Why Accountability Breaks Under Pressure

00:00:09:03 Junior: Welcome back everyone to this episode ofThe Leader Factor. Today we're talking about accountability. Tim, good to seeyou.

00:00:09:03 Tim: Good to see you.

00:00:09:03 Junior: What are you thinking about thisepisode?

00:00:19:02 Tim: I love it. Well, I love the way we're gonnadig into it and we're going to talk about some patterns that I think, I don'tthink I've heard anybody else talk about. And we're naming those patterns.

00:00:34:16 Junior: So I hope they're sticky for ourlisteners and viewers. I hope so too. I think the words that people hear inthis episode

00:00:43:14 Tim: represent 10 times more, probably 20 timesmore that we've said off air to try and get to this point, to try and distillthe principles, to try and choose the right words. And so in some of thederailers and some of the skill language, just know a lot of blood, sweat andtears went into wringing out all of the extra and getting down to firstprinciples in practical language that we think that you will be able to employ.Let's start Junior with the word accountability. This episode is onaccountability. So for listeners and viewers, I want you to think to yourself,

00:01:17:21 Junior how do you absorb the wordaccountability? Does it have a hard edge? Hmm.

00:01:24:02 Tim: Or is it an inviting word? Is it a wordthat you naturally want to embrace? Or is it a word that you want to step awayfrom? So do you see how important and powerful words are? The connotations, thenuance, the everything that comes with, you know, the emotional freight of thatword. What's that like for you?

00:01:52:12 Junior: For us, accountability is an incrediblyimportant word, but you got to dig into it before maybe it's a little, to makeit more inviting than maybe it is. Well, and we should call out importspecifically, because if you say, well, I don't like it, but I also recognizethat it's important. That's different than saying, I don't like it, and I don'tthink it's important. That's true. And so looking at those two variables is aninteresting thing to do, because hopefully by the end, you'll say, it isinviting and I like the word, and I also see its importance. That's right.Hopefully we can get there.

00:02:28:09 Tim: So I'm gonna start off with a sentence,which is this, the most seductive lies are the ones you believe.

00:02:35:17 Junior: And I'm not talking about the lies thatyou tell other people, I'm talking specifically about the lies that you tellyourself. You might think, what does that have to do with accountability? Alot, because it's about narrative. And we craft narrative often to please ego,the ego of ourselves and the ego of others. That can be a wonderful thing,depending on what that ego compels us to do. It can be an awful thing,depending on what that ego compels us to do. So think about the last time thata project failed, the last time that you missed a goal, the last time that youmissed a deadline, the last time you came in over budget, the last time you hadan outcome that was negative and unexpected, what did your mind do?

00:03:22:19 Tim: Think about your brain, what was happening?What were the gears doing?

00:03:27:16 Junior: You probably started processing, whatare other people going to think about this? What am I going to say about this?How am I going to communicate this? And we talked in the last episode aboutthat system in our activity monitor that's constantly looking at other people'sperception. That's spinning in these instances. And we're looking at a wholebunch of different points of view, a bunch of different stories and narrativeswe could create. We have a whole host of options in front of us and we have to chooseone. So we're kind of looking at the menu. Yeah. Which narrative, which storyare we going to go with? Yeah. And your brain will almost always spin up atleast one version of the story that makes everything okay for you. That can bea very dangerous thing.

00:04:16:09 Tim: That story in a situation like this couldbe that the market shifted, could be that we ran out of budget, could be thatwe needed more team members, could be that X, Y, Z, one, two, three, there areso many things that we could say to just make it okay for us. Accountabilityhas a lot to do with the story that we craft. And maybe not just the story wecraft, but the one we choose. Because we're gonna craft a whole host ofstories. As you said, we have a menu in front of us, which selection will wemake? That selection will depend a lot on what we believe about accountability.So back to that original question, what do we think about accountability? Youbetter know. You better have that conversation with yourself. We'll help you dothat through this episode so that you can make a reasonable choice from themenu.

00:05:07:10 Junior: All of those things that I mentioned,the variables about the market and the timing and the budget and the team,those could all be true,

00:05:14:19 Tim: but none of that helps you in a real sense.If you choose that path, you're going to delay a whole bunch of learning. Andthe learning tax is something that we hope to pull through today's episode. Soif your aspiration is to improve, if your aspiration is to learn, then you haveto be very intentional about these choices. Junior, I find it interesting that

00:05:38:11 Junior: in the field of mental health andwellness,

00:05:45:13 Tim: every talk therapy in the world

00:05:52:10 Junior is based on the same premise.

00:05:54:20 Tim: And the premise is that we tell ourselvesthings that are not true.

00:06:01:10 Junior: I find that quite interesting.

00:06:04:00 Tim: So to your point,

00:06:06:00 Junior: if you tell yourself something that'snot true, if you spin up a narrative, if you have a story,

00:06:11:09 Tim: and it's a soothing story, then there's atax.

