Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Christoper Avery, a leading authority on applying personal and shared responsibility for agility and performance returns to Crisp in Stockholm April 29-30, 2013 to teach his public workshop Creating Results-Based Teams. Space is limited. Register now.

This classic blog post was originally posted on Christopher Avery’s popular blog on January 20, 2011 — you can find it here. 

There is a big difference between being an accountable leader and being a responsible leader. I have been working with business leaders for the last 20+ years as a consultant and speaker, and I am committed to showing real leaders the powerful difference.

The following may sound a bit harsh or pedantic at first, but stay with it and you will be rewarded with important distinctions:

An accountable leader focuses on being able to account for his or her actions and results. As a communication scholar years ago I researched “account-giving.” That is simply the narratives (i.e., stories) we make up to explain what is going on — we give accounts.

Thus an accountable leader has all of his or her ducks in line. He knows what he is being held accountable for and ensures that he can account for all the activities and outcomes. An accountable leader is likely a good manager, efficient with time, and proficient with tracking objectives, priorities, and schedules.

An accountable leader attends to accounting for what’s happening — but a responsible leader attends to responding. One is backward looking, the other forward looking.

Here’s the Difference That Makes a Leadership Difference

An accountable leader focuses on accounting for why he or she can’t get where he/she is headed while a responsible leader is going somewhere and focuses on confronting and overcoming the obstacles. It’s a huge difference.

Want an example?

I’ve heard many leaders in the past year — on the news and in my workshops — account for their inability to produce desired results by justifying that they had inherited a dire situation or a poor performing organization. If you follow the lessons of the Responsibility Process, you realize that there are six ways we can account for failure and let ourselves off the hook: we can operate from denial, lay blame, justify, shame, obligation, or quit.

We also sell others on accepting our accounts about poor results in hopes that they, too, will let us off the hook for poor results. And it is amazing how often they do!

A responsible leader is different in the way he or she views the world.

A responsible leader

• is on a quest, a quest that requires her to constantly expand her ability to respond to whatever happens around her.
• challenges himself to own his power and ability to create, choose, and attract everything that happens to him. He feels increasingly connected to and in harmony with — instead of apart from and fighting — the world and knows that he gets to choose what

If you want to be a positive and unstoppable leader, learn, practice and master your minds natural Responsibility Process for responding to and overcoming any challenge or upset.