​There has been some interest in the notion that fear is a notorious performance inhibitor, and I have had some interesting questions about how one can bring about improvements to the performance of underperforming managers without invoking fear.
Let’s look at some background. If you are noticing that a manager is underperforming, chances are this is because you have noticed that she is not delivering on a performance expectation that is perfectly clear in your mind – in other words, what she is delivering falls short of your expectations.
It has been my experience that managers have the greatest difficulty handling such issues with the managers who report to them. I think there may be some ego issues – it is difficult to acknowledge that you may have put the wrong person into the job. They may have difficulty defining what it is a manager should be doing in order to deliver on expectations. I think they may also have difficulty having these difficult conversations. They are stressful and they make you anxious. But consider this: will yelling and losing your temper change anything? No – in fact, it will probably make things worse. Will leaving well enough alone and hoping for the best work? No – and you will have the further impact of disillusioning the rest of the team with your failure to take action.
The ability to correct underperformance without using threat or fear depends on the following:

1. The performance expectation must be clear in your own mind. You need to be able to describe it in clear, specific, measurable or observable terms.
2. The performance expectation must be as clear in your team member’s mind as it is in yours. You must have articulated your expectations in a series of discussions with your team member, and your team member must be able to describe the following accurately:
   1. What must be done / what must be delivered?
   2. How it must be done?
   3. When, how often and by when it must be done?
   4. What must be done when it goes wrong?
   5. How is performance measured?
   6. What is the impact of falling short of expectations, and what will be expected if this happens?

If you have not heard these expectations from your team member’s own lips you do not know if she has the same picture of the expectations in her mind as you do in yours.

1. The performance expectation must be monitored regularly and the team member must be given regular feedback on her performance in comparison with the expectation.
   1. She needs to know where she is meeting expectations and where she is falling short.
   2. She needs to have the opportunity to think through and discuss the possible reasons why she is falling short.
   3. She needs to have the opportunity to think through and discuss what she needs/needs to do in order to bring performance back up to expectations.
   4. She needs to know what may happen if she continues to fall short of expectations.
   5. She needs to be encouraged to keep trying and be reminded that she has your support.
2. You need to be sure that you have done all that can reasonably be expected in order to enable her to reach the required levels of performance:
   1. Have you ensured that she has the necessary skill? Have you provided training/coaching in the event that there is a skills problem?
   2. Have you made sure that performance to the standard is recognised and acknowledged (or is it ignored or even punished in some way)?
   3. Have you ensured that there are no obstacles to performance – everything that is required to do the job is in place and works (equipment and technology works and is suitable for the job, the information required is available timeously, the necessary people and other resources are available to do the work, etc.)?
   4. Have you given regular feedback on progress – including noticing when progress is made and saying something when there is insufficient progress?

If you have done all of the above and are still not happy with the performance of your team member it is appropriate to have a conversation that clarifies that meeting the performance expectation is not negotiable.
There are some steps to follow:

1. Get your mind right – do not have this conversation if you are angry and uptight. Do your preparation.
2. Articulate the performance that is expected and describe how it continues to fall short.
3. Remind the team member of the things you have done in order to give her the best chance to succeed.
4. Ask if she thinks there is anything else you should be doing in order to enable her to succeed. Discuss this and agree if this is reasonable or not. If it is a reasonable request, agree to the action. If it is not a reasonable request, say so and give a reason.
5. Clearly state that meeting the required standard of performance is non-negotiable, and the deadline by which such performance must have been achieved. Also describe what you will have to do in the event that the team member continues to fall short of expectations. This may include taking disciplinary action. Indicate your reluctance to go this route and that you hope it will not be necessary.
6. Make yourself available in the event that the team member requires any further support from you.

In your dealings with the team member, make sure that you remain calm and that you never threaten. Advising someone of the consequences of continued underperformance is not a threat – and there should be no threat in your tone. It is a statement of fact – that no manager can be expected to tolerate prolonged underperformance from any team member. Be sure that you are prepared to follow through.
In all of this, it is so important to remember that we are dealing with people, and compassion is key. We are living in tough times, and people are struggling with all sorts of things that we know nothing about. Discussions relating to the possibility that someone may lose their job are not to be taken lightly. While it is never a good idea to allow underperformance to run too long, it is important that you can look yourself in the mirror and know that you have done everything you can, and more, to help this person perform as required.
A word to the wise – it is preferable to have the first of these conversations as early as possible. The longer underperformance is allowed to persist, the greater the difficulty in correcting it – after all, your silence and inaction implies that the performance is okay.

