I was reminded of a powerful reality when I was on a video call with a client recently. Her shoulders were low, she was talking more quietly than usual, and she explained that she had no luck again this week as she was ‘looking for a job.’ And I could visibly see the fatigue in her whole energy field. It was like she had been on a weekend fishing trip and didn’t get one nibble for all the time she had spent. What I know about fishing is unless you do it for sport (i.e. challenge and/or money), most people do it to be out in nature and to relax. The actual catching of a fish is a nice to have.

As a Career Coach & Advisor, I equate ‘looking for a job’ to fishing, channel surfing and online shopping – they are things you do when you are relaxing OR there is nothing else to do. Read that sentence again. If you are currently looking for your next job, think about the energy you have when you are doing any of those things. Your eyes are glazed over. You’re likely bored. You might even be confused or withdrawn. If you get my point, THAT is not the energy or intention you want to put out in the universe in relation to acquiring your next job – especially your dream job.

So, getting back to my client…I challenged her to consider changing what she says to herself from ‘looking for a job’ to calling it ‘job acquisition activity.’ I recommended she say to herself, ‘I believe my job is out there. I am taking intentional actions that will help me acquire the job for me.’ While, I get that some of you might think it is woo woo, there is science that shows a small change in semantics – changes your brain and in doing so, it changes your outlook which in turn changes your energy. 

The next week when we spoke, my client was sitting up straight, she had excitement in her voice and told me about the clarity she had over the weekend.  By making that small change to call it ‘job acquisition activity,’ her brain started helping her find clarity and really get clear on her end goal. She could articulate the elements of the position she was seeking. She had written a short list of companies in the industry she wanted to be in, had researched and found they provided services she is passionate about, and then saw several of the companies even had jobs posted that she was qualified to do. The energy of being intentional in how she spent her time was infectious – even over zoom. She had also completed two inquiry calls with colleagues in her support network. With her new found clarity, she was able to tell them what jobs were of interest to her and asked for any introductions they could help with.   

If you are actively job seeking and you use the terminology ‘looking for a job’ in the same tone of voice and with the same energy you would if you were going fishing, channel surfing, or online shopping — here are 3 simple tips I challenge you to use this week:

1.     Limit the time you spend and label that time as ‘Job Acquisition.’ Schedule small amounts of time on your calendar that have a start and stop time and honor that time; you have to balance having a life outside of your search while you work to attain your dream position. 

2.     Pick times of the day when you feel energetic and good about self to do your job acquisition activity and use that to your advantage. When you feel good about yourself, you make better decisions. Remind yourself of your accomplishments and when you felt like the best version of you at work. Then, commence job acquisition.

3.     If you find your eyes glazing over, you feel bored, confused, or have lost your sense of purpose – get up from the chair. Walk around. Stretch. And maybe even walk some flights of stairs to get your pulse going before you go back to it. [Hiring managers don’t hire people with energy of a person without a pulse.]

You all know from other articles I’ve posted that I have interviewed thousands of candidates in my 20+ year HR and talent recruiting career. While job experience, behavioral competencies and potential are important factors in hiring, your energy is also a thing. Consider it part of culture fit. Feel free to re-read my article on that by clicking here https://cindygoyette.com/finding-your-tribe-how-culture-fit-affects-your-job-search/

Candidates get hired who exude positive energy appropriate to the job they seek. For all you introverts who just gasped, I don’t mean you have to be someone you are not. But, when you are clear about your goal job and you talk about what you love to do, your eyes light up, your posture changes, and that energy is what helps you get hired. Try it this week and let me know how it goes for you. YOU MATTER.

People Matter in Business.

Cindy Goyette, CC, SPHR, MA is a Certified Career & Leadership Coach. Her clients include executives, management professionals and non-traditional job seekers who no longer want to go through the motions but instead have a job that LIGHTS THEM UP where they can be their BEST SELVES at work. By exploring cumulative work and life experience, interests and transferrable skills – Cindy works with clients to align with the same role, or a new career, where they can have greater job satisfaction in the second half of their careers. 

