.

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

Every “should” can be a question with “could

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

Neurochemical incentive and reward lies in employees experiencing the right amount of challenge that allows them to maintain confidence and optimism that they can successfully meet expectations and receive the corresponding neurochemical reward.

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

We create patterns and loops that act as operational software, executing the program instead of remaining curious. If we expect a positive result from our effort, we are eager to engage. If we expect a negative result from our effort, we are less inspired to engage.

We deal with problems, not people.

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.

You can want your employees to be better or expect them to perform at a certain level, but if you don’t genuinely believe in their potential to achieve results, it’s likely they know it. It’s unfortunately very easy to subconsciously, subtly, or overtly communicate and create an employee’s personal possibility ceiling.

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.

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.

Leaders have to give employees a way to win. Since it can’t be guaranteed they’ll get the result every time, it’s important to make the process of putting forth effort neurochemically rewarding enough to maintain the incentive to engage.

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

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.

Perceived capability is expressing genuine belief in another’s abilities in a way that raises their perception of what’s possible.

Quite differently, Inspiring Accountability empowers employees to improve by avoiding the blame and shame game. When an employee’s dignity is maintained, they are better able use the mistake as a growth opportunity.

The “feeling of responsibility” associated with guilt sounds positive, but employees don’t need to endure guilt to motivate improvement. In fact, guilt and its related companions become triggering impediments.

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

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.

We are inspired by those who see us as more capable or who help us believe we can be more than we are.

When you do it for them, you take accountability from them. Let them be accountable for the origination so they will be more accountable for their contributions.

With Inspiring Accountability, we similarly skip over spending time and energy on what not to do and move directly to the effort we can and will do to more productively get the result.

With regular Revisiting, meeting expectations moves from a hopeful invitation to an inevitable expectation when the brain realizes the best option is to adapt.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Most leaders “expect” employees to perform very well but may not genuinely believe that their employees can or will meet expectations.

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.

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

Negative feedback and experiences are damaging in the moment and longer lasting in our memories.

No one feels good about a laundry list of ways they need to improve.

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

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.

When we feel we gave our best effort and still didn’t get the result, being held accountable for what seems like impossible circumstances disregards the positive effort we put in and leaves us discouraged, disengaged, and demotivated.

When you practice Possibility Thinking, which is built into the upcoming Results Model, you’ll move quickly from “what’s in the way” to “what’s possible,” and you can retrain your brain to problem solve instead of panic. When you no longer need to rely on frustration or agitation to communicate the weight of a problem, you will inherently give permission and create safety for your employees to stop panicking and start problem-solving.

Without company values or leadership principles explicitly crafted and executed as clear accountability anchors, they remain to be seen as only ineffective invitations instead of Revisited expectations.

ou can imagine that it’s not likely for an employee to go above and beyond for a manager who doesn’t see much potential in them. Eventually, the employee gets exhausted trying to prove them wrong and lets the manager be right.

You’ve already learned an effective way to do what performance reviews have been failing to do for decades. Using the Results Model regularly will meet these exact objectives without the ineffectiveness of reviewing a year’s worth of work through a triggering experience that statistically (and neurochemically) decreases performance.

Your ability to initiate conversations instead of confrontations determines the engagement and accountability that follow.

Your goal as a leader should be to increase the experience of positive neurochemicals and decrease the experience of triggering negative ones.

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

Managers turn to using blame, shame, retribution, or guilt when they feel helpless about influencing results. The power of shame is used as a frustrated, last-ditch effort to make the employee feel the weight of their poor contribution in hopes the damage will be so unforgettable that it will never happen again.

Many leaders’ directives are too vaguely phrased for employees to achieve results efficiently and effectively.

…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.

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.

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.