​Success in #20Plenty is going to be about far more than whether or not you meet your KPIs. Actually, that’s not really success – that’s just meeting the demands of your boss. Success is going to be about the commitments you made to yourself and kept. Here are some examples:

• Personal growth: did you do the work you said you would do in order to be more in control of your emotional reactions, or do you fly off the handle as badly as you did this time last year?
• Health: did you implement the exercise programme you chose in a disciplined way; did you stick to the eating lifestyle you committed to; did you kick that carb habit that was making you fat?
• Relationships: were you more gentle with your Mom? Or did you continue to be as impatient with her as you always are?
• Money: did you invest money every month, like you said you would? Did you manage to save for that holiday?
• Work: Did you become a better leader and coach for your team, or are you still telling everybody what to do?
• Career: what did you do to build your network in the wider organisation? What changes have you made on the advice of your mentor?
• Community: did you give back in the way you intended to any of the communities of which you are a member?
• Family: What did you do differently in order to make your family the priority that you say they are?

Most of us start the year with goals or intentions for the year – and many of them will fall under the headings above. But then life happens and we get busy and we live on autopilot and suddenly the year is over and oh, shucks!
If you are serious about achieving the goals you have set in these various areas of your life, I recommend that you “appoint” accountability partners. Don’t make one person your accountability partner for everything – rather use a few people and schedule regular get togethers with them where you account for the actions you have taken against each of your goals. Setting up your accountability partners involves a conversation in which you outline the following:

1. Describe the goal, why it is important to you and the actions you intend to take to achieve that goal. Also outline how you think you might get in your own way – your personal bad habits or weaknesses.
2. Ask them to be your accountability partner and clarify what the role means – that they need to hear you accounting to them regularly for your actions; that they need to get you to commit to new actions, if necessary, and that they need to give you honest feedback on how you might be creating your own problems. It is vital that you and your accountability partners agree to mutual freedom of expression within a relationship of mutual respect.
3. Agree on how often you will meet (can be fact-to-face; telephonically; or via Skype) and what that meeting will cover.

In terms of your work and career goals, I recommend nominating an accountability partner who regularly sees you in action and is in a position to give you frank and prompt feedback on how they see you showing up in comparison to the intentions you have shared with them.
Appointing accountability partners takes courage. You will have nowhere to hide! Isn’t that great?

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the fifth in series of 12 monthly articles, first published in SA Coaching News in which I share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team.
 
I think the most common coaching topic that comes up in my coaching practice is time management. It is a fairly broad topic, and comes up in a variety of ways that may not, on the face of it, seem as if they relate to time management. Consider the following examples:

• The team member who regularly works late because much of her work day is spent helping other people and taking care of their priorities – so her own deliverables are taken care of after hours. This person has a boundaries issue, but it becomes visible because of its impact on her working hours;
• The colleague who bounces around from unfinished task to unfinished task and has 10 windows open on his screen because he is distractible and has not developed the habit of task completion;
• The person who drops a high impact deliverable that she is working on to attend to a request from her boss’s boss – a request that makes absolutely no impact on her own KPIs, and which causes her to miss a critical deadline. This person lacks the assertiveness to clarify and manage the expectations of people in positions of power;
• The team member who spends all his time in meetings – some of which do not require his personal attendance – and then works late regularly and often misses important family and parental occasions resulting in immense guilt and a sense of loss around these key occasions. He has not clarified his key priorities, probably accepts meetings mindlessly and is also not using the resources available to him.

All of these issues can be dealt with using Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants approach to time management (see The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and First Things First). I am going to take you through my own version of this approach, the basis of which is the following:

1.  Consider what you have on your plate in terms of the following dimensions:
a.  Importance - there is only one thing that makes a task important: there is direct line of sight between the task and your goals. Not your boss’s goals, not your CEO’s goals, not your global head office’s goals. Your goals! And this includes your personal goals, like taking care of your health, being a good parent and a supportive spouse. This implies that you have tasks that are important (to you) and tasks that are not important (to you). Now before you get all anxious and stop reading, I am not about to suggest that you will not do those tasks. I am simply going to encourage you to think about them differently.
b.  Urgency – the more pressing the deadline for the task, the greater the urgency.

2.  Once you have decided where each task goes, you can decide how to tackle them.

The diagram below explains how to identify and deal with what is on your plate, and to allocate it to the correct quadrant.

