This post contains my margin notes from the book The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power by Christopher Avery. This book was recommended to me by Cameron Presley, and is a core part of the company I work for, Lean TECHniques.
🤔 = note from Geoff | 💡= resonated strongly with Geoff
Part I: Responsibility in Everyday Life
Introduction
- Taking 100% responsibility — you see yourself as an agent for your success
- 🤔 The quotation from Derek Sivers is a slippery slope toward taking responsibility for things you shouldn’t. People have control, but not over everything.
- 🤔 Where is the boundary for taking on too much responsibility?
- Each of these are traps that we can name and get out of.
- 🤔 Self-leadership traits that resonated: strong sense of loyalty, strive for work-life balance and fall short because you feel bad about shorting other people, see other people have a life of ease and you wonder if you’ll ever be able to.
What is personal responsibility?
- The book covers free will vs determinism, attribution of guilt, and cognitive biases.
- Free will — individual choice and voluntary action
- Determinism — all things exemplify natural laws and have causes; human thought/behavior is determined solely by what came before it
- Self-efficacy — the degree to which we believe we can produce the results we want
- This is a skill that can be developed.
- Mastery experiences — failures lower self-efficacy
- Social modeling — if they can do it, I can
- Social persuasion — discouragement lowers self-efficacy faster than encouragement raises it
- Physiological and psychological responses — how we feel affects our ability to perform
- Socratic method — what do you know, and how to you know it’s true?
- The framers of the US Constitution chose a single person (instead of a public body) and that person can be removable from office.
Responsibility =/= accountability
- Responsibility is internal.
- Accountability is external (being held to account).
- Responsibility > Accountability
- Work suffers if…
- A person’s willingness to be responsible is missing
- Responsibility is punished (i.e., people cannot think for themselves and only do what they are told)
- 💡Performance management systems usually suck…
- People need to be watched. Businesses need to increase perceived control over the business (i.e., false certainty).
- Crafting a culture of responsibility (people naturally step up, take ownership, perform highly) is messy, imprecise, and challenging.
- Accountability is based on a credible threat (do X or face the consequences).
- Low levels of ownership and responsibility -> onerous and complex performance management systems.
- Commands, controls, evals, and corrections make people dependent on authority rather than thinking for themselves.
- 🤔I think the above concepts that make accountability “unnecessary” only work if everyone is responsible. When you have one or more people that don’t want to play along (I would argue it gets amplified the larger the group), you need these controls.
Part II: Three Tools for Understanding and Practicing Responsibility
The Responsibility Process
- The process shows how we think about things that are bothering us.
- 💡The trigger for entering the states of Lay Blame, Justify, Shame, Obligation, and Quit is when what you have =/= what you want.
- These natural states are to be expected because we are human.
- Each state is its own trap.
- Lay Blame — Who did this to us?
- The problem is external — someone else.
- We are powerless victims who are not at fault.
- Justify — What circumstances did this to us?
- If you have ongoing complaints about some situation, you are in Justify.
- The problem is happening to us and for it to go away, circumstances must change.
- Shame — Laying blame on ourselves.
- The problem is internal (e.g., not smart enough, don’t deserve success).
- We believe we lack what we need.
- Culturally we are conditioned to be here. Taking responsibility and being shamed gets us praise for “owning up.”
- Obligation — I have to, but don’t want to.
- This is largely a cultural trance where keeping our commitments is considered good even if we don’t like it.
- Commitments are still important for life to function. Obligation is about the feeling you have.
- Being stuck here…
- People do the minimum required.
- Resentment is a mental virus.
- You can look responsible by societal standards.
- Quit — Disengaging from the problem.
- You want something and think you can’t have it.
- People stay here to avoid Shame and Obligation.
- Denial — Ignoring the existence of something.
- Responsibility — Owning your own power and ability to create, choose, and attract your reality.
The Three Keys to Responsibility
- Intention — Your intention to operate from the mental state of Responsibility when things go wrong.
- Being in any other state is coping with the problem rather than owning it.
- Awareness — Notice your mental state when you are upset so you can make a conscious choice about whether to stay there.
- Confront — Face your upset directly so you can uncover the real problem behind it, resolve it, and grow.
- The #1 approach to formal leadership development is developing self-awareness. Leadership is a relationship issue.
- When we operate from Responsibility, we see more clearly and can accept things as they are.
- If we aren’t mentally present, we’re time traveling.
- In the past, we replay events where we blame others, justify conditions, shame ourselves, or resent commitments.
- In the future, we catastrophize.
- Being present allows us to be mindful of what trap we’re in and gives us the choice to stay trapped or escape.
The Catch Sooner Game
This is a 4-step adaptive process for changing anything about yourself that you want to change.
- Catch — Catch yourself behaving in a way you want to change.
- Change — Demonstrate the desired behavior.
- Forgive — Forgive yourself for being human and not changing faster due to unconscious programming or conditioning.
- Vow — Vow to catch yourself sooner next time.
💡Notes about the Forgive step…
- Most advice about behavior change is accompanied with holding yourself to account (beating yourself up, extinguishing unwanted behavior, punishing yourself for falling short [Shame]).
- We are good enough. The longer we hang out in Shame, the more we reinforce old habits.
- Beating ourselves up for not changing is a sure way to continue not changing.
Part III: Practicing and Mastering Responsibility
Lead Yourself First
- 💡Error: Most people start applying the The Responsibility Process to other people and how they should change.
- Most people mistake responsibility for “You should be good and do as I expect.”
- Responsibility is the mind’s framework for growing or not growing.
- Every upset is an opportunity to learn. You cannot avoid upsets, but you can control what you do when they happen.
- Take it easy on yourself. These patterns/traps are part of a cultural trance that you can decide don’t serve you.
