What is leadership?

Leadership means leading, i.e., going first, right? It means taking ownership or responsibility for a space in time and place, thinking ahead, and facing tough challenges with courage and conviction. It also means confronting the truth, even when doing so may be difficult or unpopular.

Most people assume this ability is given to only a handful of people. But my field studies over the last twenty years on the front lines of leadership suggest the ability is given to everyone — including you.

Unfortunately, few discover this gift. Fewer apply it. And very few master it.

The Leadership Gift is available to you right now.

You already have everything you need to discover, access, and apply it. I’m convinced about that, and so are many others who have studied this field.

When people discover, access, and apply the Leadership Gift, extraordinary things happen. Their ability to lead themselves and others increases. That does not mean it gets easy, but leadership become more true. And it also does not mean it become more authoritative, but it does become more authentic.

This article will describe this Leadership Gift, how it works, and what you can do to put it to good use.

The Leadership Gift is your innate ability to take complete ownership of any space, scene, or situation; to confront any truth; and to overcome any challenge no matter how big or daunting.

Yes, you possess an innate ability to do this.

I know this because of my research and experience over the past two decades about how the mind processes thoughts about avoiding or taking responsibility. Taking ownership of a situation — whether it is

• a task
• a child
• a project
• a relationship
• a business
• a war
• or the future of a nation

is an undeniable essence of leadership. Until one feels a sense of personal ownership for a situation and for moving yourself or others toward intelligent action, you can’t truly take charge of anything.

The Leadership Gift you have available to you right now, and anytime you want to call on it, is your on-board, ever-present Responsibility Process.

Your Responsibility Process

Over the last two decades I’ve learned much about how personal responsibility works in our minds. I’ve also learned that most people are quick to think I’m responsible — it’s all these people around me who need your help, Christopher!

However, consider this. Imagine being able to improve and master your own ability to

• take charge, change, grow, and overcome limitations of any kind (yes, any)
• teach and inspire the same (i.e., personal responsibility) in others
• and determine how to raise the standard of personal responsibility in groups and organizations?

Do I have your attention?

Regulating leadership

Discoveries show that both avoiding responsibility (i.e., not taking charge, changing, growing, or overcoming) and taking responsibility are regulated by a simple yet amazing mental process. This mental process has little to do with your intelligence or education and much more to do with your emotions and nervous system.

We’ve also learned that this mental process normally operates involuntarily, in the background (like breathing happens without thinking about it) but that you can also bring the process to the foreground of your awareness so you can work with it purposefully. That means that personal responsibility no longer needs to remain a mysterious character trait (or flaw) but can now be understood, taught, and inspired directly.

A predictable mental program

I’ll briefly describe the Responsibility Process.

Think of the Responsibility Process as a mental program that gets triggered each time something goes wrong in your life, large or small.

For example: Let’s say you arrive at your office building on a cold morning with many pressing issues on your mind. You grab your ID, which doubles as a key card, and hold it up against the card reader. Doing this usually unlocks the door so you can enter. Only this time the door doesn’t unlatch. Frustrated, you mumble to no one in particular, “I wonder who screwed up the card reader?”

This seems to be a perfectly innocuous comment, the type we say and hear everyday in a myriad of annoying circumstances. Not only that, but it’s also a perfectly reasonable assumption that someone screwed something up keeping us from our morning routine.

We say and hear such things every day. So regularly, in fact, that it can be predicted.

Our studies reveal Lay Blame as your and my first thought when things go wrong. Sure, we’ve been told our whole lives that we should not blame. Why? Because it isn’t resourceful, i.e., it doesn’t solve anything. But that doesn’t stop us from doing it. We are most likely hard-wired to do it. Lay Blame is the first of many stops in our Responsibility Process.

The logic of cause and effect

Psychologists tell us our minds are constantly making meaning out of our experience. The Responsibility Process is part of this process. More importantly, the Responsibility Process appears to feed us answers about the cause and effect relationships when things go wrong.

