PHOTO BY: Woodleywonderworks

There was a coach the coach thing yesterday which happened at Franklin University, my alma mater. Bill Brewer from Designed Learning who did a presentation called Building Accountability and Commitment. 

It was some high level concepts-or painfully simple-you know how those are.

Choosing accountablity in the work place is so hard to stretch ones head around. We butt up against, overlap, and work together with so many different personalities it’s often hard to see where our agendas begin, the organization’s mission drives our efforts, and where the egos of all the players start and end.

The simple idea, the genius, is to approach all interactions with the commitment to be accountable for yourself

If everyone in all communities did that there would be a new world of possibilities.

The example that came to mind when a participant complained that if they show up deciding to be accountable, but others didn’t that he’d essentially be screwed.

Made me think of going to a potluck where there’s always tons of delicious food.

You can choose not to go, but then you don’t get to have a voice. Or you can go and pig out with little regard for your health. The last approach is you go, have a voice, eat a meal -not 3- and walk away enriched for the experience without having slashed your committment to yourself.

That would be being accountable. Right?

So how do you do that at work?

You decided before you enter a situation that you’re going to participate and that you’re going to get value from the experience. You decide that you’re going to take some risk which includes taking a leap of faith that others care for the general whole as well. That’s pretty much from the hand out I got, I don’t want to plagerize.

But wow. It’s caring about the general whole, the trust part that’s hard. Go back to the potluck analogy though, I can trust that people aren’t going to poison me. I trust that they kept their cat out of the food while it was cooking. And even more subtlely they didn’t use whole cream then tell me it was made with skim milk. Individuals have a certain amount of integrity.

Integrity is a important word for me.

It’s one of the core three that I use to rule my decision making. Optimism and persistence are the other two, incase you were curious.

I see integritiy as how I personally commit to myself, how I handle situations as right or wrong. It’s my internal measure by which I hold myself.

I see accountability as how I commit to you and others in my community. And my community is vast. It’s work, my daughter’s school, my family, my EGG DAY folk. Plus I see areas for improvement for myself.

How about you? Are you good with being accountable? In what ways could you improve your accountablitiy to the people around you that you impact? Can you stand up and make a promise in front of a group of people without internal negotiations and caveats? Would that make you itch? Tell me about it.