Accountability Conversations

Can you count on those around you?   In our work, leaders often complain that “He/she/they just aren’t doing what I asked them to do”.  Alongside the content, usually comes a big dose of emotion – which can be anything from anger to resignation, from frustration to despair.   In the wider world, the term accountability appears often in the news. Almost always the implication of the term in this context is that people should lose their job, or even their liberty, if they fail to deliver what is expected.   But is this what accountability really means? Are we just talking about something punitive, a big stick that is held over others (or ourselves) to ensure that we do what we are supposed to? Personally, this approach to accountability is likely to make me perform less well – not better.   People in organisations are required to deliver things as part of their roles. How can we ensure that they make the changes necessary in order to do so?
Read More

Categories: Accountability Conversations.

Why do I keep having the same old conversations with people?

Some frustrating conversations just seem to keep cropping up – and not always with the same people! They are frustrating because we know that failure to move them on is reducing our effectiveness and keeping us from the outcomes we need. This month’s thinker has some ideas to help you break these patterns to get better results. The games people play (yep, that means us!) Eric Berne took Freud’s ideas and made them accessible by focusing, not on the individual but on the patterns of interaction (transactions) between them. His seminal 1964 book ‘The games people play’ introduced not only the Discipline of Transactional Analysis (TA) but was also, arguably, the birth of ‘pop psychology’. Before we look at the ‘games’ (the recurring relationship patterns) that we all play, we need to understand the underlying ideas in Berne’s work on TA. Some (now) familiar ideas… Berne explains that we play ‘games’ from one of three basic roles (‘states’):- Parent. In which we play the part of an authority figure. This is
Read More

Categories: Accountability Conversations.