Lay Blame is just the first step in the process. Other steps include Justify, Shame, Obligation, Quit, and Responsibility.

Each of these positions have proven to be predictable, and you can learn very quickly to spot these positions of mind and to even anticipate (or predict) what might happen next.

You can get stuck at any step

When things go wrong in our lives (big or small), we can

• Lay Blame on others
• Justify the problem based on circumstance
• wallow in Shame that we did this to ourselves
• feel trapped in Obligation to do something we don’t really want to do
• Quit the situation hoping to escape it and leave it behind us, or

we can take ownership that it is our Responsibility to learn, correct, or improve in order to rise to the challenge presented by the problem.

Each of these positions is best thought of as a position of mind, a mental state, a mindset we adopt, or — a favorite of many — islands in the mind on which we camp out for awhile or a lifetime around any upset. We can address our problem from any of these positions of mind. And we do so, naturally, without thinking about it.

Only one of these mental states is a state of resourcefulness, of learning, or of leadership. All the other mental states are merely coping mechanisms.

What’s your comment?

Read Part 2: Do You Have The Leadership Gift Part 2: Cope or Grow?

Unlock and Unleash Your Leadership Gift

Request an invitation to Christopher’s next Leadership Gift free preview call now!

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

I want to dispel the myth that responsibility is an inherent personality characteristic. Responsibility is learnable — my client’s results prove it over and over again. With the advances of the last twenty-five years responsibility is a directly observable, learnable, and teachable mental process anyone can understand and master.

When leaders treat responsibility as a personality trait (or flaw), then you assume it is nearly impossible to alter it and you must do your best to control others, hence you design controlling management structures and processes. But when you understand how responsibility actually works in the mind, then you can equip yourself with its power, and tap into it to leverage every other tool, skill, and process in your organization.

Ownership Mindset Missing In Action

Thinking that new tools and skills will increase productivity can frequently be a waste of resources for companies — the real problem isn’t a lack of problem-solving tools and skills. The real problem is a severe absence of problem-ownership that prompts someone to relate to the situation, learn from it, and choose a resourceful response. When people don’t feel a sense of ownership for problems, they don’t engage the abilities they posses.

You have the ability to directly and effectively confront this lack of ownership in your team and across your company. When teaching how to take responsibility, I find that once responsibility is mastered, people resourcefully employ all of the dormant tools the firm has invested in. Now that’s leverage!

Corporations are spending billions of dollars on the wrong investment — accountability — when they could be spending it on building sustainable cultures by teaching responsibility.

Most executives these days expend energy on strategic goals and objectives for building a culture of accountability. The focus of these efforts is on doing a better job of holding others to account. When I look at these investments, I see a focus on the external–i.e., outside of themselves–on attempting to do a better job detailing what must be done and then following up to make sure it is done, and finally ensuring there are meaningful consequences for achieving or failing to achieve the stated accountabilities.

The 3 reasons why companies loose money when they focus on accountability:

1. Tightening Control Results in Less Responsibility
Tightening behavioral control begets resistance and irresponsible behavior. Improving the mechanics of the external (accountability management) without understanding the dynamics of the internal (responsibility, or feelings of ownership) frequently creates the opposite effect. The more I attempt to control your performance, the less responsibility you will feel for your situation. You might expend a lot of energy creating some result out of a sense of obligation, but that’s different than a true sense of ownership.

2. We’re All Experts at ‘Looking Good’
There are many ways all of us successfully account for failed performance every day in order to get rewarded anyway. We blame others, or we blame the circumstances (“I got put on a bad team”), or we take pity on ourselves in hopes that others will pity us too, or we claim that we followed the instructions to the letter and still things didn’t work out. All of these claims compel many managers to accept the explanation and let the subordinate off the hook. With a strong desire to keep them on board and motivated, coupled with your own feelings of guilt about your contribution to their failure, you grant the annual raise or bonus.

