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This workshop was part of a Managed Leadership Gift Adoption program to develop an culture of responsible leadership so agile and lean methods will flourish in the enterprise.

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.

My principle of the least-invested coworker states:

Any, and every, team will perform to the level of its least-invested member

As dire as that prediction sounds, it’s true and straight-forward — and that makes finding a remedy for getting a team back on track straight-forward. Only a leader in denial will ignore team member motivation when assessing his or her team’s potential to perform highly.

Why is this prediction true? It’s true because teammates who are less interested in the collective project (regardless of technical skill set) show their lack of motivation through their level of engagement and effort.

When other — more invested — team members observe this, they grow increasingly resentful. Why? Because the project responsibility is shared, which means individual efforts are interdependent and the rewards are shared. Everyone can recognize a free-loader in their team, and no one enjoys or looks forward to picking up the slack for them.

Instead, teammates subconsciously reduce their expectations — and thus their motivations — until they match the level of investment of the least-motivated coworker. You could think of it as a form of subconscious self-organized justice. For higher performers, this means they will shift their motivations to some other aspect of their work or life until they can get off of this project and move on to a project with more highly-invested partners.

So what’s the smart leader or teammate to do?

1. Let go of the idea that people should be motivated by a paycheck or company or team loyalty. See things as they are instead of the illusion you would like them to be.
2. Attend to issues of buy-in, commitment, interest, and motivation early and often. Learn to ask, “what is in it for you to work together with the rest of us on this project?” and pay attention to the responses. Play them back for understanding and clarification. Talk about interests as a team and acknowledge that “win/win” isn’t just a slogan, it actually means meeting everyone’s interests.
3. Learn about and use the potency of intrinsic (i.e., internal) motivation to your advantage. External motivators like compensation, benefits, and rewards may get people to show up and occupy space, but they don’t drive personal investment. Also, since peer team leaders don’t have much say over extrinsic motivators (like salary and bonuses), they assume there is nothing they can do about managing peer motivation. Not true! Remember, high performance is voluntary. And that’s an issue of intrinsic motivation — motivation that is defined inside.
4. Develop your proficiency at collaborative and participative communication practices. When team members have a legitimate say in what’s happening, their commitment tends to increase. When people are excluded, their commitment level goes down.

Technical skill sets are critically important for successful work, but team member motivation is the long lever of team dynamics. Empowering employees or team members will be rewarded with workers who are stepping up their performance.

Christopher Avery helps leaders worldwide to operate their business — and lives — far more productively and successfully. Find additional resources to master leadership and build responsible teams at ChristopherAvery.com and The Leadership Gift.

The popularity of the saying “win/win” speaks volumes – we all like to win. So let’s define what “winning” means. And then let’s turn that definition into a tool you can deploy as a brief agenda item for each team meeting or retrospective.

You can deploy this tool immediately in your next team meeting. And it can pay huge dividends in terms of team dynamics. Let me explain.

Predicting Excellent Team Dynamics

I recently wrote about powerful benefits of iteration retrospectives in developing excellent team dynamics in The Benefits of Retrospective Meetings at the End of Every Project Iteration. Picking up on that theme, let’s explore one specific way you can use the retrospective — or any regular team meeting — to boost three critical team dynamics:

• trust,
• respect for individuals, and
• goodwill and cooperation.

These three factors — trust, respect for individuals, and goodwill and cooperation — were demonstrated by research to be the greatest discriminators of high- from low-performing teams. That means these three factors generally exist in high performing teams. And it means they generally do not exist in low performing teams.

Here’s the problem: These factors prove difficult to develop or repair by addressing them directly. That’s why improving teamwork and collaboration can prove so challenging.

And here’s an answer: Research also shows that you can indirectly improve trust, respect for individuals, and goodwill and cooperation through five collaborative communication practices:

• creative dialog,
• brainstorming,
• conflict resolution,
• information sharing, and
• team learning.

And that’s the job of a collaborative leader whether a manager, scrum master, or a peer team member.

