“How do we build a culture of accountability in our company?” That was a question one of my executive leadership coaching clients asked me recently. When I asked him what he meant by accountability, he had difficulty fully articulating what accountability meant to him. Finally, he said he wanted people to take ownership of their work and the results they produced. After we spent most of an hour exploring what was missing and what real accountability would look like, he made a bold statement. “The first thing I need to do to build more accountability is to stop talking about what we should do. I need to decide what I am going to do to be more accountable and promote accountability within my team.” It was as if a light came on for him. He realized that while we all want to foster accountability, we can’t. I can. He can. You can. Accountability happens when individuals take ownership, and that starts with individual leaders deciding to make it happen. Although my client had had a major breakthrough, he still had a big question to answer in the coming weeks, “How do I get started?”
It is one thing to do what we know is right, but doing so when those in authority are telling us not to (or ordering us not to) can be extraordinarily challenging. Add the element of repeatedly putting his life on the line, and it is easy to understand why Sgt. Dakota Meyer received the Medal of Honor last week. He is truly an exceptional human being, and his action on September 8, 2009 and his behavior since then have proven he is also an impressive leader.
In any given day, how many different people are we? When that nagging issue at work jars us from our sleep and we roll out of bed, many of us jump right into problem solver mode. I often spend the first few minutes of my morning contemplating the problems and opportunities of the day ahead. As I descend the stairs, I move quickly into dad mode – helping to get the kids ready for the day ahead. For a few minutes, I step into husband mode as my wife and I discuss the matters facing the Moran household. That’s three different people, and I haven’t even started work.
For the third time in a row, I am writing about the connection between leading and teaching. Maybe it is the time of year, with another school year ending. Whatever the cause, I continue to find great leadership lessons from the teachers in my children’s lives. This time the lesson came during a cross-country horseback riding clinic my daughter, Mary Kate, was participating in. To provide some context, Mary Kate rides a horse named Blackberry. Blackberry is mischievous and a bit nuts. He’s a wonderful horse, but if he were a was a high school boy he would probably spend a fair amount of time in detention. He has developed a reputation for his bad behavior. His owner refers to his antics as “B.B.B.B.ing” (i.e., Blackberry breaking bad big time). Around the barn, they call him Crackberry.
We all know that as leaders we have a responsibility to help those we lead develop and grow. More often than not, our lessons just happen. We may have no idea that we are teaching something until the new behavior manifests itself. Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing this in action at my son’s guitar recital. His instructor primarily teaches piano, so when she arrived at the venue to find a strategic piano key broken, she was quite upset. Her students range from the very young performing for the first time to high school students ready to study music at the university level. She was uncertain whether they would be able to have the recital.