3. Responsibility Trumps Accountability
My research shows that responsibility (the internal process) trumps accountability (the external process). All the resources in the world spent understanding, doling out, and managing accountability don’t matter in an environment where people don’t demonstrate a sense of ownership when things don’t go as planned. Where performance is concerned, responsibility is the more powerful and primary element. Performance studies consistently show that when high performance is achieved, people have stepped up and accomplished more than they were asked to do. The only state of mind that produces resourceful responses is Responsibility.

Keys to Responsibility

My quest to support clients in rapidly developing more resourceful responses to problems uncovered three keys that collectively provide a prescription for mastering Responsibility: Intention, Awareness, and Confront.

Intention
The first key to unlocking and mastering responsibility is to clearly and powerfully intend to operate as much as possible from a mental position of responsibility. Without this key, the others don’t matter. That’s why it’s first.

We can effectively support leaders and followers at every level to develop a thirst for, a belief in, and a shared value for thinking and acting responsibly.

Awareness
The second key to unlocking and mastering responsibility is to develop an ever-increasing awareness of the Responsibility Process™ operating in your thoughts, language, and actions. Unlocking and mastering responsibility means overcoming the temptation to behave irresponsibly, and that requires self-awareness.

Note that developing self-awareness also represents the state-of-the-art in leadership development.

Confront
The third key is to face the truth. I call this confront, which means to face. As a key to unlocking and mastering responsibility it means to face yourself, examine the situation, and see what’s true about how you are or are not responding resourcefully. The purpose of confronting yourself is to see the truth of the situation and generate new responses to it. Effectively confronting yourself always leads to growth, expanded perspectives, and change.

Most business cultures are not very good at supporting this ability. In fact they support the opposite behaviors of denying, avoiding, defending, and resisting. However, the good news is that this sill can be cultivated in your culture.

Redefine responsibility

The lack of responsibility at work and in society is a fundamental problem. Like solutions to other fundamental problems such as quality and service that are transforming industry, the solution is to redefine responsibility first for yourself and then for your team.

When people learn and apply what I call the the Keys to Responsibility™ to everyday upsets, they start eliminating wasted thoughts and wasted behaviors that are chewing up resources and adding no value to the top or bottom line. Remove them and productivity soars.

Highly responsible people — those who are self-aware and intend to confront themselves about the truth of a problem instead of disowning it — do not remain very long with a blaming, justifying, shaming, obligating employer. Highly responsible people are drawn to employers who cherish that quality and grant freedom, choice, and power.

I encourage you to work on creating that kind of mindset in yourself, and that kind of culture in your company.

As always, let me know what you think by sharing a comment below.

Christopher Avery, Ph.D. wrote the popular book Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility — which Fortune Magazine claimed is the only teamwork book worth reading. He is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Master leadership or build a responsible team (or family) with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

There is a big difference between being an accountable leader and being a responsible leader. I have been working with business leaders for the last 20+ years as a consultant and speaker, and I am committed to showing real leaders the powerful difference.

The following may sound a bit harsh or pedantic at first, but stay with it and you will be rewarded with important distinctions:

An accountable leader focuses on being able to account for his or her actions and results. As a communication scholar years ago I researched “account-giving.” That is simply the narratives (i.e., stories) we make up to explain what is going on — we give accounts.

Thus an accountable leader has all of his or her ducks in line. He knows what he is being held accountable for and ensures that he can account for all the activities and outcomes. An accountable leader is likely a good manager, efficient with time, and proficient with tracking objectives, priorities, and schedules.

An accountable leader attends to accounting for what’s happening — but a responsible leader attends to responding. One is backward looking, the other forward looking.

Here’s the Difference That Makes a Leadership Difference

An accountable leader focuses on accounting for why he or she can’t get where he/she is headed while a responsible leader is going somewhere and focuses on confronting and overcoming the obstacles. It’s a big difference.

Want an example?