00:06:17:04 Junior: There's a tax on your mental health andwellbeing. If you're a leader in an organization, there's a tax on yourperformance. There's a tax on your development as a human being. It doesn'tmatter where you are, it doesn't matter what role you have, there's a tax.

00:06:34:05 Tim: And the more fanciful that story becomes,the higher the tax and the more delayed any progress will be. It doesn't matterif it's in professional life or personal life or wherever it is, you're gonnapay the tax. Yeah.

00:06:51:18 Junior: I find that very interesting. I do too,and it's part of why I love the imperative of today's skill. It's gotta be,it's close to the top. And my favorites of the Core 15 Imperatives, which istell no soothing stories. And that's going to be the main point of today'sconversation, that if you can do that, your chances of taking accountabilityand paying that learning tax early and becoming better, it's high. That'sright. So if you kick that can down the road for too long, it will becomeobvious to you and to other people that you've kicked that can down the roadfor way too long. And you've probably met people who have deferred thatlearning tax far into the future, and then it becomes too big to pay. Okay,hang on a second, there's one more comment. If you kick that learning tax downthe road, perpetually, you keep doing it over and over and over again,

00:07:43:21 Tim: not only does it get bigger and harder topay,

00:07:47:16 Junior but you become less able to pay it,because you, in the meantime, you will suffer the consequences of willfulblindness. Yeah.

00:07:58:12 Tim: And so there's delay, delay, delay, andthere's an accrual of unintended consequences as you go down the road too. Soall these things are happening. Yeah.

00:08:12:10 Junior: So when we spin up that story and wechoose the one that's easiest for us, often we're going to do that in one ofthree ways.

00:08:22:11 Tim: Victim, storytelling, responsibilityhoarding, and shame enforcement. Those are the three patterns of derailment.And as we talk about those three derailers, I hope that we can all beintrospective, open and honest with ourselves about which ones we lean toward.You're not gonna fall squarely into one camp. You're going to have tendencies.You're going to lean a direction. You're going to have patterns. And being openand honest about what your patterns are is the price that the learning taxrequires in the shortest term. So deferring the learning tax in today's episodewould look something like, first of all, finding this completely irrelevant andnot listening. Can't do that. Have to listen to the end of the episode and giveus a like and subscribe if you really want to learn now, I'm just kidding. Butit would be listening to this episode and doing nothing about it, right? Notfinding yourself in one of those patterns, saying that's somebody else, it'snot entirely me, and that can be problematic. And let me just clarify. When wesay accountability for this episode, we're talking about personalaccountability. We're talking about the accountability that is relevant inleading yourself. We're not talking about holding others accountable, right?We're in the first domain, it's lead self, and this is an essential skill inthat domain. I just want to clarify that. Yeah. It's the basis for allaccountability. That is important to understand. The principles do apply toholding other people accountable, but you have to start here. If you can'tlearn to do that well, then certainly you won't be able to do it well withothers. That brings up another pattern. Sorry to interrupt you. No, keep doingit. If you don't hold yourself accountable, if you don't exercise personalaccountability in the first domain of lead self,

00:10:14:14 Junior: and you persist in that pattern, thenhow will you hold others accountable?

00:10:21:12 Tim: You're gonna try. You're gonna try. We seeit all the time, but how do people, how do managers, how do leaders hold othersaccountable when they don't hold themselves accountable? Because they sure try,we see it.

00:10:34:21 Junior: Well, one pattern is, perhaps the mostpervasive pattern is,

00:10:39:09 Tim: they hide behind title and position andauthority. They hide behind these artifacts that the organization has giventhem. What else are you going to do? Yeah.

00:10:52:01 Junior: Right? Yep.

00:10:54:05 Tim: You're not leading with the credibility ofyour example.

00:10:57:17 Junior: You're not modeling the way. What elseare you gonna do? If you're hiding behind title, position, authority, and youtry to hold a high performer accountable, they're gonna tell you to pound sand.That's right. Okay, so we're asking this fundamental question, when things gowrong, what story does your mind tell?

00:11:18:03 Tim: Accountability collapses when you can'taccurately assess what went wrong. So think about that and think about the talktherapy track that you were going down is very interesting. The cost islearning. We've been talking about the learning tax. We're going to learn- Orprogress or development. Right, but what progress or development is therewithout learning? There is none. There is none. But it's under that heading. Itis. If you don't have learning, there is no progress. So let's talk about thefirst pattern, victim storytelling. This is the most common failure pattern andit's the hardest to see because it often feels like thinking.