- What Do I Want > What Should I Do
- Recall that “should” = Blame / Obligation.
- We’ve been taught that no matter what problem you have, someone else has already solved it. You don’t need to think for yourself — just be responsible to ask for the right answer and do as you’re told.
- Relearning how to want
- Most of us don’t really know what we want (typical answers are vague things like success, money, relationships).
- We grew up being told now to trust ourselves but to listen to well-intentioned parents, relatives, and teachers who told us what we should want. (This is informally called The LifeScript™️.)
- 🤔 This concept is similar to the one outlined in Dr. James Hollis’ Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life where living a life someone (usually your parents) want you to live is unfulfilling.
- Discover what you really want.
- Discovery — What do you want to experience in your life in abundance on a daily basis? (Spend 1 hour or until you feel complete writing these down without editing.)
- Organizing — Group items based on specific daily experiences.
- Ordering — If I could experience one of these things in abundance on a daily basis, what would it be. Repeat with the remaining list.
- Craft better goals.
- Clarify intention — Be clear about what you want and intend to accomplish.
- Focus attention — To make something happen you must focus attention on it.
- Remove obligation — Too many goals become a burden. (Procrastination comes from Obligation.)
- Generate energy — Good goals lead to excitement, motivation, and a deep desire to reach them.
- There is a life beyond Obligation.
- “Many patterns in life and work may look like a burden to you — something in which you are trapped and don’t see a way out of — just something you must deal with to live.”
- “Instead of giving in to Obligation, simply refuse to feel trapped, and that will lead your amazing mind to find new choices.” 🤔This reminds me of /r/thanksimcured where superficial, “obvious” advice is supposed to cure a systemic issue such as being depressed.
- Clarify your needs, wants, and demands.
- 💡If you feel stretched too thin, or overworked and underutilized, you are likely producing only 20% of the desired results from 80% of your time, energy, and efforts.
- Write down all of your commitments.
- Sort each commitment into No, Yes, and Hell Yes.
- Empty the Yes column.
- Clean up your messes.
- Acknowledge your role.
- Apologize.
- Ask what you can do to make amends.
- Recommit to do better in the future.
- Claiming wins builds the power of intention.
- 💡We focus on losses all day long, which sends us into victimhood.
- We are in charge of our choices.
- A win doesn’t need to be large. It’s not a size, but an intention met.
- 💡Our culture teaches us that only the big wins count.
Sharing Responsibility, Sharing Leadership
- Main dynamics
- Alignment — directional focus of people’s efforts
- Integration — the degree to which members operate with shared values, principles, and beliefs that support and protect the whole as well as the parts
- Many leaders (incorrectly) assume they can’t make much difference in groups unless they are given authority over others.
- You are a trim tab (a device on boats and aircraft that makes controlling the bigger movements easier).
- Sources of power
- Authority power — “power over” (threat)
- Exchange power — “power to” or “power by” (bargaining)
- Integrative power — “power with” (attract others to accomplish something you couldn’t do alone)
- The first two get more attention but are limited because they rely on scarcity.
- Dependence
- Positive interdependence — we are in the same boat together; people are naturally more open, supportive, and collaborative
- Independence — we are in separate boats that don’t relate
- Negative interdependence — we are in separate, competing boats (i.e., for one to win, the other must lose).
- Elevating responsibility in others
- A common statement the author hears in seminars: “I’m surrounded by people who don’t take responsibility. How do I get them to step up?”
- The fastest way to elevate responsibility is to model it yourself.
- 💡Most people agree that the biggest problems are between roles, between teams, between departments — where problems aren’t assigned to anyone.
- Single-point (individual) accountability systems silo people’s focus on themselves rather than the group.
- Cynical people distrust and disparage other people. Teams get stuck in Lay Blame and Justify. They convince themselves that the problem is external.
- 🤔 Is there no room for actual blame in this process? What if problems are literally caused by others? (This is clarified further in the last section.)
Developing Responsibility in Others
- After studying The Responsibility Process and practicing it yourself (how will you change to have what you want), commit to teaching and coaching others.
- 💡The best way to teach the process is to tell stories about your own coping habits.
- When others share their upset with you where they try the “yes, but” trap to have you rationalize them being stuck (e.g., “But I really have to go to my manager’s stupid meetings. Are you saying I don’t have to go?” Don’t validate their coping state; let them know you understand where they’re coming from and ask them to look at it from a different viewpoint.
- There are no “between” states — e.g., between Obligation and Responsibility. If you are feeling bad, burdened, or trapped, what state are you in?
- We are conditioned to ask, “What should I do?”
- 💡Responsibility-for-advice transfer — When you tell people what to do, then they make you responsible for anything about it that goes wrong.
Leading the Organization of Choice
- Responsibility first, then accountability
- When leaders and the org value personal responsibility over role accountability, they get much higher levels of self-leadership, self-management, personal responsibility, and shared responsibility.
- 💡If you start with accountability, you end up with complicated and onerous performance management systems to gain a false sense of control over the system.
- 💡Bridging the two
- Am I operating from Responsibility?
- How did I create, choose, or attract this?
- What part of these unsatisfactory results are mine to own?
- What do I want to be different so that we can get a better result?
- Do I know what I want?
- Leaders seek personal clarity about what they do want before they address others.
- Clarity can lead to new self-awareness or asking others to change.
- Have I asked for what I want?
- Assumption: Most people are doing the best they know how at the time.
- Ask for what you want rather than telling. Asking gives the other a choice.
- Do I have agreement for what I asked for?
- Lead in a way that preserves other’s choices and responsibility for those choices.
- “Yes” is only meaningful in a relationship if “no” is also.
- Responsibility means both parties choose “yes.”
- If 1-4 are “Yes”, then call to account.
- Am I operating from Responsibility?