Taking Charge Of Your Own Personal Development

We often ask: who is the most important person to get Above The Line? Of course, that person is you. Why? Because you can’t help yourself or anyone else achieve your organization’s desired results if you’re not taking full accountability to achieve your desired results. Regrettably, our research reveals that a large majority of people in organizations today feel powerless over changing priorities, overwhelmed with the amount of work that needs to be done and frustrated over unreasonable deadlines—i.e., feeling stuck Below The Line. Consider the following story of one person who turned things around for himself and his team by taking accountability for his own personal development and impacting results.

A mid-level executive in a large industrial products company, we’ll refer to him as Michael, took his customer service division through a large-scale organizational change initiative. Six months into process, Michael became concerned about his division’s progress toward achieving the intended objectives of the initiative. He was experiencing the Accountability Gap that seems to so often accompany these efforts. The gap is the difference between what people know they should be doing and what they actually are doing. People were not executing on the initiative and Michael was ultimately responsible as the leader of the organization.

During an executive coaching session we had with Michael, he admitted that he had been fallen Below The Line in terms of leading the initiative. He saw the gap in performance, but had prioritized other things as more important than dealing with it. Unfortunately, the day of reckoning was drawing near and he wasn’t making progress. At first, he identified the problems with everyone else, but ultimately was able to see his own lack of leadership as a fundamental opportunity for personal improvement. With only this focus in mind, he went to work to fix the problem. Taking accountability for the lack of success, he visited with others who had successfully implemented similar initiatives and got their advice, he secured needed resources for the team, and he began practicing the principles of positive accountability that we cover in our book, How Did That Happen? by effectively establishing expectations with the team (FORM, communicate, align and inspect).

Michael later explained that once he decided that seeking feedback and coaching others had to become an integral part of his daily leadership, he began seeing real movement in the division. His modeling and practicing the principles of positive accountability communicated to everyone that he was serious about moving the initiative forward. He realized that he had to become the change he wanted to see in his division. By his own account, not only did he become a better leader in the process, but everyone in the division also became better and more accountable. Soon thereafter, the initiative gained traction and the division started achieving results that it had never achieved before.

To learn more about taking accountability for your personal improvement and results, we invite you to join the Accountability Community at www.partnersinleadership.com, where you can review actual client case studies and advice from the experts.

Above The Line, Below The Line, and Accountability Community are registered trademarks of Partners In Leadership Inc.  Accountability Gap is a trademark of Partners In Leadership Inc.