00:11:54:05 Tim: Something goes wrong and to our originalexample, we start doing what? We start thinking, but before you've evengathered the facts, like this happens subconsciously, right? It's thatunbeknownst to us system activity that's going on. We start constructing thenarrative and the story. It's sophisticated. It has nuance. It acknowledges allof the complexity and yet somehow in this pattern, it concludes that the corefailure was not ours. That is the pattern. So Junior, this tendency to moveinto storytelling and construct a narrative is the most, the single most commonform of dissonance reduction. Is that not true? And dissidents. And dissidents,yeah. That's true. That's right. And I would say to add to that explanation,it's reflexive. It doesn't feel intentional every time. It's not that you sitthere deliberately and spin up the story, okay, this is this, yes, yeah, thatfeels good. No, it's subconscious, it's reflexive. And we acknowledged in theprevious episode that so much of that is biological. We're part of a tribe. Youwanna stay part of the tribe. You don't wanna get kicked out in a Siberianwinter and have to go fend for yourself. You have to have other people likeyou. That's important, but at what price? In today's day and age, you're notgonna get kicked into the Siberian winter, but maybe you're not in thein-group. Maybe it's politically expensive. So these things do haveinterpersonal costs. So what are the tells?

00:13:30:05 Tim: You can explain what went wrong in detail,the circumstances, the constraints, the other people's contributions, but youstruggle to say clearly what you would do differently. Your postmortems areheavy on context, light on personal counterfactuals. You notice externalfactors before you notice controllable factors. The same kinds of failures keephappening with different external explanations every time. When someonesuggests you played a larger role, your first instinct is to defend rather thaninvestigate. You're better at describing what happened than at describing whatyou learned. I like that one very much. So overall, I think what you could say,Junior, is that as you are constructing your story,

00:14:11:17 Junior you never get to an honest root causeanalysis.

00:14:16:21 Tim: You don't isolate that root cause, takeresponsibility for it. You don't do that. You have an external locus ofcontrol. That's right.

00:14:27:12 Junior: If you're looking continually,reflexively as a pattern at the environment and saying, "I am onlyaffected by this environment, and I have very little affect to thisenvironment," in a technical sense, that's problematic. And you can startto see, each of us have our own patterns, but we certainly can see the patternsof others who fall into this category.

00:14:54:20 Tim: How much do you want this person on yourteam? How much do you want this person as a friend? How much do you want thisperson as an advisor, as a confidant? Well, often what happens is you get twopeople in this category who display the same pattern, and we just seecommiseration, right? We throw our hands up, we raise the right white flag andnothing happens. We cry in our beard together. That's right. That's what we do.That's right. You and I are gonna go do that after the next, no, I'm justkidding. It lets us off the hook. It's an easy thing to do and it often feelsgood. And the fact of the matter is that you can't be responsible for everysingle thing, and that's where the nuance lives. And so as we progress throughthese 3D railers, hopefully you start to see, and I certainly have the level ofspecificity that's required, the level of nuance, and as we describedpreviously, how this becomes an art form.

00:15:44:21 Tim: So what's the cost? Compounding repetition.That's even upstream from the learning. What this means is that we're justgonna do the same thing every time because you can't fix what you refuse toown. And that's the principle underneath this repetition. So if we keep doingthe same thing and we're not owning the outcome, then certainly we're destinedto repeat again and again and again. Did you ever read the book "AnimalFarm Junior" by Orwell? Yes, required reading. Required reading. Yeah, it wasincredible. I just remember, and it was a long time ago, I think maybe, I don'tknow, maybe it was high school, but I just remember the horse saying,"I'll work harder."

00:16:23:18 Junior: So that's what comes to mind, "I'llwork harder." Okay, well, that's not gonna be the solution if you don'tunderstand the cause and effect mechanism and what's going on, right? Yeah, butI would say that reflexively, that's often not the pattern of people who fallinto this category, is just working harder. I think part of it is- Part of itis. Part of it is just a refusal to acknowledge that you played a role in theoutcome. That's even worse. Was more than you thought. That's what you wouldlike to think. So what's the fix? The fix is making reality the boss. The fixis humility. That is the antidote, and we're going to talk about that as we getinto the sub skills. Let's talk about derailer number two. This is the oppositeerror. So you'll notice as a pattern with all of these derailers that we haveunder use, overuse, and misuse. So as we go throughout the Core 15, that willbe the pattern. So when we look at victim storytelling, that's the under use ofaccountability. Can you overuse accountability? Yes, you can. Yes. And I wouldpose that question to all of the listeners out there. That's what's nuancedabout the model. You can overuse every single one of the skills. There'spathology that lives at both extremes. That's right. And so do you want to-- Tyrannyat the extremes. Better way to describe it, it's true. Tyranny is interestingbecause you become beholden to the tyrant that is that pull. That's exactlyright. Love it. Okay, responsibility hoarding. If you're a high performer, thisone might be yours. So if I start going down this derailer and the alarm bellsare going off for you, then it might be you. So something goes wrong. Back tothe original example, instead of deflecting and going outward, you collapseinward.

00:18:12:20 Tim: It's my fault, I should have caught that. Ishould have known, it's on me. It sounds like accountability. It can feel likeaccountability, but it's not.

00:18:24:12 Junior: Responsibility hoarding isaccountability overused into distorted responsibility. What does this mean? Youown everything in a way that's emotionally punishing and operationallyunhelpful. You absorb problems that belong to systems, context or shared execution.It looks like high ownership, but it produces poor leverage. Tell me about thisone.

00:18:46:11 Tim: Junior, it's a codependent tendency aswell.