Until recently, I had been through 9 company acquisitions. In a 12-year span, I sat on integration teams on both sides of mergers and acquisitions that ranged from multi-million to multi-billion-dollar deals that affected approximately 1,000 employees. All the companies involved were successful, thriving businesses experiencing some of their strongest financial years when the deal was struck. 

I once asked a hotshot acquisition attorney after he bragged about the many deals he’d closed that year, “When [in a deal] do you ever talk about PEOPLE?? (i.e. employees in the business?)” He audibly scoffed at me saying, “NEVER!” Quickly followed up by, “Who ARE YOU, anyway?” Story of my life. Seeing it again and for the 10th time, I know the cold, hard fact is…business acquisitions are about money. Let that sink in because you need to know this fact. Especially, if your company has recently been acquired and you are taking the news personally. These deals are not about people.

If you know me, or have read any of my blogs over the years, you know that I teach (and preach) that all businesses at their core are about PEOPLE. More specifically, they are about HUMAN BEINGS and their BEHAVIORS which can help, or hinder, a business’s ability to be profitable or not. And while there has been an increased emergence of conscious leaders in businesses today – most leaders still don’t ‘get’ this concept. They show they don’t get it after they receive huge, post-sale paychecks and retire to a warm beach — completely oblivious to the plight of the loyal human beings who helped their financial success. 

From the human perspective, I describe an acquisition as a collision. A head on collision of two successful companies going 100 mph toward their goal, crashing at full speed and sending human shrapnel flying everywhere. In one sentence, “We’ve been acquired,” a leader throws once focused, wildly talented humans abruptly into a state of shock, then anger, then fear, then extreme disillusionment. Post acquisition environments are full of raw human emotion. Politics are heightened and people who were once teammates and friends, turn against each other to compete for a smaller number of chairs (i.e. jobs) that decreased due to redundancy. At the very time when leaders need to step up and be more available to people, more directive about what people need to do, more transparent and more communicative, they ghost the very people who would’ve jumped off a cliff for them if they’d asked them to, who trusted and followed them, only to be left without a sincere Thank You — or even their job.

“When you know better, you do better.” — Maya Angelou

I wrote this article and advice in honor of the passionate, hardworking and self-less workforce at Major Medical/Rocky Mountain Medical Equipment (and to anyone else going through change from an acquisition). Here goes:

• Don’t Take It Personally. Acquisitions are all about money, really.
• Leaders will disappoint you at some point because they are people, too.
• You are the only one who has your back. You are 100% responsible for you, your happiness and your career path. 
• There are aspects to any job that you will have to do that you don’t like – or believe in – but are still part of the job you are paid to do. 
• Stay competent in your craft so you keep a healthy level of confidence in your skills at all times. 
• Your talent is cumulative of your work and life experience. Remember…that is your ‘full package’ and it has value.
• You are needed and wanted somewhere – so find the place that wants and appreciates you.
• Keep Doing Your Best because your work ethic, integrity and reputation follow you where you go.
• Be You! You are Enough.

YOU MATTER. 

PEOPLE MATTER in Business.

Cindy Goyette, CC, SPHR, MA – cindygoyette.com 2019

One of the biggest trends in talent recruiting is company’s screening candidates for ‘culture fit’.  And, even though culture fit has been a best practice in talent and recruiting strategy for decades in more progressive and people-focused companies – more recently medium, small and start-up companies are understanding its importance and implementing relevant screening activities.

Candidates screening activities now may include skills questionnaires, behavioral assessments, personality profiles, etc. as part of the recruitment process in addition to initial job qualification screens done by applicant tracking systems and recruiters.  Now a recruiter may do their usual phone screen with a candidate to ask about job goals, why they want to work there, review high level experience and inquire about compensation expectations to further screen; and, in addition, they may send a link to an online assessment for the candidate to complete in order to screen for culture fit and reduce the candidate pool further before presenting a handful to the hiring manager.  