1. Quadrant of Necessity – Important and Urgent

These are tasks which must happen today. There is direct line of sight between these tasks and your own goals. Some of these will be surprises in the form of crises or emergencies, but many of these will have been coming up, so you should be ready to take the necessary action. If you feel as if you are lurching from crisis to crisis, then you are probably not spending enough time in Quadrant 2.

2. Quadrant of Quality – Important but not Urgent
​
These are tasks that contribute to the quality of your work and life. Every single Quadrant 2 activity is focused on the future.  At work these activities include:

• the time spent developing new stuff and improving old stuff – innovation and continuous improvement should keep you out of crisis management, and if you are constantly in crisis management it is a strong indicator that you are not spending enough time on quadrant 2 work;
• the time spent preparing and preventing – this is about being organised, focused on quality and on top of things;
• time spent on strategy – this is the thinking and designing work that keeps you ahead of the game and ensures that you are not relentlessly bogged down in day-to-day operational busyness;
• time spent building relationships and developing people – you do these things in the present so that you can call on them in the future;
• time spent planning – daily for tomorrow; weekly for the coming week; monthly to make sure preparation time is blocked out in your calendar.

​Outside of work, quadrant 2 tasks relate to key personal goals, events and concerns – some of which have to be attended to during working hours. Attending the gala in which your daughter is swimming qualifies; as does going to the gynae with your spouse for a pregnancy scan. Taking care of your health through regular exercise and physical exams also qualifies.

Because there is no pressing deadline on your Quadrant 2 activities, they often get bumped aside in favour of tasks with greater urgency – Quadrant 3 is the biggest culprit (see below). For this reason, it is important that you book out chunks of time in your calendar to take care of your Quadrant 2 activities. Consider these “appointments” as a matter of integrity. You wouldn’t dump an appointment with a client for weak reasons, would you? You wouldn’t do the same to a person of influence in your working world, would you? So why would you do it to your team members, your family and yourself? A commitment is a commitment. If you have blocked off time and you absolutely have to do something else during that time, then reschedule – and honour that appointment.

The first part of the day should be spent in Quadrants 1 and 2 – this is when your energy is at its best and should be used on work that serves your objectives. Having good boundaries is critical to ensuring that your most valuable part of the day isn’t gobbled up by other people’s priorities. This includes good personal boundaries – like developing the habit of task completion. You do your best work when you get into a state of flow (google it). It takes about 20 minutes to get into a state of flow – and every time you shift your focus to another task you add another 20 minutes to the task, and take away from the quality of the work.

​3. Quadrant of Deception

These are tasks that make no contribution to your goals, but they shout so loudly that you are deceived into treating them as important. It is your Quadrant 3 activities that erode the time that should be spent in Quadrant Two. It is important to defend yourself from them. These activities include:

• Many of your emails;
• Interruptions to address someone else’s concerns;
• Requests from people who outrank you (your boss’s boss or the global head office) – especially last minute requests or demands;
• Many of the meetings to which you are invited;
• Many of the reports that you compile.

There are 3 main tactics for dealing with activities in Quadrant 3:

• Delegate: are there meetings that you do not have to attend yourself? Can you ask a team member to deputise as part of their own development or because they are as capable as you of representing the team? “I won’t be attending that meeting myself. I am sending Douglas. He has the authority to engage on this subject and contribute to the decisions you will make.”

         Do you have to perform Quadrant 3 tasks yourself, or can you ask a colleague to take care of them – in which              case, say “I will be passing this on to Nqobile to do. You can follow up with her. Let me know if you have any                  problems.”

• Relegate: this means that you move these tasks to a later part of the day or you give them a lower standard of attention. For example, it is appropriate to look through your emails at the beginning of the day – not to clear them, but to establish if there is anything that must go into Quadrant 1. All the other emails can be relegated to later parts of the day. Perhaps you can attend to some emails every couple of hours – in between your more important work. And please switch off your email alerts! You don’t need them. There is no danger that you will not get to your emails – but if you have an alert popping up on your screen, and a vibration on your wrist and a ping from your cell phone, all you are doing is raising your blood pressure and exacerbating your ADD! Also please remember that the vast majority of your emails can be dealt with via a quick one-liner – most often it really is not necessary to write an email as a formal business letter!
• Negotiate: this is about managing other people’s expectations. When you receive a request (or demand) from a person who outranks you, it is completely appropriate to say “Sure I can do that for you. Can I get it to you by Friday?” You do not have to explain why. And when you get that 4.00pm email for the piece of work that is required back by 9.00am the next day, it is fine to say “Got your email. I can get that work to you, but it won’t be by 9.00am. It will be with you by the end of the day.” Again, no reason is required.