00:18:50:11 Junior: Can be. Is it? Tell me more. Well, Ithink it is because you might be raising your hand all the time, right? I'lltake that, I'll take that, I'll take that.

00:18:59:09 Tim: And so that can be reallycounterproductive.

00:19:03:18 Junior: So I just think, I just wanted to pointthat out because I think we have to acknowledge that sometimes that happens,right?

00:19:10:12 Tim: So you can see very clearly how this is theoveruse of what in theory is an excellent principle. I'm gonna takeaccountability, right? You think about Jaco's extreme ownership and you havepeople who embody that principle. The piece here that I think is mostinsightful to me is the second thing that I shared. You absorb problems thatbelong to systems, context or shared execution. And then you're getting in theway. Exactly. You're making it even more complicated and you're delaying theresolution. Yep, and the consequence is poor leverage. So you're not helping,you're hurting.

00:19:48:17 Junior: And it may feel useful in the moment andin the shortest term, maybe the thing gets done, but that's not a reliable wayto solve the problem. So here are the tells. You absorb responsibility forthings that were genuinely beyond your control. You apologize for outcomes thathad multiple causes as if you were the only cause. Your self-talk afterfailures is punishing rather than diagnostic. You become the sink for everyproblem, the one who will own it when no one else will.

00:20:16:13 Tim: People learn to let you carry thingsbecause you always will. You're exhausted and you've made it a moral failure toadmit that the exhaustion is unsustainable. And then you yourself probably gothrough cycles of feeling useful and needed and then feeling discarded andused.

00:20:38:16 Junior: Very dangerous.

00:20:40:22 Tim: So we have to pull ourselves out. I lovewhat you said. You first have to get up in your hot air balloon and look at thesystem in a very objective way to understand what is the nature of the problem,what is the nature of the cause

00:20:56:07 Junior and be as dispassionate and as objectiveas you can as you're looking at it. Get yourself, pull yourself out of theequation. It's not about you.

00:21:08:08 Tim: I wanna talk about the learning tax as itapplies to this derailleur because it's less obvious. In the first pattern ofunder use, it's clear that you're not gonna learn. You're not even involved,right? It's completely externalized to you. This one, at a glance, you mightthink, well, yeah, of course you're gonna learn because you're the one in it.You're taking it, but back to the systems point and the leverage point, you arekicking the can down the road for systems and process and leverage. That's theprice that you pay. That's the learning tax. And so yeah, you're learning in atechnical sense what to do right, what's do what is right in front of you. Butwhat you're not doing is figuring out how to build team to solve the biggerproblem. I have a comment on that. So I think there's some real ignoranceassociated with this pathology as well, because you have to understand thenature of a team. A team is a system.

00:22:08:10 Junior: A team is the basic unit of performance.A team functions based on coordinated behavior, their specialization, there'sinterdependency in the way that we create value. So seldom is there thismonocausal line that takes us back to, here's the cause and it's you. That'sjust not reality. It's a good point. So you have to understand the context andthe mechanism of how a team works. A team works through coordinated behavior

00:22:43:10 Tim: because we have specialization,

00:22:46:08 Junior we have value that is brought together ina complex way. There's interdependency. And so you gotta bring thatintelligence and that understanding to the issue all the time, because that'show we do work. This is the nature of the complexity of our work. I think I canspeak to this one because I've done it so often. I've fallen prey to this moretimes than I can count. And your impulse when you've built identity andpersonality this way, is just jump in and take it. And you feel like you'rebeing useful. You feel like you're taking accountability, you're beingresponsible, but I can vouch for the fact that you lose leverage because you'renot solving for the thing at the level of the system. It is not useful to youand it is not useful for your team. So I'm trying to learn this every day. Andsometimes it takes the form of firefighting and heroism. I'm gonna charge, goin there, I'm gonna solve the problem. Well, and sometimes you gotta do that.You do. So if I were to have someone lean a direction, probably have them leanthis way. Okay. Probably have them air on this side. At least they want to takeresponsibility. At least you care, at least you're doing something. That'sright, that's right.

00:24:05:14 Tim: Okay, so what is the antidote toresponsibility hoarding? Clear ownership.

00:24:12:22 Junior: Not less ownership, clearer ownership.

00:24:16:18 Tim: Last one, shame enforcement. This is thethird derailleur. This is the misuse of accountability. Something goes wrong,our original example. And immediately your mind goes haunting. But thenarrative is different. You're looking for who did this? Who dropped the ball?Somebody needs to own this. And you start asking accountability questionsbecause you're the accountability person, right? You use ownership language,but the goal isn't learning, it's assignment.

00:24:47:17 Junior: You're using the same attachment to thefailure. So the failure has a place to live that isn't with you. I love that.Shame enforcement is misusing accountability to produce compliance throughsocial threat instead of improvement through learning.

00:25:01:12 Tim: The social piece of this is interesting andcomplicated. You're preying on the fact that people understand or at least feelthe social implications. And you're using that in disguise to your ownadvantage.