Why are companies doing this?  Companies with strong cultures want to keep them that way so they want to hire talent they can retain and that will be productive. Culture ‘fit’ has a direct correlation to employee engagement. Employee engagement, or lack thereof, positively or negatively, affects the company’s financial bottom line.  And because a company’s talent is a huge expense (labor costs), they want to increase the likelihood that employees will want to stay for awhile and successfully apply their talents. 

For decades, companies focused predominantly on hiring for ‘job fit’ and over time, it became harder and harder to attain their strategic and financial goals. While they were effectively hiring people who met, or exceeded, the job requirements – those chosen may not have been the best team members to work with.  Most experienced workers have been on a team of people who fit their job requirements; yet, those same people were a wide spectrum of personalities from super team-oriented and conscientious to super self-centered bullies where the latter crushed the souls of the former and team productivity plummeted.  While that was an extreme example, it shows my point.  Who we are and how we behave while doing our work – now matter to employers much more than before. The current logic is that a company can train the skills gap (i.e. job fit) but hiring a self-centered bully that could decimate a team and/or a great culture is not in their best interest.  

When people work in jobs that align their talents with their work responsibilities AND they work among people who have similar character and behavior traits and care about the same things they do, they typically like their work more and do more of it to help the company’s financial success.  Data shows that engaged employees apply more discretionary effort to their work resulting in increased productivity, product innovation, improved customer experience, etc.   

• Job Fit recruiting is focused specifically on connecting minimum job requirements (i.e. years and type of experience, education (if applicable) and other competencies specific to the position and level.) Think of this as the task orientation part of a job. It answers the question of ‘could the candidate do the job tasks?’
• Culture Fit recruiting is Job Fit (see above) PLUS assessing an individuals’ values, beliefs and attitudes and whether those are aligned with the company’s culture: core values, behavioral expectations and performance success factors.

To be successful in a job search, candidates now need to be qualified to do the job AND self aware. They need to know what they value, what their strengths are and be able to articulate how they’d fit with the organizational culture ~ which by their own uniqueness differentiates them from other candidates. There are many ways candidates can find this information out prior to taking an assessment by a potential employer. I always recommend job seekers attain this knowledge about themselves through career coaches, job placement and training companies so they can show self-awareness, build their confidence in their unique talent mix and show they’re open to personal and professional growth and development.

What many candidates forget when they get a phone call that begins the process, is that interviews are a way for both sides, Hiring Manager and Job Seeker, to make assessments about job fit and culture fit.  Conscious Hiring Managers want to bring in talent that adds value and productivity to their team packaged inside a person who espouses similar values, attitudes and beliefs as their company to increase engagement. Job seekers deserve to find their tribe and bring all their talents to work in an environment aligned with their values, character traits and career aspirations — so they can be the best most productive versions of themselves at work. People Matter in Business.

Cindy Goyette, CC, SPHR, MA – cindygoyette.com 2019

Whenever I take a road trip as an adult I’m reminded of my childhood when my family took long car trips. At regular intervals we’d ask, or sometimes whine, “Are we THERE yet??” Not unlike antsy backseat passengers, your employees have a continued interest in where your business is in relation to its journey (i.e. its direction and goals.) They have a good reason to because the status of how the business is doing in the big scheme of things directly impacts the work they do. Information and how effectively it is communicated through an organization has a direct correlation to employee productivity and engagement. That said, I’ve found that many leaders spend little time planning what information they will communicate to their employees. The simple truth is: Your employees want regular and relevant communication from you.

Employees need – and expect – specific types of communication at regular intervals.

From leaders, employees want to know and understand the ultimate goal. They need to hear the vision, the business strategy — broad direction with milestones and appreciation. Those sound like “We are still going in this direction…” and “Here is how we are doing in relation to our strategy…” and “Thank you all for helping us get to where we are.” Then, when the business needs to course correct – which it will – leaders need to let employees know that things will be changing. “We are going to change our direction and here is why…and how it affects what we’ve previously communicated.” 

