1: “Sorry I’m late. My other meeting ran over.”
How many times have we heard these words?
How many times have we said these words?
The message we are sending is: “Don’t blame me. If my previous meeting had finished earlier, I would have been on time,” Fred Kofman writes in his book The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.
There may be truth to our statement. And what we are saying is disempowering.
“Why?” Fred asks. “Because to claim that being late isn’t our fault, we have to claim that it was not in our power to be on time. The price of innocence is impotence.”
Ouch.
“The fact that the other meeting ran over is just that, a fact,” he notes. “It didn’t make us late; we made us late. We made either a deliberate or an unconscious choice to stay put rather than leave.”
We aren’t responsible for the fact that the prior meeting ran late. We are, however, accountable for our choice to stay when it runs over.
“It’s not my fault!” we might say. “I stayed at the previous meeting because it was more important to the company than the later one.”
Okay. But “saying that the previous meeting ran over is just a polite way of saying that the second meeting was not as important to me as the previous one,” Fred observes.
2: Fred isn’t saying we made a bad choice. He’s pointing out that we made a choice.
“I can think of many circumstances in which I would rationally make the choice to be late,” he notes.
To establish a culture of accountability, we must fully own our ability to choose.
And as leaders, we must set the example of the culture we want to create. When we take responsibility for our choices, we reduce the negative consequences for those who expected us to make good on our commitment.
“In this case,” Fred writes, “I may have a reasonable justification for being late; for example, that I was in a crucial meeting with the CEO and the leadership team of the company. But it’s much harder to find a reasonable justification for not sending a quick message to the people who are waiting for me in the following meeting.”
Sometimes, we need to “break a promise and make a mess,” he observes. But we “can always let people know immediately, apologize, and clean it up.”
Once, Fred was climbing a mountain with Leslie, one of his colleagues who is also an Outward Bound instructor. Suddenly, a storm came upon them.
“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad gear,” Leslie said.
“The saying makes me think of other times I’ve complained about things that are beyond my control—and how fruitless that is,” Fred writes. “The storm doesn’t care whether I am happy or sad, or whether I live or die. The storm is just a force of nature. It is what it is, exactly as it is, and perfectly so.
“It is up to me to dress appropriately and to deal with it,” he notes.
“Since that day with Leslie, I’ve adopted a new practice. When I’m dealing with a ‘difficult person’—someone who poses a challenge to which I don’t know how to adequately respond—I switch into ‘Outward Bound’ mode. I see the person as a force of nature. He is who he is, exactly as he is, and perfectly so. It is up to me to act appropriately in dealing with him.”
The alternative is to become a “victim.” To avoid responsibility and perhaps embarrassment. “But the price of an excuse is high,” Fred writes.
3: If our goal is to become a transcendent leader, we must accept full responsibility for our actions in all circumstances, even in circumstances that are not of our doing.
“This means consciously choosing our response to events,” Fred writes, “rather than telling a self-justifying story in which events drive us.
“If we want our organizations to control their destinies, we must lead from the front. Instead of seeing and presenting ourselves as victims of forces beyond our control, we must see and present ourselves as players responding to a challenge.
“Only then,” he notes, “will we have the moral authority to demand that everyone else do the same.”
There are no such things as hard problems, Fred concludes. Only situations we are unable to fix.
Yet.
“If I can’t lift a certain weight, it’s not because it’s heavy, but because my muscles are not strong enough to do it—at least not yet,” he writes.
“There are certainly weights that are too heavy for anyone to lift—now or ever, but that doesn’t contradict the point I’m trying to make. My argument is that it’s always more empowering to tell the story of the player: When I fail, it’s because I don’t yet know how to effectively respond to the challenges I face.”
It’s the same for us. We can let go of claiming it’s not our fault. That’s the price we pay to become a leader.
Fred calls it “Response-ability.” The ability to choose our response.
Which is the foundation of transcendent leadership.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Think of a recent situation where things went wrong. How did I respond? Was I the victim or the player?
Action: Journal about the situation and our response. Is there anything I would have done differently?