00:25:17:09 Tim: You're looking from a collaborative modelto an adversarial model. You're looking for blame. You're looking to placeblame and fix fault, right? So you've turned it into that. And many of us haveprobably met people who do this. So on the slide, you'll see compliance throughsocial threat. As I said, that's the tool in the toolkit of these people.Compliance through social threat. And what is the price improvement throughlearning? So again, we're paying that learning tax at a personal and at a teamlevel. And we're saying, we're going to avoid the learning necessary to solvethe problem. And we're just going to assign fault. Well, Junior, think aboutwhat this does. Think about if you're a team leader

00:26:04:16 Junior: and you have a team of eight people

00:26:07:13 Tim: and you're working on an issue andsomething goes wrong. And you as the team leader, you pull out this tool ofshame enforcement. And so you're on the hunt, right? On the errand ofaccountability, mind you.

Yes. And that's why it might appear righteous. Like I'm onaccountability's errand and I'm here to enforce it. Right, but think about whatthat does. When you take that posture and that attitude and that approach,think about what your team does.

00:26:38:19 Junior: So you are now infusing the team withfear

00:26:45:06 Tim: as soon as that happens, you break thefeedback loop. Everyone moves from an offensive posture to a defensive posture.So this is now you've turned, you've moved people into a defensive routine.

00:27:02:10 Junior: So now they're retreating, they arewithdrawing, they are playing defense. Think about the ramifications for notonly you, but for the entire team to learn. So that learning tax is massive.

00:27:18:00 Tim: That learning tax is compounding to theentire team. They're not in a learning frame of mind.

00:27:27:04 Junior: They're now, they're playing defense.

00:27:30:10 Tim: So now it's about, it truly is about lossavoidance and personal protection. We're not learning, playing defense.

00:27:41:08 Junior: Let's talk more about how it shows uppractically. After a miss, you focus on who's responsible before you focus onwhat went wrong. Your post mortems feel more like trials than investigations.

00:27:52:13 Tim: People have started being careful aboutwhat they tell you because they've seen what happens to the person holding theball when the music stops. Problems go underground longer because surfacingthem early means being blamed for them. You've justified this pattern as highstandards and holding people accountable. The team has learned that mistakesare dangerous so they optimize for deniability over transparency. Instead ofthe mistakes being clinical material for learning.

00:28:20:23 Junior: And to your point that you've made, Idon't know how many times did the mistakes go away? No, they just get hiddenbetter. And so the team optimizes for concealment. And so the errors just getpushed under a rug. They don't stop happening. They probably continue happeningor happen more often and become less visible. I heard an interview the otherday, junior with Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan.

00:28:50:14 Tim: And he said, one of the things he said thatI liked, he just said, "Mistakes and errors, they don't age well."

00:28:59:02 Junior: Love it. They don't age well. It's true.They don't go away. They compound. More often than not. Right?

00:29:06:01 Tim: The learning tax grows and then the cost ofthose mistakes grows as well.

00:29:12:09 Junior: So what happens to you culturally? Theculture starts to protect itself first and improve second. That's reallyinteresting. Yeah. So, and does the improvement ever happen at all? If it does,then it comes second. Love that. And where reliability erodes because thesystem punishes the very candor accountability requires.

00:29:34:11 Tim: So the fix is reorienting to what? Awayfrom blame and to design.

00:29:40:12 Junior: What broke, not who broke it.

00:29:44:02 Tim: So those are the three. The three derailersfor accountability that represent it's under use, it's overuse and it's misuse.Now let's talk about the solution.

00:29:55:03 Tim: Accountability as a system broken up intothree component parts. So we've talked about the three not to dos. We're gonnatalk about the three to dos. The imperative again, tell no soothing stories.It's definition. Accurate causal attribution plus behavior change. Love that.Both. A system that converts failure into learning. That is what we are afterin accountability. There's nothing inherently valuable about accountability. Ithas to produce a learning outcome that you mentioned earlier is progress, is development.That's what it transforms into. But if there's no acknowledgement of thefailure and our role in it, then we can't move. So we can't pass it go. Again,Junior, the fundamental distinction.

00:30:46:01 Junior: A mistake that leads to learning versusa mistake that leads to protection.

00:30:55:12 Tim: There's a fork in the road. Yeah. Youextract lessons faster, adjust behavior more readily and compound judgment morequickly than those still trapped in self-protective narratives. So if you thinkabout this competitively, so just pull out the morality of it and you just lookthrough a competitive lens, you will smash everybody who doesn't do this well.If you can learn how to take mistakes and failures and turn them very quicklyinto learning. If you are constantly tuned into that and looking all the timethrough that lens, you'll be able to make progress much faster. And we talkedabout how the learning tax compounds, the actual learning that does happen alsocompounds.

00:31:40:19 Junior: So if you can do that early, then howmuch better could you be than the competition, again, talking through acompetitive lens across a certain time horizon, not marginally better, notlinearly better, exponentially better, especially with the toolkit of today.And that's interesting when we look at it through a 2026 lens. I look at thetoolkit available to us and how someone who takes accountability and isoriented toward learning, the progress that they can make in a day isunbelievable.