As I wrote last time, the retrospective is designed to enhance team dynamics because it employs the communication practices listed above. Let’s look at this notion of “wins” to see how you can use it to enhance team dynamics in your project.

Define a win as an intention that has been met

Consider this: A “win” is anything you intended to happen that did indeed happen and anything anyone intended to not happen that did not happen. Want a simple test? Think about when you exclaim “Yes!” — or high five, fist pump, or fist bump — when you get the outcome you were going for. That’s celebrating an intention met. That’s what I call a “win.”

Humans are intentional beings — we have desires, goals, and, well, intentions. We really like our intentions to be met, though they aren’t always, but that’s what makes winning so delicious.

Here are some examples of met intentions I’ve recently heard team members claim:

• We shipped all the planned features
• I slept at least eight hours every night throughout the iteration
• We didn’t have any management emergencies
• I learned how to code faster and better by pairing with Sally

These examples are obviously related to an agile project team and reflect the types of wins people might report if they were in the habit of claiming their wins and sharing them. When humans are winning (i.e., when our intentions are being met), we feel energized, fulfilled, and powerful. And here’s the performance key: when this is happening we feel like stretching and exercising our power of intention for more and larger accomplishments and wins.

Try this: think of a recent win of any size (“I meant to start the day with taking care of paperwork — and I did!”) and acknowledge it to yourself.

Congratulations! Now think of another.

Congratulations! Do you sense a power within you that you might not have noticed or forgotten existed? Does it feel good? Want to exercise it some more?

Reserve two to three minutes at the beginning of team meetings and retrospectives to claim and share wins

Try this at your next meeting.

1. Define a win as an intention that is met. Then give an example of one of your own wins from the last week or two. Also explain that a win can be large or small — and that every win is defined only by the person experiencing it. A win can also be a shared intention, so some wins might start with “we” as opposed to “I.”
2. Invite the team to claim wins from the recent iteration. Acknowledge each win. Say something like “congratulations!”
3. Don’t allow anyone to turn a claimed win into a joke or a discussion, just acknowledge the win and call for more.

When a team reports wins at the beginning of meetings, people start exercising their mental filters for wins. Your team and members will experience winning and will become accustomed to it. They’ll feel like winners and learn that there are lots of ways to win. They look forward to claiming wins.

Most of us in industry are in the terrible habit of deferring wins. And many of us as managers and leaders filter for issues, problems, and “what have you done for me lately?” instead of “how are you — and we — winning?” No wonder so many workplaces are full of unhappy people who feel like they are continually losing so the company can win (i.e., “We’re going to wait until January and celebrate all of the year’s wins then”).

Try it

Claiming wins might feel weird at first and your results might be rough the first couple of times, but stick with it and you’ll see amazing dynamics develop. You’ll also be doing your teammates and projects a big favor since acknowledging wins translates into engaged, motivated workers.

Christopher Avery, PhD, supports enlightened leaders worldwide to master agile and responsible teamwork, leadership, and change. Members of the Leadership Gift Program for Leaders claim wins ever time they meet.

Shared Responsibility

Early in my speech I asked how many in the room are in a position of “shared responsibility” in their workplace. I asked: “Are you in a position where you are  not in charge of them and they are not in charge of you but your own performance depends on what you do together?” Every hand went up. This is a challenging situation for most as the setup leaves us vulnerable because we can not guarantee that our teammates are doing a great job. If they don’t, their bad performance reflects on us.

As an organizational scientist I have spent the last 30 years researching the phenomena of people having a hard time taking personal responsibility. When things go wrong, we immediately find excuses and blame others for the poor performance. Why is that? In my speech I went into detail about what actually happens in those situations.

It is fascinating what goes on in our brain and how we are hard-wired to respond in a predictable fashion. There is a natural mental process that plays out dozens, maybe hundreds, of times every day that protects our egos from our own painful mistakes. More importantly, it keeps us from solving problems, adding value, and making forward progress.