It is not mannerly or collegial to assume that someone has nothing better to do with their evening than sort out someone else’s bad planning. And if the person making the request really needs the work urgently, they can come back to you and politely ask you to pull a rabbit out of the hat. You will also have made the point that it should not be taken for granted that you can attend to last minute requests.

The same is true of interruptions. If you are busy with an Important task, it is fine to say to your colleague “I need to finish this (you don’t have to say what it is). Can we talk at 2.00?” And then be sure to be available when you said you would be.
​
Remember that the standard required for activities that make no contribution to your goals is good enough. Do not over-engineer these tasks. They do not deserve or require a higher standard. Accurate is important, but perfect is not.

4. Quadrant of Waste

These are typical time wasters. Some have to be done, like filing (does anyone still keep files of papers?). Many of them make no contribution of any kind. If you really need a break, go for a walk – with a colleague, even. That is real restoration (combined with relationship-building) – playing Candy Crush is not. Eliminate these tasks if you can. Don’t allow them to pile up if you can’t.
 
Using the Four Quadrants in Coaching

1. Explain the model. While doing so, ask your team member for examples of tasks and activities that fit into each quadrant – this will make it real for them. Also ask them which of the traps they typically fall into. Use a whiteboard or draw on a piece of paper – make the explanation as interactive as you can.
2. Once you have explained the model, ask what small changes will make the biggest difference to their ability to use the time available more effectively.
3. Now get a commitment to specific actions – you can follow up on these in the next session. And don’t fall for the “I didn’t have time” excuse!

To quote Scott from her website:

Obnoxious Aggression™ is what happens when you challenge but don’t care. It’s praise that doesn’t feel sincere or criticism that isn’t delivered kindly.
Ruinous Empathy™ is what happens when you care but don’t challenge. It’s praise that isn’t specific enough to help the person understand what was good or criticism that is sugarcoated and unclear.
Manipulative Insincerity™ is what happens when you neither care nor challenge. It’s praise that is non-specific and insincere or criticism that is neither clear nor kind.
 
Radical Candour is the quality of feedback that happens when you skilfully challenge directly within the context of a relationship in which your personal care is clearly apparent. It is not enough for you to know that you care. It is important for your team member or colleague to also know that you care.

Radical candour is the quadrant within with the Coaching Manager belongs. Coaching Managers I have worked with have had some or all of the following good intentions in adopting coaching as their style:

• To be a good manager
• To take a good team and make it really great
• To enable team members to achieve their potential
• To help average and weak performers to improve
• To get people to think for themselves
• To foster innovation in the team
• To build relationships
• To develop people in support of their career aspirations

We really can’t engage well on any of these topics if there isn’t a relationship characterised by care and complete honesty between you and your team members.

One of the most important leadership lessons that I have learned in my years of working with managers is that if you want your team members to be able to take honest feedback and guidance, you yourself need to be able to take it. A second aspect of this is that you also need to be able to take it publicly. Good managers hold themselves to the injunction to praise publicly and criticise privately – well you don’t have that luxury.

This is actually something of a blessing in that it presents you with the opportunity to model or demonstrate healthy responses to criticism. When your team sees you take criticism in an open and non-defensive manner, you become better able to expect that they will take criticism or constructive feedback in a non-defensive way. If you genuinely want to elevate the levels of honesty between yourself and your team, you need to put yourself directly in line for feedback.
Also from the wonderful Kim Scott book, Radical Candor, comes this fabulous question that invites feedback on your own impact on your team: What can I do or stop doing that will make it easier to work with me?

What a wonderful question! But how you respond is everything. On no account should you defend, justify, explain or retaliate. If you do that, you will never get useful feedback again. Appropriate responses include:

• Thank you for that. It must have taken courage to go first.
• Tell me more so that I understand you better.
• That’s really useful! I didn’t realise I was doing that!
• I will definitely give that a try. Thank you.
• You’ve given me something to think about. Can I go away and think about this and then we can pick it up again next time? (And make sure that you do!)

