Page 264 - Fearless Leadership

Holding Each Other Accountable 251

mance culture, yet in this meeting you are not behaving as committed
partners. You have forgotten your commitment to stand for the success
of one another and are engaging in old, automatic behaviors.”
The group was stunned into silence. I said much more, and it was
far more colorful and impassioned than what I’ve described here; in
fact, the people present at this meeting refer to it as “The Great
Rant.” They were stunned because, in that moment, they saw how
they were sabotaging their mission by their behavior. From that point
forward, the meeting snapped into place and there was a clear and
undivided focus on business matters.

The Result. The leadership team was remarkable in their ability and
willingness to respond quickly to coaching. As soon as they recog-
nized they were playing small, they changed their behavior. Their
commitment to being effective was much stronger than their com-
mitment to being right.

Lesson Learned. High performance teams, like any other teams,
become trapped in automatic behaviors. The difference is the speed
at which they recover. The question you may be asking is, “Would
this team have self-corrected their behavior without outside interven-
tion?” My answer is yes. At the time of this meeting, the team was
in the early stages of learning how to hold one another accountable.
They may have taken longer to get to the point where they stopped
the unproductive behavior, but they would have succeeded.

Holding each other accountable is a high-level skill that committed
partners master through practice. It is the final agreement of committed
partners and is by far the most challenging because of our fear that we will
make things worse instead of better.

LOCATING ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE PROPER PLACE
Any discussion of accountability must start with this question: Who has
the accountability? Above all, you must understand where accountabil-
ity is located. You must clearly understand if you are fostering an envi-
ronment in which “good reasons” are tolerated over results as previously
discussed.