In my email newsletter today I invite readers

Can social responsibility really be achieved through corporate policy? I firmly believe social responsibility only flourishes from a base of personal responsibility. That means we must scale responsible behavior starting with ourselves, rather than scaling process or policy.

Here’s a tough question to ask yourself: Are you lending your skills to, and taking a paycheck from, a leader, organization, or clients with whom you are not totally aligned in terms of the true net value (i.e., taking into account the costs to people and planet) they are adding to society? Why?

What if we each just stopped working for such employers?

What do you think? Leave a comment.

P.S. See the rest of this email newsletter.

These posters are increasingly being seen in offices, conference rooms, kitchens, and schools all over the world.

In my recent post, we looked at what to do when we’re left in the uncomfortable position of “holding the bag” and I suggested a straightforward 7-step process for calling others on broken agreements.

It’s a great process. And it’s simple. But it can be very difficult to apply. Why?

Many of us have one or more emotional blocks to effectively calling others on irresponsible behavior.

To better position ourselves to use the approach, let’s look at what makes it seem easier to “hold the bag” than to confront others when they let us down.

We’ve all been in dozens of situations where co-workers’ behavior was irresponsible, in direct violation of a promise, or damaging to our productivity. It hurts.

So, why do we tolerate someone’s irresponsible or damaging behavior? In my experience, most of us feel one of two basic emotional responses, or “blocks,” to taking responsible action:

1. the need to be nice
2. the addiction to criticism

Needing to be nice — or to be seen as being nice — is evidence that we need social approval more than we need inner congruence.

Social approval is great to have. We all need and enjoy it. But as health professionals tell us, when social approval is in conflict with our personal experience, it actually becomes a destructive force in our lives. It’s called lying.

To overcome this block, we can reduce our willingness to tolerate irresponsible behavior and increase our “provocability,” that is our ability to show what really happens inside us  when someone’s behavior hurts us.

When we chose to show our true–provocable–response to irresponsibility, we actually foster greater collaboration with others.

How? Because provocability signals integrity. And it’s integrity that builds trust between co-workers, not apparent–but false–tolerance.

Provocability is part of a collaborative communication strategy called “tit-for-tat.” To play tit-for-tat, start interactions with cooperative behavior and, after that, match your co-worker’s behavior. If they cooperate, then you cooperate. If they are uncooperative, or defect on you in some way, then show provocability.

Call them on their uncooperative behavior and let them know you hold them responsible for the relationship: they can have it be cooperative or uncooperative. It’s up to them.

Then match their moves. When used compassionately and proactively, tit-for-tat is a great strategy for teaching others how to cooperate with you.

Get started with this week’s 5-Minute Practice Tip:

Provocability is best learned by removing small tolerations first. They’re easier to call. Today, pay conscious attention when a co-worker bugs you slightly.

Here is a hint: When you’re “bugged,” you’re provoked — that is, the other person’s behavior is in some way unproductive or uncooperative in relation to you.

Use the 7-step process to show an appropriate level of provocability. Remember, if you’ve been tolerating a particular behavior for some time, a relationship pattern has been set and your demonstration of provocability can be seen as “over-the-top.” Start small and easy, then build.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Build a responsible team (or family) and master your leadership skills with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

And in another post — Leadership Tools: Clear Your Judgement to Move On Effectively — I encouraged you to trust a little too much in order to trust just right.

So what do you do on those (rare) occasions when others let you down, i.e., leave you holding the bag?

Well, I see the first order of business as a careful assessment of the relationship’s value to you. Is it worth changing its future course (for whatever reason)? Your other choices include living with it in a damaged state or removing yourself from the situation.

If the relationship is important to you, then you must engage the other(s) in a conversation about the broken agreement.

The way I see it, such a conversation needs to cover 7 steps — one in preparation and then 6 action steps.

Prep Step: Acknowledge your own feelings about calling someone on a broken promise. Doing so is confronting — and confrontation is only successful when done “cleanly,” i.e., without judgement about the other person.

If you’re anything like me, feelings at such times include fear, doubt, commitment, and courage.

Step 1: Be invited. Conventional wisdom tells us we can’t tell anybody anything they’re not yet ready to hear. So, it’s your responsibility to prepare others to receive your feedback. Start with something like, “Friend, I want to talk with you about how we’re working together. Is this a good time?”

Step 2: Be explicit. Describe the other(s) actions that have caused you concern. Be specific in your description of behaviors and deliverables. Tell them you thought you had an agreement with them for a specific action to take place by a certain time and that it appears they didn’t follow through.

Step 3: Use cause-and-effect language. Report the consequences to you (and your team) of the failed promise. “When you didn’t deliver on your promise, I was unable to complete my task, and the entire team’s deliverable fell behind schedule.”

Step 4: Tell how this failure affected you personally. If you’ve made judgements about the person — and you probably have — then this is the place to voice them, not before. Start with words like, “I assumed…” or “I interpreted….” The point is to take responsibility for your judgement and your feelings. “So, I decided that your promise is not as important to you as it is to me.” “I felt betrayed.”