00:32:17:15 Tim: And so you best believe that you will beleft behind if you don't understand this principle. Let's just summarize thatagain, Junior, that's worth underscoring both learning or the learning tax willcompound. Yeah.

00:32:33:19 Junior: And that's, you can choose, but one ofthose things will be true.

00:32:40:07 Tim: And it's not binary. So if you just learnmore faster than your exponential curve will move faster than everybody else's.And so it's not binary and it's not that, well, the tax and then you go down orthe learning and you go up, it's the rate of change. And so if it truly iscompounding and you make a massive credit to the account today, then later, Imean, it won't matter when someone tries to catch up in five years becauseyou'll be so far gone, they can't even see you. That's right.

00:33:10:12 Junior: Okay, sub skill one, humility, makereality the boss. Humility is letting reality outrank your ego. Tell us alittle bit about humility. Why of all the things we could choose,

00:33:25:18 Tim: we've got three opportunities in sub skillsto get at the heart of accountability. Why is humility the first thing? I liketo define humility, Jr. as the unresented acknowledgement of two things.

00:33:46:02 Junior: Number one, your ignorance. Number two,your dependency.

00:33:52:13 Tim: That's my favorite definition. Theunresented acknowledgement of your ignorance and your dependency.

00:33:59:12 Junior: And so make reality the boss, that's theanswer. Humility is acknowledging those two things. When you do that, you'renot going to pay that learning tax.

00:34:12:05 Tim: Is the discipline of grounding judgments infacts, feedback and verifiable metrics and treating the facts as friendly evenwhen they sting. So you mentioned the unresenting. Unresenting as a qualifieris super important because in this one, we're saying treat the facts asfriendly even when they sting. If you have a whole bunch of resentment towardreality and it's a resenting acknowledgement of your dependency and yourignorance, you won't develop as quickly. Jr. Carl Rogers is the one that coinedthat term, the facts are always friendly. And he was talking about that in thecontext of a clinical relationship

00:34:51:23 Junior where people are trying to get better.

00:34:54:18 Tim: And he said, yes, the facts might convictyou at the beginning, they may be bitter, they may be stinging, they may behurtful, but ultimately they are your friends. So don't push them aside, don'tdeny them, don't cover them, don't ignore them.

00:35:13:08 Junior: The facts are always friendly.

00:35:15:16 Tim: I can't remember who said this, but andI'll paraphrase, but mental health is confronting reality at all costs andmental illness is avoiding reality at all costs. So there's thisacknowledgement of reality that lives inside humility, like a deep understanding,again, to your definition of those two things, your ignorance and yourdependence.

00:35:39:05 Junior: Okay, so you separate narrative fromknowledge by testing assumptions, comparing leading and lagging indicators,actively inviting disconfirming input.

00:35:49:13 Tim: I like that piece of active invitation. Soit's not just, well, if good feedback comes my way, then so be it, you know,and we'll look. This is hard. But it's active invitation.

00:36:02:07 Junior: I have seen that in a couple of placesin the last week inside our organization. And it's interesting to watch thathappen in action when people are actively looking for ways to improve.

00:36:16:18 Tim: Some people might look at that and say,well, I don't wanna disclose my weakness. We already know you're ignorant anddependent. We all are, right? Well, I said-- It's useful to just acknowledgethat and say, hey, what can I do? What am I missing? We had a conversation justa few days ago. And I think I said to you, I'm happy to be wrong. But in theback of your head, you're still saying, well, I hope I'm not wrong. I reallydon't want to be wrong. Totally. But I remember saying that, and indeed,

00:36:47:14 Junior: I'm quite certain that I was wrong.

00:36:50:10 Tim: And as I look at it now, I'm very, verygrateful to have been wrong so that we can go forward making the rightdecisions.

00:37:01:12 Junior: So that's just, it happens. And happyand wrong is a really high bar. I think it's totally reasonable for you to goto someone and say, I am willing to be unhappy and wrong.

00:37:13:21 Tim: I'm willing to be wrong. I reserve theright to be unhappy about it, but so be it and I'll get over it. Happy andwrong is a tall order. At least not at first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, what elsedo you do? You replace spin with clarity. What was observed, what was measured,and what it means for the next decision? And when data conflict with yourstory, story yields. You stay ruthless about the facts and respectful about thepeople. Quick checks. I actively look for evidence and feedback that couldprove my view wrong. Do we do that? I revise my conclusions when the factsdon't support my initial story. Do we do that? I base my judgments onverifiable information rather than on ego protection. So those are someinteresting things to ask ourselves. Do we do those things? Let's go tosub-skill two, ownership.

00:38:08:10 Junior: Amputate the excuse.

00:38:11:12 Tim: Amputate the excuse. That's a powerfulverb, Junior.

