Posts Tagged ‘accountability’

A Self-Exam on One Piece of Paper October 14 2011 18262 responseshttp%3A%2F%2Feblingroup.com%2F2011%2F10%2Fa-self-exam-on-one-piece-of-paper.htmlA+Self-Exam+on+One+Piece+of+Paper2011-10-14+14%3A13%3A55Scott+Eblinhttp%3A%2F%2Feblingroup.com%2F%3Fp%3D1826

One of the many intelligent things that Socrates said is “An unexamined life is not worth living.” In an era when many professionals are running flat out until they crash, taking time for self examination usually ends up falling into the category of important but not urgent. The downside of that, of course, is that the urgent things end up overwhelming the important things that a little bit of self examination might have identified.

Fortunately, Mike Figliuolo has come up with a simple yet powerful approach to self examination in his new book, One Piece of Paper. The big idea is to boil your personal philosophy on four basic aspects of leadership down to one piece of paper. Mike offers a series of questions and exercises to help you do that. One of his core tools is what he calls the maxim. The maxim is a simple idea that you hold in your head to remind yourself of how to act. An example that Mike offers is “What would my grandmother say?” (As I wrote earlier this year, that question also worked for Tim Sanders.)

To give you an idea of how Mike’s approach works in real life, I’ve considered a few of his questions in the aspect of Leading Yourself and will share my one piece of paper (less than that actually) answers with you:

Are You Accountable or Responsible? September 28 2011 11094 responseshttp%3A%2F%2Feblingroup.com%2F2011%2F09%2Fare-you-accountable-or-responsible.htmlAre+You+Accountable+or+Responsible%3F2011-09-28+16%3A29%3A54scotthttp%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%2Fwp_scotle%2F2011%2F09%2Fare-you-accountable-or-responsible.html

Are you accountable or responsible? What’s the difference and why does it matter?

The first time I heard this distinction was years ago in one of my first coaching engagements. I was interviewing colleagues of my client and a senior executive said, “He needs to be more accountable and less responsible.” That made a lot of sense to me and the distinction ended up being one of the nine leadership pick up and let go distinctions in my book, The Next Level. The idea is that to grow and be effective as a leader, you have to pick up accountability for many results and let go of responsibility for a few results.

Since the book came out, I’ve had a lot of conversations with leaders about the difference between being accountable and responsible. The most recent one was yesterday in a wrap up session for our group coaching program, Next Level Leadership™.  As we talked through the progress the participants have made over the past seven months, one of them said he was still struggling with getting a handle on the difference between the two.

I probably gave the most succinct and clear answer I’ve ever given to what the difference is between accountability and responsibility. It worked for the leaders in the room yesterday. I hope it will be helpful to you.