The mental process is simply this: each time something goes wrong, we do our best to avoid owning it.

We all do it, no matter how responsible we attempt to be. It matters not whether the problem is big or small — the mental process is the same. The existence or lack of personal responsibility is not so much a character trait (or flaw) as it is a well-developed and practiced mental process. People who are well practiced in avoiding ownership for their actions are usually quite effective at it. The level of a person’s intelligence or other professional skills make little difference. In fact, the smarter someone is, the more creative that person will be to avoid ownership. Have you ever noticed that the most intelligent people tell the most elaborate stories?

“Who took my keys?”

Here’s an example to see this response in action. What’s the very first thing you think and maybe even say when your car keys are not where they are supposed to be? I’ll bet you it is: “Who took my car keys?! ” That’s not just a figure of speech. That’s the communication of a thought rooted in an assumption of cause and effect.

I call this Laying Blame, and it is the first of six ways we avoid owning it when something goes wrong. The other five ways are: Obligation, Shame, Justify, Lay Blame, and Quit. These are the positions of irresponsibility you’ll find illustrated on my Responsibility Process poster. You can download it for free at ChristopherAvery.com.

Why does our mind work like that? I’ll get into why we justify our behavior when our competence is challenged in my next blog post in this series. In the following weeks I will explain the whole Responsibility Process and point out why it is so important that we master to overwrite these initial responses in our mind with taking responsibility — because if we don’t change our behavior we will always be dependent on other people changing, and that is unlikely to happen.

You can see the whole video of the Agile Day NYC keynote speech here.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Learn more about mastering leadership or build a responsible team (or family) at The Leadership Gift. Enjoy a more productive way to live and lead.

In general, managers and leaders foster way too many feelings of negative interdependence in their organizations. That is an unintended consequence of compartmental- ization, single-point accountability, budgeting, and sub-optimization in the name of organizational efficiency.

The Unfortunate Result

People are running around in each other’s way instead of helping each other toward the collective goal. Then we call problem-solving meetings to blame each other for being in each other’s way.

Interestingly, people’s behavior changes instantly and organically the moment they feel — not think, feel — that they are in the same boat together. They stop complaining and fighting for dominance and start supporting one another, coordinating with each other, giving and asking for help, and making contributions toward the whole. So perceptions matter, a lot. This is really about the meaning of work, not the actual design of work.

Keys to getting everyone feel they are in the same boat

1. Stop shining your huge spotlight on the pieces and start shining it on the whole. Spotlight the collective outcome or mission and hold it there while using just your tiny pen-light to illuminate the myriad assignments. Pursue that focus with the group, regardless of the size, until you achieve a condition I call “shared task clarity.” That condition is reached when everyone is completely clear about what the collective must achieve together. Only when that happens can everyone also stop worrying about whether others are working at cross-purposes to them.
2. Solicit help shining the light. Many of us attempt to clarify the bigger picture by independently crafting and sending a message — perhaps a statement of vision, mission, or purpose. If this achieves the desired condition, fine, but most of the time it doesn’t. Usually a dialog process, sometimes ongoing, that invites people into the process of pursuing shared task clarity is much more successful. Successful leaders understand the condition they must achieve at the beginning of a project — perceptions of shared task clarity — while others merely check off the “purpose statement” action item.
3. Know the standard you are striving to achieve. Here’s is the question the group (project team, staff group, partnership, etc.) must reach consensus on: What must we do together that is bigger than each of us, requires all of us, and none of us can claim individual victory until it is done?

It is exciting to observe the immediate and organic behavioral shift in people when they have successfully achieved this condition of feeling like they are in the same boat and are eager to help each other work toward the same goal. That’s the art and science of collaborative leadership at work.

Christopher Avery helps leaders worldwide to operate their business — and lives — far more productively and successfully. To find additional resources to master leadership or build a responsible team, please explore ChristopherAvery.com and The Leadership Gift.