00:38:15:19 Junior: Words matter. Amputate the excuse. Wechose this one on purpose. Yes, we did. So are any of you excuse amputees?Would be another interesting question. How often are we willing to let go ofthe excuse and say, good riddance, get away from me. That's enough. Because weuse them all the time. Notice the connection between the second sub- skill andthe first sub-skill. So amputating the excuse connects back to humility. If youcannot acknowledge your ignorance and dependence, there's little chance thatyou will have a desire and a willingness and even a capability to amputate yourexcuse. So the one precedes the other. The one is a precondition for the other.Yeah. Well, you can see with this one, how achieving the perfection of theskill is close to impossible and how it truly does live on a nice edge. Becausewe talked about the fact that you can't control every single outcome. There arevariables out of your reach and that there's such a thing as taking too muchresponsibility. Yet we're also telling you amputate the excuse. That's right.And so you have to come from both sides, take every situation by itself andfigure out exactly how much responsibility is due, is useful, would be best foreveryone in this scenario. And also, is there an excuse living somewhere thatshouldn't be there? Is there an excuse somewhere that is totally reasonable butI shouldn't talk about? It's a dance. It's an art form. It is. And the balance,the need for the balance doesn't go away. It's constant. Yeah. So if you lookat the quick checks on the slide, I clearly state my role in an outcome beforediscussing external factors. I identify what I could have controlled and what Iwill do differently learning. I take responsibility promptly rather thanwaiting to see how others respond. And I like the back half of that thirdbullet rather than waiting to see how others respond. A lot of people willwait. They'll take cues from the room and then they'll decide what they wannado. What are the politics of the room? Where are they leaning? Let's conduct apoll. And let's see before I say anything. That's right.

00:40:48:15 Tim: Okay, sub-scale three, correction, embodythe insight. So this is where the learning actually happens.

We've been talking about learning. We've been talking aboutlearning tax, but what do we actually do? What's the causal mechanism? Embodythe insight. Convert insight into behavior change, which is accountability'sproof.

00:41:08:08 Junior: So if you wanna put it simply, how canyou demonstrate accountability? What's its proof? Behavior change. Learning,positive behavior change. If you can show that you've changed positively overtime, we know necessarily that you've embodied to some degree accountability.And I think you could say behavioral change, but then we keep going. It'scharacter change, it's skill change, it's capability change, because we'removing through that progression of knowing and then doing and then being. Andwe've gotta keep going.

00:41:47:19 Tim: But again, deliberate choice of words here,junior, embody the insight. Do you wanna just say a word about that? We talkedabout that. And we kinda wrestle with that one a little bit. Yeah, I thinkabout body in a literal sense this way. It's incorporeal. It's something that'sin us. It's who we are. We are the length and shadow of the insight that weintegrated into our own life. You gotta bring it in. You are the learning.

00:42:20:04 Junior: To me, that's the ultimate integration.And so I like the word embody in this application because we're saying, andinsight is also an important word. And Jillian mentioned this before theepisode. Insight is bite-sized.

00:42:37:06 Tim: It's not an elephant that you have to eatall at once. You can do it.

00:42:41:12 Junior: Insight's like, oh, there's just alittle thing. Okay. Right? I can handle that. Oh, this thing clicked in my mindor I saw some light over here.

00:42:50:10 Tim: I learned a little thing that might changeother things. If you can take those in a cumulative sense, it's huge volume.It's massive. It's the idea of marginal gains. If you can get 1% here, half apercent here, that compounds too. And so we're not saying go learn every lessonthere is to learn in one week. We're saying, no, if you have a 1% insight, athing that could be a little bit better, tone that you could change by fivedegrees, do that. If something clicks for you, you don't have to do it to perfection.That's not now your new responsibility, but just do it a little bit better. Andif you can do that pretty soon, you are the proof of your learning. That'sright. And that's to me, like the ultimate expression of progress is ifsomebody can look at you and your behavior and reverse engineer all of thelessons you've learned. They look at what's happening, the choices you'remaking, and they're not saying like, well, it's not mysterious, right? Theycould look and say, well, of course accountability is here because of behaviorone, two, three. We know that this person is high integrity because of this,this, and this. And what are you other than your decisions? You're just theamalgamations of all the choices you make. And so there you go. And it goes back,I love that. It goes back to, well, again, we're talking about leading self,first domain.

00:44:21:11 Junior: The second domain is to lead a team.

00:44:25:10 Tim: So the connection there is very clearbecause if you're doing this, if you do incorporate, if you do apply, if you dointegrate, then you are able to model. And then as we like to say, right? Itgoes back to the work of Albert Bandura, how do people learn?

00:44:43:03 Junior: Observation, they're watching you.Imitation, they're imitating you.

00:44:48:19 Tim: So that is now, you do have a platform ofcredibility

00:44:54:20 Junior: and a reason to be able to lead and ajustification to be able to lead a team. Without that, you can't do it. Well,let me make a point here. We're often asked, obviously in our line of work,like how do we develop our leaders? To me, the most simple tried answer is be agood one.