From direct managers, employees need to hear more granular information from what leaders provide. The information managers need to communicate is more specific to department activities and individuals’ job tasks. Employees expect ongoing dialogue with their manager because they want to do good work. They want to course correct as they go because they don’t want to have to redo their work – which wastes time and resources. They regularly need a chance to get clarification about their work and progress against goals, expectations of behaviors they exhibit, consequences, as well as, recognition and appreciation.

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Rollo May

If you think about it, we condition people early in life to receive regular report cards when they’re in school; yet, when they get into the workforce, managers don’t effectively apply that concept. Part of a manager’s responsibility is effectively providing feedback, like a report card, to their employees on an ongoing basis. It’s part of managing performance. While the term ‘feedback’ typically gets a negative connotation, if managers are transparent in their communication – authentically share the positive and negative behaviors and outcomes they observe on a regular basis – it becomes a behavioral norm and part of organizational culture. Remember, employees expect it. People don’t come to work to suck at their jobs nor do they want their manager to think they do (suck) and not tell them directly and/or give them a chance to address the feedback and share their perspective. From this two-way dialogue, managers and employees are in a better position to gain each other’s trust and respect.

Regular organizational communication is important to business and human performance regardless of which levels of management it comes from. 

If leaders don’t communicate frequently enough, employees fill in the gaps between what was last said and what they think is going on. It’s human nature. People will make up information in the absence of real data – which often creates a culture of uneasiness, worry, gossip and overall unnecessary drama. Having made up and/or misinformation circulating is never in an organizations best interest from a employee morale standpoint. If you are a leader and you aren’t sure of how often your employees need to hear from them – ASK THEM. Don’t assume you know. 

All communication is a key organizational “system” that is as important as IT infrastructure and other business systems.

Think about the information you communicate as the leader of your organization as one of the most important tools your employees need in order to accomplish their jobs effectively. It’s truly that impactful on your business and by realizing that – you’ll spend more time on it and make it a priority. And, if you do make it a priority, you’ll see a positive return in the areas of employee productivity and organizational effectiveness.

Relevant communication is about providing audience focused information. That means – what’s important to THEM – not what’s important to you necessarily.

If you hold company meetings and regularly talk about stock value or bonus calculations and a majority of your workforce don’t own stock options, or if the bonuses they receive can barely pay for a tank of gas, consider communicating that information to a smaller subset of employees to whom it’s relevant. I’ve seen this happen too many times. While leaders think they are sharing “positive news” when the stock price is up or pending bonuses are significant, all the employees heard were executives ‘bragging about money they’re going to get’ and they leave feeling angry and unmotivated. 

Understanding that your communication should consider the audience and what information is relevant to them, is paramount to your success. If you aren’t exactly sure of what kind of information your employees consider “relevant” and what they need to hear from you – ASK THEM. 

And my final thought…when you hold a company meeting and the status of strategic projects has not changed, say so – because it’s the truth. The truth works – that’s transparency. If you can only tell part of something to the team due to confidentiality, tell them as much as you CAN say. If you’ve got no new information to share about topics you regularly cover in that meeting, you can always spend time saying “THANK YOU” and recognizing your hardworking people for their contributions. People Matter in Business.  

Cindy Goyette, CC, SPHR, MA – Maximizing Human Capital, Inc. 2018

One of my favorite sayings is “Leadership is NOT about you. It’s about THEM.” I like it because it focuses on the fact that great leaders have followers. Followers are willing individuals who choose to follow because they believe the leader is going somewhere or doing something they, too, would like to experience. And, on any given day, a leaders’ following can be large, or small, depending on their actions and words. SIMPLE TRUTH: Employees want Leaders to Lead.  

