Bridging the Accountability Gap
Are you accountable? It's time to bridge the accountability gap that exists in most organizations. Use our online training course, I Am Accountability, to make it happen! Part of our Lead Where You Are series. https://cl.learnupon.com/store/95972-lead-where-you-are-series-i-am-accountable
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
What is Going On Around Here?
What is your organizations environment for performance?
Individual and team performance is either enabled or handicapped by the culture and the performance environment created and cultivated (knowing or unknowingly) throughout an organization. A good exercise in these first few weeks of the new year is to look at the challenges and opportunities facing your organization in 2017 and invest the time and resources to assess whether or not your organization has the right culture, values, behaviors, and competencies at every level of the organization to meet the challenges and capitalize on those opportunities.
It is important to conduct either a formal or informal organizational pulse survey to determine if people are truly engaged and committed to success in 2017 or if they are complacent and existing in a position just to get through the day. Does the performance environment in the organization talk a lot about change and innovation with little to no proactive change or innovation happening? Or maybe there is too much unnecessary and reactive change going on where change fatigue and a lack of direction or commitment to long term success is prevalent?
Understanding both your current and future performance environments are two of the most critical starting points to new year efforts that any organization can embark on that will positively impact success at the end of the year.
Once your future-state is identified, engage employee-led teams to assist in defining the actions and activities that will help close any gaps that might exist from your current-state and provide options and recommendations that will cultivate a 2017 (and beyond) performance environment of clarity, alignment, and accountability.
So what performance environment has your organization enabled and cultivated? If you don’t know, now is the time to find out!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Employee-Led Goal Setting: Accountability
In our final Goal Setting blog our focus turns to Accountability. Establishing clarity, alignment, and now accountability are the primary reasons any individual or organization should set goals. Goals, even if they are clear and completely aligned in the organization are nothing more than a “wish list” if accountability is not established.
When working with coaching clients we use a 4 A model to accountability that moves the goals from well-intentioned to completed. The 4 A’s of Accept, Act, Adjust, and Achieve will give you the framework for goal success.
Accept – Accept that you are accountable for delivering on your goals and the milestones created “no matter what”. Circumstances are going to happen (some even beyond your control) on the road to goal completion, however, once you accept accountability no matter what you will persevere through the obstacles and barriers to find your way to success.
Act – Turn your goals into action. Don’t wait to start and every day chart your progress. This is your personal measure of accountability. Keep your actions and reactions consistent and positive while giving deserving credit to others along the way.
Adjust – We must adjust along the way to goal success! While you don’t have control over all circumstances, you do have control over your reactions and your go forward responses. Be willing to adjust your plans, attitudes, even your perspective and thinking as circumstances dictate. Be persistent but flexible at the same time.
Achieve – Achieve one action, one milestone, one project, one goal at a time. Continually update others as you make progress. This enhances both clarity and alignment. Establish a personal record of success; accountability breeds success.
Now with your goals clear and aligned, with accountability established, if you stay focused on your plan, a firm foundation for 2017 success is set. Now go and make this year the best you have ever had. Wishing you the best in the holiday season and great success in 2017!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Leadership. Doing the Right Thing, Even When Nobody is Looking.
It is the small things you never would think anybody would see or notice that can have the greatest impact. We are all defined by our actions, but judged by our reactions!
Something struck me yesterday while watching the Dallas Cowboys play the Baltimore Ravens. Dak Prescott, the rookie sensation quarterback which over the season has led the team to a franchise record 9 straight wins, had just come off the field. He was sitting on the bench and finished drinking water from a paper cup. He went to discard the empty cup in a trash can sitting just a couple of feet behind him when his short toss missed the trash. (It is good for the team he can throw a football 50 yards more accurately).
I don’t know how many people, particularly with the egos and entitlement behaviors that are seemingly pervasive in all of pro sports and in society today, would have got up like Dak, go pick up his trash and throw it away. While it is a very unassuming act, it speaks volumes for the person and leader Dak Prescott is proving to be.
Leadership is the doing the right thing even when no one is looking. However, in this case, millions of people will see Dak lead both on the field and off now that the video has gone viral.
During this season of giving thanks, I for one, am thankful there are still role models like Dak we can point to that show us what true leadership really is.