00:45:15:20 Tim: Be a good one. If we learn throughobservation and the modeling behavior of other people, just be a good one. Likehow much better are you as a leader if you have a good leader in front of you?Way better. And obviously that's right. There are a lot of things that we cando, but that's the simplest answer. And so how do you have good impact? How doyou have good influence? Well, embody these things, embody the insight. Junior,it reminds me of a client that we have, a beloved client for many years. And amantra that they have in their organization is,

00:45:53:18 Junior they always want to know what does goodlook like? What does good look like? Show me what good looks like with this,with this, with that, everything. Show me what good looks like. I need to seeit embodied. I need to see it demonstrated. I need to see it manifested.Otherwise it's theory.

00:46:12:01 Tim: Otherwise it's an abstraction. So show mewhat good looks like. I love that. Well, I think to that pointYou've got tooperationalize it. To that point, that's probably one of the biggest tragediesthat could be true in leadership is if you've never had the opportunity to seewhat good looks like. And so I hope that everybody has opportunity to have aleader that they can look at and say,

00:46:36:18 Junior: "Holy smokes, it is for real."This is what good looks like. Yeah, this is what good looks like. Notperfection. No, but good. But good. And I can imitate that. I can look at themodeling behavior. I can observe and I can infer choices. That's right. Well,okay, they're probably gonna do this thing, which means that I can do thatthing if presented with the same situation. So yeah, that's a really powerfulprinciple.

00:47:01:14 Tim: Okay, let's talk about application. Let'sgo back to the situation. A major product launch underperformed. Multiplefactors, delayed features, market timing, competitor moves, coordinationissues, and calls you made that were wrong. You are the one leading theretrospective. So let's talk about the derailers. If you're going to get intovictim storytelling, well, given the constraints, we did well. We did the bestwe could. The world was against us and there was bad weather and it's alwaysbad weather and so on, right? So you can tell the story.

00:47:35:05 Junior: Or responsibility hoarding, you guys,I'm so sorry. It's completely my fault. I should have seen every last one ofthese variables. It's on me, right? Should have escalated earlier. My bad, mybad, right? My bad.

No. Please. And then shame enforcement. So this was theoutcome. Hey everybody, so who missed their deliverables? Right. What happenedhere, everybody? I wanna see hands, right?

00:48:02:00 Tim: And it's masquerading as accountability.I'm using ownership language, but it's pathological. It's the misuse ofaccountability.

00:48:09:04 Junior: So what does it look like if we do itright? We employ all three sub skills, humility. What are the facts show?Because I know I'm ignorant. What feedback am I resisting?

00:48:19:00 Tim: Ownership, what specifically did I control?What would I do differently?

00:48:23:15 Junior: Correction, what change in behavior orsystems will prevent this in the future? And how will I know if it worked? Inother words, what does good look like? And how do we get closer to it? So youcan see all of the patterns that we can take that are derailment. We can seeall of where all of the quicksand lies. And we can also see the patterns ofsuccess. If you can take all three of those sub skills and embody those, wow,you're going to learn fast. That's going to compound. And you're going to getway ahead.

00:48:56:11 Tim: Learning is inherently valuable. Yeah. Itis. (Laughs)

00:49:03:06 Junior: But next to that, very, very close tothat is learning's application. And so if you can embody the insight, again,which is that third sub skills imperative, then you can make tremendousprogress very quickly. And that's useful to you. It's useful to everybodyaround you. The consequences ripple. And if you aspire to have good influence,then it's incumbent upon you to do these three things and do them well. Andmake it seriously, to look at it as a progression, to look at it as a spectrumand to improve by degrees.

00:49:36:16 Tim: What are your final thoughts? I can't helpbut think of two roads diverged in a wood. Yeah. And I took the one lesstraveled by. Mr. Frost. Learning or learning tax.

00:49:54:14 Junior: Which one do you want? Yeah.

00:49:58:02 Tim: That's where the divergence comes. And itcomes over and over. There's another saying that if a path has no obstacles, itprobably doesn't lead anywhere.

00:50:08:02 Junior: And so you can think about that path.It's probably useful to envision it. And the one that looks a little bitfraught, the one that looks a little more taxing, it's probably the one youshould walk down. Almost always. And it will be deeply uncomfortable, but thejourney to good leadership is deeply uncomfortable.

00:50:26:22 Tim: But it is worth the price. And that's thepoint, that's why we're here. That's why we share this material. That's why wedo the work we do with our clients. Our aspiration is to help you become abetter leader. It's to become better leaders ourselves. And there's a lot inhere that if applied, can help achieve that end.

00:50:43:14 NARRATION

So thank you everybody for joining us in today's episode.We're going to be putting these out every single week as part of the Core 15series. So if you haven't seen the ones that preceded this episode, go back,we're still in the lead self domain. We've got a couple more skills to do tofinish this one out. And then we'll move on to team and then organization. Soif you want all 15, stay tuned, subscribe so you don't miss any, and we'll seeyou in the next one. Take care everybody. Have a good rest of your week.(Upbeat Music)

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