Years ago, I was at an off-site meeting where the leader had planned for us to go hiking after we’d sat all morning listening to presentations. He’d been at the location before, but none of rest of us had. So, when he swiftly hiked off leaving us behind, we were unclear as to which way to go when we encountered a fork in the path and our leader was nowhere in sight. I had been coaching the executive for a couple months by then and I laughed out loud because the situation was indicative of his leadership behaviors in the office. He often spent time alone believing he had to solve all of the organization’s problems himself. Many times, he believed he had given directions to people but actually he had never said anything out loud to them. His direct reports had previously voiced frustrations to him about his leadership style, so it wasn’t surprising that everyone stopped at the fork in the path. Collectively, we stood there wondering how long it would take our leader to notice we weren’t following him. When he came back yelling expletives, one team member said, “You didn’t make it clear where we were going, or even if you wanted us to come with you. How were we supposed to know? You didn’t say anything.”

If you strive to be a successful leader, you need to know that followers have expectations of you. Articulating direction and business plans to your organization is not seen as a one-time or even a once-a-quarter event by your followers. They want you to regularly communicate vision/direction, current state of the business and any changes that occur because those all effect their job activities. You being personally involved and physically present in the day-to-day operations of your organization is important to them. Your followers expect you to engage with them. They want you to walk among them, ask their opinions and listen to their ideas. Companies spend a lot of time, energy and money hiring smart people who have solutions to many of their business problems; yet, most leaders don’t spend enough time collecting these insights or putting them to use.

If you lead without understanding your follower’s expectations, human behaviors in your organization are negatively impacted. Just like the frustrated management team was out there at the fork in the path, without a regular infusion of leadership direction, your people are unsure of what needs to happen next. Their productivity stalls while they wait for information — or they take action without direction — which may result in work having to be redone later when clear information is forthcoming. Both frustrate your employees, cost you resources and make your organization ineffective. [NOTE: By providing direction, I don’t mean your followers expect you to tell them what to do or how to do their jobs. They know that. What they want is for you to provide the bigger picture view of what the outcome you’re expecting looks like so they can align their work accordingly (e.g. “We need to complete and launch product X by Y date so that our customers can Z and we can to stay on our strategic course”)]

Another expectation followers have of you, their leader, is that there are consequences for not meeting the goals they set. While it may surprise you, followers respect leaders that determine and communicate what will happen to individuals, teams, or the whole organization, if performance goals aren’t met. While holding people accountable can be hard, leaving unmet goals unaddressed can also be hard. Leaders then risk losing their most talented followers who are aware of what’s happened and grow frustrated when low performing individuals or teams get to lag behind without direct consequences.

To recap,

• Learn what your followers expectations are of you as their leader and provide clear direction that allows them to effectively follow you
• Walk among them in all areas of the business to regularly listen their ideas and solutions to your business problems
• Drive accountability behaviors that include having consequences and applying them consistently – if your expectations are not met.

It’s important. People Matter in Business.

Cindy Goyette, SPHR – Maximizing Human Capital, Inc. 2017

You don’t have to look far to find articles about employee engagement because they’re everywhere lately. And it’s not surprising that these articles continue to provide reminders that the quality of an employee’s direct manager remains in the Top 3 of the most important factors that affect their level of engagement.

Most employees will tell you there certainly is a direct correlation with their manager’s availability and abilities and the positive, or negative, affect those have on their day-to-day morale and productivity. Employees would even go on to say that their long-term commitment to your company is connected to whether or not they believe their manager can help them grow and develop in their career.

Leaders of today may not know how we got here continuing to struggle with manager quality which is still a leading cause of turnover of talent. After reading this, I hope you feel compelled to shift your perspective about how managers spend their time and make the needed changes for the good of your whole organization. The story goes something like this…executives that came before you created what is now the standard of organizational management that you may be propagating without really knowing why or considering an alternative to.

Within the last two decades, many companies made widespread organizational changes affecting managers that became the management model used today that continues to negatively impact employee engagement and productivity. Since the early 2000’s, executives came to believe there was too much “management redundancy” in their companies. They chose to cut most, if not all, middle management positions in the pursuit of massive savings by reducing payroll and other overhead costs associated with them. Thousands of managers were swiftly terminated and shown the door.

