Accountability and Fatal Flaws

During Mid-Year conversations, there are always one or two questions about accountability and fatal flaws, so this week I thought I would address them here.

Accountability is the choice to take responsibility for your actions and your situation. Interesting Foster, Hicks & Associates describes Accountability this way: 

“Accountability is the choice to take responsibility for your actions and your situation without blaming others or feeling like a victim of circumstance.  The focus is on taking ownership by acting on what you can control and recognizing what you cannot.  It is also about being truly proactive, rather than waiting for others to act, or hiding behind your defense mechanisms.”

Accountability is good for the soul.  😊   

Foster & Hicks say this:  “The alternative to accountability is blame and with blame, one gives away all their power.  It is virtually impossible to feel invigorated, competent, or happy and be stuck in resentment.  Studies show that when we are accountable and believe we have some control over our lives, we live longer, manage stress more effectively, and have higher levels of perceived quality of life and emotional capability.”

This is important because high performers are those who take ownership to make things better.  As such, they are viewed as reliable and trustworthy.  

When you are accountable, you go beyond responsibility (just doing the tasks assigned to you) and look for ways to make contributions above and beyond.  In Mid-Year conversations, when the topic has been your accountability use the above to reset expectations and to rethink what accountability means to you.

The other question that comes around frequently is about “fatal flaws”.

Fatal Flaw is a term used to describe a limitation that a person puts on themselves and if not addressed can lead to problems that affect that person's actions or abilities and their reputation.  Think of it as a weak spot, but one that can really hurt your career.  When we talk about fatal flaws at work, it is complex because humans are complex.  However, understanding what fatal flaws are and recognizing if you have them is step one. 

Some examples of fatal flaws include:

• Perfectionism
• Lack of openness to new or different ideas
• Lack of accountability
• Procrastination
• Time Management
• Inability to learn from mistakes

As I have resolved my own issues with perfectionism I have recognized that really it is just a pattern of inactivity.  Not that I am doing too much, but rather I am not moving the item forward because it isn’t good enough, and if I just had more time.  Truthfully, when I do recite “perfection is the enemy of good enough” and submit whatever I am working on the majority of times it is just what was needed. 

It is important to know your strengths and it is equally important to know where you have areas that need focus.  I challenge you to reflect on areas where you need to focus and determine why you do them, and how you are going to focus on them so that you can address and get better.

With that, I am out.  Hope you all stay cool (it's raining where I am going) and I will see you all on August 9. 

Happy Thursday!

-srt

How do you receive Feedback?

How do you receive Feedback?

Every day, not just at Mid-Year, we receive feedback from the people around us.  This might be your manager, peers, direct reports and even family and friends.  It is how we take in the feedback and what we do with the feedback that matters. 

A great #careerhack that I learned some 20+ years ago, was to always receive feedback like a gift.  To do this, you have to believe the person giving the feedback has the best intentions for you and your development.   

After framing your mind with that positivity (“good intentions”), here are five steps that Hays Consulting recommends you take to receive feedback like a pro:

Actively engage with what you are hearing.  Ask yourself, “What is the key message being delivered?”

Pay attention to the feedback givers emotions and body language.  Those will help you understand how the feedback giver is feeling giving you the feedback and in turn helps you adjust to how you respond to them.  For example, in really difficult conversations the feedback giver may tense up or use a lot of words in giving the feedback.  This is especially important when receiving feedback from family and/or friends.

Convey what you have understood from the feedback.  Understanding the feedback (not defending or apologizing or describing how you will rectify it) and conveying it back concisely shows the feedback giver that you heard.  NOTE:  I recommend scheduling follow-up conversations with the individual with some time between to share what you will do with the information. 

Thank the feedback giver for the feedback.   It is amazing how a simple thank you can open the doors for future feedback. 

Throughout the feedback session, I will always ask permission before asking questions.  The simple phrase, “do you mind if I ask a question about x?” Can go a long way to ensure the conversation is two-way and that you walk away fully understanding.

I recommend scheduling follow-up conversations with the individual with some time between to share what you will do with the information.   For the duration of my career, I have always sent a follow-up to my performance feedback thanking my manager for the investment of time with the items that I am going to focus on and describing to him/her how I was going to take action.   Overkill?  Maybe, but my management knows that I heard them and that I am committed to focusing on the behavior or initiative with some high-level action bullets of how. 

Happy Thursday!

-srt

Family Time!

Next week I head off to my favorite place on the planet, Cannon Beach Oregon.

Cannon Beach is about two hours out of Portland and is the home of the West Coast’s largest sea stack called Haystack Rock and the Needles.   Haystack Rock is a basalt sea stack and it rises 235 feet from the edge of the shoreline.  It is the place where Goonies and Kindergarten Cop were filmed. 

As a child, I crawled all over Haystack Rock and would spend hours finding crabs, starfish, sea anemones, jellyfish, and all kinds of fish and other mollusks.  It was here that I first learned to dig for razor clams, fish from the beach, and “wave dive”.   Do you see the cave in the attached picture, my brother, sister, and I explored it only to get trapped by the incoming tide.  Too embarrassed to call for help, we made it out but not without some serious mollusk burns on our legs and hands.  I was six years old. 

Haystack Rock is now a bird sanctuary and is off-limits to humans.  The tide pools that are uncovered in front of it at low tide are not as populated as they were in my youth, but you can still find the occasional hermit crab or starfish. 

The town of Cannon Beach is a quaint ocean town although it has grown to have far too many tourists for my liking these past 10 years.  However,  it has a huge artist population and some of the most eclectic shops I have ever seen.

Since birth, my family would vacation at Cannon Beach and we would stay two weeks over the summer vacations.  We did this when we moved from Oregon to Idaho to Utah and to California.  Maybe not every year in our teen years but consistently every one or two years. 

As adults, we continued the tradition and for a long period of time, we went back with our spouses and our growing families.  Each family would rent a house and each morning we would meet in front of the rock to determine what we were going to do for the day.   After my father passed, we paused for two years until my sister and I decided to visit Cannon Beach with our families on the week of the fourth of July as they always put on a great fireworks show out of Seaside which you can see from Cannon Beach.

I am looking forward to early morning walks and searching for sand dollars with my momma on the beach (a tradition since childhood, see picture), preventing Jonathon Livingston Seagull from absconding with our hotdogs, having an apple fritter at Cannon Beach Bakery, playing Exploding Kittens with my boys, building a sandcastle with Emmett and Wyatt (grandnephews), playing Fascination and Skeeball at Seaside, maybe even doing some crabbing in Nestucca Bay, but mostly just to hang out with my family, my momma and my sister’s family. 

Everyone needs a favorite place.  I shared mine… what is yours?   😊 

Happy Thursday all and Happy 4th of July next week.  

See you when I return on the tenth,

-srt