Here are three reasons why mastering responsibility is a must for effective leadership:

1. Leaders respond

It’s what you do. Feeling a sense of ownership for a situation defines leadership. When you don’t feel a sense of ownership, you won’t respond resourcefully, hence you won’t be leading. When someone in leadership blames others, justifies his or her actions, or operates from shame or obligation, he/she has ceased to respond resourcefully. Being stuck — stopped — is the opposite of leading.

2. Others amplify the leader’s acts

Fair or foul, moral or immoral, supportive or conniving, a leader’s actions are scrutinized and amplified by and through followers. If you want followers or team members to take ownership, then you must master the practice of demonstrating ownership at all times — especially when things go wrong.

3. Followers won’t demonstrate greater responsibility than their leaders

It just makes sense — no level of an organization will demonstrate a higher level of responsibility-taking than the level to which it reports. This one principle suggests a number of decisions and expectations:

• you shouldn’t expect your followers as a whole to step up any higher than you do
• seek leadership mentors who are responsibility masters
• realize leadership is about far more than hitting metrics — it’s about owning all actions and consequences across the board

Step up, take ownership — of the good and the bad. If you want your employees or team members to take responsibility, you need to be the one demonstrating it first. Don’t be afraid to be honest about making mistakes. This creates an atmosphere for your followers that invites them to take responsibility for their part without having to fear ramifications. Being a fair leader who masters taking responsibility instead of blaming or shaming others will make you a more powerful leader than you think — give it a try!

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Find additional resources to master leadership or build a responsible team (or family) at The Leadership Gift to enjoy a more productive way to live and lead.

4. Ideally, challenge the team to discover such a goal and invest time in that discovery process

In my five-step team orientation process (see Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility), I treat the clear and elevating goal as one of five conversations a team must have (in fact, that a high-performance team will naturally engage in). But it’s not the first conversation I would encourage; it’s the fourth. There are three other things I would do first to give the team the best chance of reaching high performance. Those are:

1. Gain shared clarity about the team assignment or task as the reason for the team
2. Discover what’s in it for each member of the team to work on this assignment with this team
3. Make and keep operating agreements or a clear code of conduct to support the team and each team member

These conversations are based on the science of teamwork, and they are in the order of the leverage they provide to the team for the time and resources invested in the conversations. I’ll tell you more about it sometime at my workshop Knowledge Team Leadership.

5. It’s always a nonlinear process, a lateral-thinking exercise, and a surprising result

Most leaders make the mistake of challenging teams to “choose a number,” setting as its goal a performance metric for the business, project, or technology. That’s frequently misplaced MBA talk. Clear and elevating goals are usually qualitatively different than the assigned task while beautifully supporting the task getting done. For instance, a Wells Fargo team I supported in the early 1990s assigned to launch the first Internet banking service created the slogan “We’re reinventing banking” and envisioned itself on the cover of its industry’s trade journal. The team designed hotel-like hangers for its doorknobs that said: “Do Not Disturb. Busy reinventing banking.” It worked to create an inspired atmosphere for the team.

6. Breaking through conflict helps the team’s performance

It is important to note that clear and elevating goals seldom emerge until well into the project. In the forming-storming-norming-performing metaphor of team development, I’ve found that the storming phase is often resolved by the emergence of a clear and elevating goal, which then guides the norming and performing phases. You can support this process by helping the team develop healthy ways to disagree and stay committed to each other as a team.

Studies show a very high correlation between healthy communication practices (such as brainstorming, creative dialog, team learning, and conflict management) and the highest predictors of team performance (trust, goodwill and cooperation, and respect for individuals). This means you can create the conditions that are ripe for breakthroughs.

Want to apply this information right away?

Assess your project environments, leaders, and teams according to these six observations and ask yourself how you can alter the leadership equation so that teams are free to discover what they really want as a team. You will find that giving team members the change to take ownership of their involvement will create a better end result because they are motivated from having their individual voices heard and validated.

To learn more about maximizing teamwork results while empowering the individual team members, attend Knowledge Team Leadership or bring it to your work site.