By cutting middle managers, executives effectively removed professionals whose full-time job was to manage people. These managers knew how to hire, they knew the individual talents of each team member, what motivated them and how to coach performance because that’s what they spent 100% of their time focused on doing. They understood human behavior and had their pulse on the collective workforce heartbeat. Their roles were important to employee morale, engagement, operational effectiveness and profitability of businesses. However, because unconscious executives didn’t see the value in the “soft skills” espoused by great managers of yesteryear, they considered them expendable and rationalized their decisions by the resulting cost savings.

As the displaced professional managers started their own companies becoming the management consultants, trainers and business coaches of today, the unlucky individual contributors directly beneath those terminated were ‘promoted’. What companies then did was effectively re-title individual contributors to managers expecting them to perform a full plate of individual contributor job duties – in addition to – expecting them to manage people. Overnight, these newly flattened companies became grossly ineffective as they moved forward with less expensive, but also overwhelmed and in many cases, incompetent managers.

Fast forward to today and we still see the result of the organization flattening, middle management decimating actions that took place. In many sectors and sizes of companies, business performance is down. If you’ve become a leader in the last decade, you likely think it’s normal to have managers with a full plate of individual contributor work who, on the side, are also expected to manage a team of people.

Now retired executives made managing and inspiring employees a “nice to have” instead of realizing it should be a non-negotiable business activity. How do you think a company is going to have engaged employees and higher productivity if its’ managers manage people when they ‘get around to it’?  THIS is the reality of organizational management today. This is why, for decades, generations of managers have continued to struggle to be effective. If you want different results, do something different.

Now retired executives made managing and inspiring employees a “nice to have” instead of realizing it should be a non-negotiable business activity. How do you think a company is going to have engaged employees and higher productivity if its’ managers manage and lead people when they ‘get around to it’?

Cindy Goyette, CC, SPHR, MA

Management used to be an actual job where managing and inspiring employees’ success was a full-time responsibility. It was a career path in and of itself and it was differentiated from that of individual contributors who could choose a non-management career path if they didn’t have the personality, skills, or frankly, the desire to manage people.

And today, while there are employee-focused companies providing sound options of management skills training, degree programs and other great support to their people managers, it’s not solely about building managers’ competence or skills. It’s about leaders supporting their people managers and increasing the time they spend enabling employee success while de-creasing the time they are expected to spend on doing individual contributor type work. This is an area you have complete control over.

Your managers want be successful and some of them even want to become great leaders in your company. Your employees need their manager to be competent in management responsibilities AND have the availability, authority and resources to enable their success. Availability being the operative word here. Both want their managers to have permission from you to take the time needed to manage and lead people. This includes translating strategic direction into expected actions and deliverables, providing immediate performance feedback, useful coaching, appropriate recognition and job skills training as needed.  How much, or how little time, managers spend developing their people is of paramount importance to the engagement and productivity of your workforce. Companies spend significant time and effort attracting and hiring talent but continue to leave their managers overwhelmed with project work and little time to focus on managing and inspiring their people.

Employees feel valued when you take the time to develop quality managers that enable their success. It is in your control as a leader to make sure they know what to do as a manager, have time to do it, are measured on how well they do it (i.e. provided 360 feedback) and that they are held accountable to their performance if they don’t. Your support of these efforts by being at the forefront of your company modeling the management and leadership skills you expect of managers will positively affect employee engagement and your company’s performance. It’s important. People Matter in Business.

Cindy Goyette, SPHR – Maximizing Human Capital, Inc. 2017

When you think of the word accountability, what typically comes to mind is ‘responsibility’ and some sort of ensuing punitive action. We think of the authority figure who asks, “Who is responsible for this (fill in the blank)?” And if we’re the one in charge, we fear the consequence.

An alternative to that perspective is the way I learned about accountability. When I had my first experience working at a management consulting firm, I learned the concept of 100% Responsibility. They used it in a wide range of management and leadership development courses.