Some of the feedback will be easy to take. Some of it will be more difficult. When the feedback is difficult, make sure to press your internal Pause Button. Breathe. Smile. Say thank you.

When the feedback is difficult and you feel defensive, take time to think about it. Chat with a colleague who you trust to be honest with you. Ask for their input on what they have observed in your behaviour. Ask their advice on how you might respond. Prepare your response. Test your response with your trusted colleague. When you are happy that your response will come across as thoughtful and mature, go back to the team. Tell the team what you intend doing with the feedback and how they can support you in your efforts.

Demonstrating your ability to take feedback or criticism well publicly sets the foundation for you to be able to give feedback privately to your team members, and use that feedback to support their growth. You have shown how it is done; you have demonstrated that you and your team are taking a journey together; you have demonstrated humility as well as courage; you have earned a special kind of respect; and you have demonstrated a respectful response.

In the next article, I will talk about having an evaluative discussion with team members that will be the basis for a coaching journey you could take with them.

In the meantime, I highly recommend that you read Radical Candor by Kim Scott (ISBN 978150984538590100) available in print, e-book and audiobook. Share it with your team! Use it as the basis for some really authentic conversations.
 
About the Author:
 
Belinda Davies is a business coach with special interests in strategy and leadership. She has been a coach since 2002, having been in the business of people development since 1986. She is a credentialed COMENSA Master Practitioner.

Contact details:
Email     [email protected]
Mobile  0825519504
Website: www.leadershipsolutions.co.za

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. In this monthly series of 12 articles, I will share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team.

You Can’t Fix What you Can’t See

“Everything was going so well. I was coaching at every opportunity. My team seemed to be on board and enjoying this new way of working. Work was progressing well, and then the system broke and there was panic all around us. The board was on my boss’s back, my boss was on my back, month-end was looming, the team was like rabbits looking into headlights and I just lost it. I’m not proud of myself, but I went right back to being the manager I had always been.”

This has happened to every manager who every tried to develop a new way of leading. After all, your natural style (like your personality) is a product of both nature and nurture – on the one hand, your personality has a significant impact on your natural way of managing (nature), while your experiences of being managed will also have impacted on your style (nurture). In many ways, the easier influences to manage are those related to your experience – you can evaluate how you have been managed in the past and choose to adopt or reject various practices based on your values and what you have learned about what brings out the best in people. It is those practices and behaviours that you default to when you are at your worst that will trip you up.

There are multiple challenges with default behaviours that sit within your personality. Firstly, they are often unconscious, and you only realise you have done them after the fact – when you go “Oh crap, I did it again!” The second issue is that they tend to be defensive behaviours – that is, they are unconsciously intended to protect you in some way (and they may well have been very effective in the past). If they are intended to protect you, it implies that you are experiencing something that you regard as a threat – to your survival, reputation or status Thirdly, the nature of the threat you experience will vary according to your personality – and so will the resulting behaviour.

Personality, however, is not an excuse. As a leader, you do not have the liberty to dismiss your bad behaviour as “that’s just how I am”. You have a responsibility to constantly be working towards self-mastery, and self-mastery cannot come without growing your self-awareness, so how do you do this?

Personality Profiles and Emotional Intelligence Assessments

I love the enneagram – but that is only because I have used it for years and I speak it fluently (although my knowledge and understanding of it grows every day). And there are also other great personality profiles such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Strength Deployment Inventory, DISC, INSIGHT, and many others. In addition, the Emotional and Social Competencies Index and other emotional intelligence indices will also give useful insight. All of these provide great insights into how you are likely to behave under pressure – but the more useful information is WHY. Why do you behave in that way? What is your fear – since all defensive behaviour is, by definition, fear-based. When you understand what you fear, and why you fear this, then you become better able to modify your responses in terms of thoughts, emotions and actions.

So your starting point is to understand what exactly sets you off, and also to understand that your reactions are not necessarily how anybody else would react. They are based only on how you see the world – and other people see the world differently. It is only when you change the way that you see the world (and make meaning of the pressure you are experiencing and what it means) that you can start to change your responses at a deeper level. Techniques do not work when you are under pressure because they require you to think – and when you are under pressure you can’t think clearly.
​
Reflection

In my coaching I have found myself working with a lot of executives who struggle with anxiety that is severely impacting on their quality of life. One of the tools that comes out of the Cognitive Behavioural school of psychology is this reflection worksheet (with credit to psychpoint.com), which is every bit as useful when your anxiety is episodic rather than pervasive.