How do you get a team to develop a clear and elevating goal?

By the way, by “clear” I  mean no measurements are needed to know that the goal is reached, and by “elevating” I mean the goal is bold and inspiring.

The truth is, no one knows for sure how to get any team to develop a clear and elevating goal. If we did, we’d be mass-producing winning teams. That said, over the years I’ve witnessed countless teams operating well with clear and elevating goals, I’ve studied the conditions under which such goals came about, and I’ve successfully coached many teams to such heights and taught many leaders how to do it as well.

This is what I’ve learned:

1. A team’s clear and elevating goal is never the goal the leader gives the team

The goal you give a team is your goal, not theirs. To the team it is just an assignment and assignments are not inherently motivating. The fact that your goal moves you does not mean it will — or should — move your team.

This is true in virtually all cases, and understanding this will make you better equipped than 95 percent of leaders.

In the literature on high-performance teamwork, and in my 20-year experience, every time a team is inspired by a clear and elevating goal that goal is one the team itself discovered.

Here’s a real example. A Motorola team I coached was tasked with “ironing out all of the inventory, barcode and delivery issues” involved in supplying computer chips to Ford assembling lines. I don’t know about you, but “ironing” is not inherently motivating to me, and the looks on the team member’s faces told me it wasn’t inspirational to them either.

A few weeks later this team requested time on the leader’s agenda to report progress. Their primary item of business was to report that they had turned the leader’s assignment into a team charter that represented the commitment of every member of the team. As the team leader read the twenty-two word charter, everyone in the room could see that she and her team were completely present and engaged. They were jazzed about this. I got goosebumps then and still feel inspired today when I share the story. Here’s what she read:

The Delivery Team will ensure that Motorola will never allow a Ford assembly line to be shut down anywhere in the world.

Do you think if the team owns that goal, they’ll make significant headway on “ironing out the inventory, barcode, and delivery issues”? You bet they will.

More importantly, do you think any leader gets away with assigning that charter to a team and have them own it like that team? No way.

Here’s my shorthand explanation: I tell teams to turn their assignment (what I often call a “task”) into a goal. How do you know the difference?

A task is what must be done
A goal makes it worth doing

2. There is no recipe or formula you can apply to a team that will result in an elevating goal each time

The best thing a leader can accomplish is to support the team in looking for a clear and elevating goal. If I could bottle that skill and develop it in leaders, I’d be running a skill-building production facility (and you’d be in line!). Crafting a successful approach is a design issue rather than a formulaic process — what you are designing is a set of conditions that encourages team members to explore what they want (rather than what their employers want).

3. There is, however, a set of initial conditions that you can design and influence

While most leaders would kill for teams with clear and elevating goals, what they are more often killing are the conditions that support them! Organizations have a way of systematically extinguishing the wants of team members while simultaneously calling for passion and commitment. We tell people what they should want. We tell them our goals and parameters and then we tell them to get busy and have passion. When I ask people on a client’s team what they want out of this project and this team, more frequently than not I hear, “Gee, no one’s ever asked me that before.”

The leader who understands clear and elevating goals will invest in creating a culture of responsible leadership that acknowledges intrinsic motivations and supports personal freedom and choice. Then he or she will make room in projects for team start-up processes that truly engender ownership within the team.

Learn about point 4 through 6 in the second post in this series (Part 2):

4. Ideally, challenge the team to discover such a goal and invest time in that discovery process

5. It’s always a nonlinear process, a lateral-thinking exercise, and a surprising result

6. Breaking through conflict helps the team’s performance

Want to apply this information right away?

Assess your project environments, leaders, and teams according to these six observations and ask yourself how you can alter the leadership equation so that teams are free to discover what they really want as a team. You will find that giving team members the change to take ownership of their involvement will create a better end result because they are motivated from having their individual voices heard and validated.

To learn more about maximizing teamwork results while empowering the individual team members, attend Knowledge Team Leadership or bring it to your work site.