I’ve heard many leaders in the past year — on the news and in my workshops — account for their inability to produce desired results by justifying that they had inherited a dire situation or a poor performing organization. If you follow the lessons of the Responsibility Process, you realize that there are six ways we can account for failure and let ourselves off the hook: we can operate from denial, lay blame, justify, shame, obligation, or quit.

We also ask others to buy such accounting for poor results in hopes that they, too, will let us off the hook for poor results. And it is amazing how often they do!

A responsible leader is different in the way he or she views the world.

A responsible leader

– is on a quest, a quest that requires her to constantly expand her ability to respond to whatever happens around her.

– challenges himself to own his power and ability to create, choose, and attract everything that happens to him. He feels increasingly connected to and in harmony with — instead of apart from and fighting — the world and knows that he gets to choose what he responds to and what he doesn’t respond to.

– knows he or she has irresponsible thoughts and actions every day and works faithfully to catch them and transform them into responsible thoughts before acting.

– learns, corrects, and improves, usually in response to something not going as planned because he knows that things often don’t go as planned.

– does everything in her power to produce the intended outcome, then lets go of results because a responsible leader judges herself not by events but by her responses to events.

– forgives himself and others quickly for his humanness and for doing irresponsible things, but in the act of forgiveness, he also holds high standards for people’s power and ability to correct, to improve, to learn, to choose, to create, and to attract his world.

– intends to operate from an inner sense of direction, vision, and truth every moment. A responsible leader knows what she wants or is searching to discover what she wants.

– is increasingly aware — of himself, of others, of perspectives, and points of view. A responsible leader never learns less. A responsible leader knows the only way he can fail is to stop trying and is always interested in understanding different ways of being and knowing.

– seeks freedom for herself and others. A responsible leader knows that the feeling of being trapped limits one’s ability to respond, which goes against the fundamental nature of responsibility — of increasing one’s power and ability to respond to whatever happens.

– generates choices for him/herself and encourages others to generate choices. A responsible leader knows that there are always more choices available than the one’s currently seen and inherently understands that choices are freeing and empowering. When one has real choices, one feels resourceful.

– is an increasingly powerful — as opposed to controlling — leader. Powerful in the sense of clarity, conviction, trust, and truth. Powerful in the sense that people want to follow rather than be held captive. Powerful in the sense that difficult or unpopular decisions can be made without regard to popularity polls.

– is willing to sit in the angst of uncertainty while searching for clarity and choices.

– teaches followers to take responsibility for their choices.

– thinks and acts clearly when others are stuck or confused.

Which presents the more powerful leadership opportunity for you?

Would you prefer to be a more accountable or a more responsible leader? Here’s an observation worth noting: responsibility trumps accountability every time. So if you focus on responsibility, you won’t have to worry much about your accounting.

It’s something to think about.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. He teaches powerful leadership skills or how to build a responsible team. Check out The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders for more information.

Questions addressed on this segment:

Q: How do I recognize its my responsibility when it doesn’t look that way and I want to blame someone else for the problem?

Q: Some people (me sometimes) feel the ownership of some domain (in business, technology, etc.) in an exclusive way, so they don’t allow other people to take responsibility. What would be a correct thing to do?

Q: Procrastination is one of the biggest obstacles that we have to overcome to take 100% ownership. What is your advice on fighting against it?

Q: What about project managers or scrum masters who can’t give up control? Micromanage? Criticize in public? Get hostile in tone when things don’t go their way? How do you diffuse this type of person and allow one to be 100 % responsible for our work?

Q: How do you get past the rationalization (Justify) during an accountability session (i.e., what went wrong) and get to more of a Responsibility space? We are very good at rationalizing, that is understand why something went wrong, but we kind of get stuck there.

Q: Given the mental and emotional issues that affect weight loss, can the Responsibility Process be used to aid in successful achievement and maintenance of healthy weight loss?