Reflection is a critical aspect of how we learn. When you have behaved badly under pressure it is because you are feeling anxious – and your reasons for feeling anxious are not the same as everyone else’s. It is really useful to work through the worksheet in order to understand what negative and unhelpful beliefs are fuelling your anxiety, and replace them with more balanced thoughts that will enable you to respond in a more constructive way. If you do this every time you trip up, over time you will change your habitual thoughts about a variety of situations and become better as responding in a balanced way to strain and pressure are work, resulting in being better able to continually grow as a manager whose default style is coaching.

References:
​https://www.psychpoint.com/mental-health/worksheets/cbt-for-anxiety/

Decision-making: not everyone is good at it, but the buck ultimately stops with the leader who is the final decision-maker.  This article looks at how to deal with the challenges of making tough decisions, and what leaders can do to create a environment where effective decisions can be made, fast. 
 
I can’t tell you how often I hear people complain that managers around here just don’t make decisions! Usually that is because of one of 3 things: (i) the scope of authority is unclear and it is unclear who should make the decision in the first place; (ii) there is fear that if the “wrong” decision is made, there will be negative or punitive repercussions; (iii) managers don’t have a process that they follow in making a decision, so they have little confidence in themselves. As a result, decisions are not made and this blocks up the works. The resulting frustration causes people to disengage – after all, what’s the point of attempting to be engaged when one gets stymied at every turn. Don’t underestimate the resentment that builds towards the “leader” who doesn’t make decisions. If you have difficulty making decisions (for whatever reason), you will lose the respect of your team. Don’t be surprised if they make jokes at your expense behind your back.  Don’t be surprised if they do the big eye roll as you leave the room having promised to look into something.

The same applies to your meetings. The purpose of meetings is to make decisions! How many meetings do you attend where items are carried over from meeting to meeting? What are your views about such meetings? My guess is that you drag yourself to these meetings, fully expecting that your time is about to be wasted. What about those meetings where people talk and talk, but no decisions are made. Do you look forward to these meetings with anticipation? My guess is not so much. We all enjoy meetings where the debate is vigorous, clear decisions are taken and action is reported on at the next meeting.

If you are unclear on the limits of your authority, have a meeting with your manager and get clarity. Use the table below and agree on the level at which you will deal with each of your responsibilities. If you are being asked to function at Level 4 or below, also reach agreement on the process by which you will progress to higher levels of authority (as your manager’s trust in you grows).

Use an effective decision-making process. I like GROW, which you can learn more about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GROW_model. Alternatively, you could learn more from here: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_00.htm
What is your greatest decision-making challenge? Is it your limits of authority? Are you afraid of the consequences of imperfect decisions? Do you lack a trusted process that you follow in order to arrive at solid decisions? Draw up a plan for yourself that will improve your own decision-making confidence and ability.
 
Catch up on previous articles by following this link, and please send me your feedback on how they are changing or improving your leadership capacity and approach.

Accountability is an over-used and misunderstood concept.  People in leadership positions often bemoan the lack of accountability within their teams, so it is appropriate to examine what accountability really means in relation to responsibility.

A leader is a dealer in accountability. They model what it means to be accountable. Remember, one is responsible for, and we account to. A great leader accounts to his team for progress on commitments he has made to them. He accounts to his upline and shareholders for progress in rolling out the strategy and the impact of that strategy. He understands that every problem that stands in the way of achieving targets and objectives is his problem – he owns it and he must find solutions. He tackles problems and finds solutions rather than just accepting that it is there and working around them. I am amazed at how often I work with clients who have just learned to live with problems that are actually solvable. When I coach them through the possibility that the problem can be solved and situation changed, they realise that they had simply been living with the problem. If something in the environment is working against the team’s efforts, the leader accepts that he is accountable for finding solutions – and he tackles problems one at a time.

In their book, The Four Disciplines of Execution, S.Covey et al advocate that one of the four disciplines is to create a cadence of accountability. This means that team members get together regularly and account to one another for progress they have each made against their strategic goals – they come to the meeting prepared to account to one another. This is so different from “being held accountable”. One is supremely adult, while the latter is far more “parent-child”. How can you replace holding team members accountable with a very adult cadence of accountability? How will you model this cadence of accountability by accounting to the team for your own progress?

Make sure that you haven’t missed out on any of the previous articles with their helpful approaches and methods to build capacity within your team while leading in an inspirational and visionary way.