Step 5: Stop talking and listen. If your words have been compassionate, factual, accurate and nonjudgmental, you’re likely to have tapped into the other person’s integrity and they’ll be prepared to make amends. If, instead, they lay blame or justify, simply continue to invite them “above the line,” i.e., to own their behavior. To see an actual exchange like that, take a look at his blog post: How to Call a Co-Worker to Account And Gain Wins for Both of You.

Step 6: Make a new agreement. Only when you reach this last step is it a good idea to tell the other(s) what you want them to do differently in the future. It’s here that you ask for what you want. For example, “So, in the future, if you discover you can’t keep a promise made to me, I want you to call me the minute you discover it yourself so we can figure out what to do.”

For my team leadership workshop graduates, these steps should look familiar: they’re a specific application of the model for Giving Feedback Responsibly. They work for me. Let me hear how they work for you.

5-Minute Practice Tip to Improve Work Relationships by Giving Responsible Feedback:

Sometimes it’s easier to practice feedback skills giving good news instead of bad. So identify someone who has recently kept his/her agreements with you.

Schedule and execute a feedback conversation for which you do the prep step and take the 6 action steps while giving positive/reinforcing feedback.

Then try the process in a relationship that could be improved by paying attention to and working through a broken agreement.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Build a responsible team (or family) and master your leadership skills with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

Want more trust in your life? Consider this: we commonly think of trust as something that happens between particular people for particular reasons.

But, if trust exists only between people, how do we explain those all-trusting persons who seem able to exhibit high levels of trust all the time? Are they naive? Or have they got something figured out?

I think they’ve got something figured out.

From my vantage point, folks who are able to trust highly all the time have figured out that trust depends on more than interpersonal dynamics: it’s also an INTRA-personal event.

Whether we trust others or not actually has less to do with what others do and more to do with our ability to respond (to what others do). And this is true not just sometimes, but every time we trust — in our personal life and in work relationships.

Think about it. Trust isn’t simply a product of what happens between you and someone in a given situation: it’s heavily influenced by what’s happening inside of you.

As you focus on teamwork as an individual skill set, how much you do or don’t trust reflects your level of individual response-ability.

That is, the more you expect others might do something you don’t know how to successfully respond to, the less you’re likely to trust them and the more guarded you will be.

Therefore, as your ability to respond grows, the greater will your trust in others grow, because you’ll know how to respond to a wider and wider range of behaviors others might choose to display. Hence, how much you trust others is really a reflection of how much you trust yourself.

As I always point out, you can only control your response to any given situation, and learning to trust more yourself will improve situations and relationships with others — although you are doing the work.

Let me put this into a personal perspective. For three years, I shied away from repeated requests to teach Sunday School to toddlers at my church. My justification was that “I specialize in teaching adults.” The truth was, however, that I didn’t trust a room full of 2-year-olds.

I finally admitted the truth to myself and confronted my fear of not knowing what a room full of 2-year-olds might do (or that I wouldn’t know how to respond to what they might do). So I tried teaching the kids and wouldn’t you know it, after two months of practice, I had expanded my repertoire of behaviors and, as a result, dramatically increased my trust in a room full of 2-year-olds.

Remember: trust is more about what’s inside you than about what’s between you and another.

If you’re always waiting for others to prove their trustworthiness to you, maybe, just maybe, you are playing too small a game. Get started with this week’s 5-Minute Practice Tip.

5-Minute Practice Tip

Refusing to empower others is often an example of our imagined inability to respond to what others might do. So this week, identify at least one relationship where you’ve been controlling another person or balking at trusting him or her. Consider where you can develop or expand your abilities so that you can trust.

Then do it. Trust me — you’ve got nothing to lose.

Tell me what you think. Leave a comment.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Build a responsible team (or family) and master your leadership skills with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

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One of my clients for the Managed Leadership Gift Adoption program is generating fun and creative ways to promote the Leadership Gift throughout its organization — and across functional and department lines into other units to spread the word.

Here’s a poster they are hanging up and distributing. It’s connected to an event called Responsipalooza.

I’ve learned a thousand ways to not teach the Leadership Gift. One of the most important success strategies is to make the learning light and fun — like with Responsipalooza.

What’s your Responsipalooza strategy when promoting the Leadership Gift?

Click the video below to see what Ronica says.

Want to know when and where you can attend Creating Results-Based Teams?

See more testimonials for this workshop.

Read more about the project to translate the Responsibility Process into more and more languages to reach every corner of the globe, especially if you want to help translate into your language.

Thanks to Mario too.

Comment below to encourage Thom and give him your thoughts about where this series should go.

The link in Scott’s tweet takes you to this chart.

I’m honored to be in the company of Chet Hendrikson, Ron Jeffries, Jeff Patton, Ashley Johnson (my scheduled co-presenter who gave this session last year), Jonathan Rasmusson, and Mary Poppendieck — agile rock stars.

To put this in perspective, 16oo people attended a reported 300 sessions over 4 days. That puts our session in the top 1%. What’s that mean? An ownership mindset and culture is on lots of people’s minds.