Q: I am starting a new job in a few weeks at a large fortune 500 company. There is new upper management recently in place (board level). The “old” charismatic leader started some key programs. These programs are currently under assessment, but as the new regime lifts the rocks, they are seeing that it’s ugly underneath. I will be on an existing program that has two diverse camps – one that wants to stop and reassess (one customer is a 60% stakeholder and claims he “doesn’t want the program, it doesn’t meet his needs) and then there is the other camp that is driving the project to try to be completed (in 2010/2011). As a new leader in this organization, what advise would you give me.

But two blog posts caught my eye this morning.

In A Corporationless Society, a post on a prolific new blog devoted to discussions about designing role-playing games, the anonymous author (I’m sure insiders on the blog know each other but I spent 10 minutes searching for ID and gave up. They aren’t super-secret, they use names, I just did not get it unraveled.), suggests that corporate limited liability is the reason for too much greed and not enough responsibility. He/she has an interesting story-line for a game: Society restarts without corporations after being brought down by mega-corporations with mega-greed, no controls, too much power, etc.

It makes me wonder about the trendy supposed “greening” of corporations and the whole Corporate Social Responsibility movement. I’m absolutely certain that some leaders completely get the need to own up to their external interdependence. That’s a fancy term I learned in an organizational sociology class in grad school 25 years ago that simply means dumping your unwanted waste on others to take care of (think conveniently pumping your post processing chemical sludge into a river and sending it downstream, or strip-mining then abandoning the countryside after you have what you want, or even helping yourself to all of the natural resource under, over, on, or running by your property (remember some former societies did not believe in owning parcels of land) without regard to who else also depends on it.

The issue, in modern terms of value and quality, is whether you are truly creating value or if the supposed value your customers pay you for is offset by the destruction (i.e., think carbon-foot-print type analogies here) you cause in generating the product or service that produces revenue.

On this subject I speculated yesterday while answering a question on LinkedIn about the connection between personal responsibility as a cultural attribute and corporate social responsibility. I said:

What I’m finding is that the more highly developed one’s sense (and practice) of personal responsibility, the more aware we become of our interconnectedness, and the more socially conscious we become. So I’m interested in working with leaders worldwide who see a connection between personal responsibility as an organization-wide practice and performance, profitability, social responsibility, and sustainability.

So then I read Clarity, Honesty, Responsibility, and Accountability this morning by a spiritual teacher Rakesh Gupta who I assume is in India. I spent a few minutes attempting to determine what spiritual persuasion (Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) but it truly does not matter for purposes of this post as the lesson is universal. Rakesh Gupta said:

One takes Responsibility. One takes responsibility upon recognizing one’s relationships.

That’s very well put.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Accountability Central, a website devoted to tracking business stories about accountability picked up an article from today’s Investor’s Business Daily.

Accountability Central: BE HONEST AND DEPENDABLE; TAKE RESPONSIBILITY Put Trust In Your People

The included tips are generally well-known:

• empower your people
• trust your people
  
• push responsibility down (hmmm, as in “wouldn’t want to accept it up here!?!?” gonna have to think about that one.)
• act decisively
• be transparent
• let them know where you stand
• etc.

Missing for me are two important points:

1. Understand how personal responsibility works in the mind so you know true responsibility when you see it, know how to demonstrate it, and how to create a culture of responsibility leadership at all levels. Research shows that responsibility is not just a character trait (or flaw) but a mental process that can be studied, taught, and developed in any individual, team, or culture. Research also shows that “leaders” in high positions often model relatively irresponsible behavior, i.e., avoid taking responsibility themselves.
2. Develop a Responsibility Practice (according to this research on the Responsibility Process) at the most senior levels of leadership so that you generate a culture of responsible leadership. Field research shows that no level of an organization will demonstrate higher levels of ownership than the levels above them. Think about it.

What do you think?

http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/account.htm

It was compiled in June 2006 by Janet Seymour, Bibliographer, Muir S. Fairchild Research Information Center, Maxwell AFB, AL

I’m familiar with less than a quarter of the references in this list, probably because it is military focused.

If you know of other bibliographies on leadership accountability and responsibility, please comment or track-back. I’d like to assemble a more complete list. Thanks.