100% Responsibility is “A special kind of responsibility which means accepting ownership for making the desired results a reality. This empowering attitude enables individuals to take productive initiative and avoid habits that become barriers like making excuses, blaming and justifying.” 

The Atlanta Consulting Group

Since learning this concept decades ago, I have seen similar definitions by other coaches, trainers, and speakers too numerous to give credit to here. Suffice it to say, this concept is a key factor in both leadership and organizational effectiveness, so now I spend my time challenging leaders I coach to redefine their ideas of accountability as a form of ownership. Ownership takes courage. It also takes commitment. It is about accepting personal responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, words, attitudes and actions without pointing to outside people or circumstances to blame or justify the outcome of the choices we make.

Another way to think of this mindset, is that we all have a responsibility to show up for ourselves every day. Every day we are blessed to wake up again, we get to choose our reaction(s) to all the things that we experience. All that we do, and don’t do, has an outcome – good, bad or neutral. We might define them as successes or failures. And with an accountability mindset of 100% Responsibility, we have the understanding that we had a choice in whatever that outcome was.

Here’s a work example: A four-person team is given a new project to develop X by deadline Y. In a company with a culture lacking accountability mindset, each person would assume one-fourth of the responsibility for their ‘share’ of the project or 25%. If someone did not do his ‘share’ — the other team members would blame him and justify that they ‘did their part’ and the team’s failure was because of him and therefore not their problem. They may even throw him under the bus to coworkers outside the team and maybe even to management.

In an organization with an accountability culture, each person would assume 100% Responsibility mindset for developing X by Y. [This is where the “I” statements come in.] If someone is not doing his ‘share’, other team members ask themselves, “What can I do to help us reach our goal?” Accountable team members respectfully call him out on his lagging activity and either he steps up his pace or the rest of the team steps in to assist in some way.  Remember, everyone is 100% Responsible for the desired outcome – the development of X by Y.  On a team with like-minded members holding themselves accountable, their productivity and chance of a successful outcome is exponential. In this case of a four-person team – it’s 400%. In short, by taking 100% Responsibility, you completely give up the option of having excuses for not meeting the goal. Instead, you replace them with actively choosing to do whatever it takes to meet the outcome or goal.

Believe me, I get that being accountable and choosing this mindset is HARD in practice. It’s hard to take full ownership of an outcome – especially if the results were less than optimal. Making excuses is EASY and second nature to many people because they don’t want to be embarrassed or show failure. If you make an excuse, you can transfer the failure to someone else and avoid being hurt or shamed.

Accepting 100% Responsibility does not mean that you do everything or do other people’s work. It means your approach is more proactive and less reactive. You ask, “What can I do to enable our completion of X by Y?” By doing so, you act as if you alone are responsible for the outcome or goal, even for the things that seem beyond your control. You no longer wait for anyone else to assume responsibility for creating the results that you want.

On my first white water rafting trip, I was there with a work team for some ‘teambuilding.’ Early in our adventure, our guide said we would regularly come across forks in the river and in each case, we had a choice to make: we could take the EASY way which was without obstacles and coast through OR we could choose the HARD way and challenge ourselves mentally and physically to handle the formidable Class IV rapids. We were all typical office workers who sat at desks all day. On that day, we agreed there was only one choice.

At every fork in that river, our guide asked, “Which way?” and we screamed in unison “The HARD way!” as we high-fived with our paddles in the air above us. As a team, we took accountability for the outcome. We wanted our experience to be GREAT and therefore, each of us chose to do our 100%. It was exhilarating. To say that it was one of our more thrilling work days, is an understatement. After that trip, when our team was challenged by a perceived obstacle at work, one of us would ask out loud, “Are we taking the EASY way? Or the HARD way?” And every time – we knew there was only one choice. 🙂 People Matter in Business.

Cindy Goyette, SPHR – Maximizing Human Capital, Inc. 2017