I’m going to make an exception to one of my practices: I normally refrain from publicly using the Leadership Gift to analyze current affairs. It would be so easy for me: every day some prominent journalist or blogger bellows, “When will [insert reviled public figure] stand up and take responsibility for this mess?!” and I could cite it and show how the person bellowing about responsibility is doing so from a mental position of blaming others.

I don’t usually comment on current affairs because I know and teach that the Responsibility Process is only effective when self-applied. People across all political and religious persuasions are avid consumers of the Leadership Gift Program for Leaders and I don’t want to politicize it or take sides by pointing out how public figures and journalists fall below the line. Using this platform to apply the Responsibility Process to the endless drama called the news would send the wrong message about how to practice responsibility. Already more than enough people believe they are experts about who should be called out on avoiding responsibility —  I don’t wish to join that chorus.

The JetBlue Steven Slater Incident Offers a Unique Window into Our Collective Mindset

I’m not interested in analyzing Steven Slater’s behavior, rather, I want to comment on the collective response – the overwhelming support he received from many people who identified with him. The situation with Slater presents a unique opportunity to show how the mindset of obligation is pervasive in our society and how applying the steps of the Responsibility Process would have helped here.

The truth is, most of us avoid rather than take responsibility as a way to cope with upset – and many become the news by doing so.

Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who used the public address system to curse at passengers and then deployed the emergency slide to exit the aircraft, has become a folk hero. Unhappy employees everywhere identify with his I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore stand against the alleged oppression. The media outlets and blogosphere are alive with celebrations of Slater’s actions.

In my view, that’s a telling and unfortunate celebration.

The Sad, Slow Burn of Obligation

The way I see it, people who are identifying with Steven Slater are acknowledging that they, too, are unhappily stuck in the mindset of Obligation, just as he was. It appears they presume

• they have to work in a situation they don’t want (presumably for the paycheck)
• they are trapped and have no other choice (for acceptable income)
• there is nothing they can do short of a satisfying but self-sabotaging “up yours” act like Slater’s

So Slater makes a flamboyant public display and interestingly, people everywhere identify with him and celebrate him. It feels good to join in the chorus and release some of that pent-up frustration. I know. I understand it. I’ve been there.

Applying the Responsibility Process to the Steven Slater Incident

Most people go to work day after day just to get a paycheck. And they pay the price — every unsatisfying moment of every day adds another toxic trace of resentment. And resentment is expensive, it saps your energy and resourcefulness. It leaves you thinking that brilliance is flipping off your employer and customers in a graphic display of I Quit.

Quit is a mental position we take when the pain of Shame or Obligation is unbearable. So we disengage, sometimes we quietly check out mentally from a valueless meeting we have to attend, or when the resentment builds up, we violently lash out and tell someone off. That’s the mental position of Quit in the Responsibility Process. We go there because we don’t know how to take ownership of the situation and produce the result we want, and because the pain of Shame or Obligation is unbearable.

If You Identify With Steven Slater, Think Again

The most responsible folks I know, including many who practice the Leadership Gift, did identify with Slater, yet they did not celebrate his actions. They remembered the point in their own life when they became aware of their sense of obligation but instead of quitting they had the tools to be aware of those feelings and used the tools to change course in a positive manner.

If you identify with Slater, please know this: the mindset of Obligation and the accompanying resentment are normal parts of being human. They just aren’t resourceful mindsets that help you to make things better. It is not my intention to make you feel bad, it is my intention to show you how powerful you are in either keeping yourself stuck or propelling yourself forward. The truth is we are far more powerful than we usually give ourselves credit for.

People stuck in Obligation is a multi-trillion dollar problem in our professional economy — you can start to change that for yourself, the people you lead, and the people you love by making Responsibility your preferred response to everything in your life.

You can learn more about how to do this with the help of the Responsibility Process.

In an upcoming post I’ll show you how to deal with Obligation so that you can transform have to into want to in all areas of your life.