A kpi of a couple of stuff ups per week builds the muscle of accountability
Helping your kids to develop ownership and accountability skills at home is absolutely essential for setting them up to be courageous doers and learners in a work setting. These are hot skills that employers are seeking in young employees, and worryingly, seeing less and less of.
When I think about the concept of ownership and accountability at work, it feels like it has three parts, all different:
taking on the responsibility to do something,
following through on the commitment and actually doing it, and finally
ownership of the outcome, warts and all!
Working with and leading people who are comfortable with all three is an absolute dream. Getting the first two is fairly common, but that last one can be trickier!
I learned about part 3 at work the hard way. I recall the excruciating feeling of anxiety whenever something went wrong and a burning desire to dodge or shift the blame in order to avoid the spotlight glare landing on me and my mistake. I knew at the time that my impulses to avoid and deflect were seen for what they were, but something stopped me from stepping forward to claim my mess.
Down the track I learned the liberating act of quickly owning up to what had gone wrong and getting stuck into fixing it and learning along the way. All thanks to a wise IT boss whose mantra was “the road to success is paved with mistakes”. He made mistakes safe.
Travis Field is of the same school of thought. On our recent Employability Skills webinar he gave an example of giving his management team a KPI of a couple of stuff-ups a week - as an indication that they are trying new things in their quest for better service at his restaurant. Genius!
If I look back at my formative years growing up, I recall that mistakes weren’t good. Consequences could be severe and sometimes completely out of the blue, and as a result, owning a mistake was to be avoided at all costs.
At the other end of the scale of parental reaction to mistakes, is jumping in to shield our kids from the impact of their mistakes, eliminating the opportunity to learn from them. Hamish Wilson of Deloitte gives the example of arriving at school camp with his daughter’s Year 9 class to discover some of the kids had forgotten their pillow. And off home scurried a bunch of parents on the 90 minute round trip to collect them!
Surely there was a lesson to learn here about taking ownership for packing (off the list) and accountability for actually doing it! And can’t a pillow be made from a fleece jacket? The temptation to shield our kids from their mistakes isn’t helping them. And their future employers won’t thank you for it!
Justine Lamont, from Good to Great Parenting advises that if parents can normalise mistakes, (by pointing out their own!), and when mistakes do happen, take a split second to ’press the pause button’ so we can move from an impulse toward punishment and shame to being calm, focused and alert. In that tiny moment in time we can decide on actions and consequences that retain dignity (in us all) and offer space for learning, and even an apology from time to time!
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