How To Build Personal Accountability?
Edition #137
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
On Keeping Your Word.
Scott Young shared this powerful thought, which has a profound meaning in anything you want to achieve.
Let’s look at some of the points that he makes in this article:
You make promises to yourself. Yet, how often do you break promises to yourself?
You tell yourself you’ll stick to a new diet… and give up after one week.
However, most of us are pretty good at keeping promises to others.
Maybe the reason we break our own promises is that it doesn’t feel like it has a cost.
Breaking promises to yourself has the same costs as breaking them to other people. Except the person you trust less is you.
If you haven’t kept your promises in the past, rebuilding that trust takes time.
Make Fewer Promises; Keep All of Them.
Read this article here.
Rule Makers And Rule Breakers In Business Culture.
Employees frequently discuss and debate a company’s culture. Senior leaders and management spend significant time thinking about creating a culture that fosters innovation, collaboration, and stakeholder trust.
Michele Gelfand is a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organisational behaviour. In this conversation, she shares her learnings and insights about company culture.
Prof.Michele discusses the benefits and downsides of a tight or a loose culture. Companies with tight cultures have strict rules for people to follow and punishments when they deviate from rules. Loose cultures have weaker rules and are flexible about people's behaviour. The question is, “Is a tight or a loose culture better?”
Prof. Michele makes an intriguing point about the tight or loose culture debate. She mentions that Israel has a pretty good number of startups but seems to have fewer large-scale companies. As companies scale, they adopt a tight culture, while startups have a loose culture.
She recommends that companies adopt a ‘flexible tightness’ in their culture. While it is great to have a loose culture in a startup, they need to adopt a tight culture if they need to scale. However, if large companies need to innovate or aim for disruptive growth, they must encourage a loose culture because it encourages a creative environment.
Some people thrive in tight cultures, and others in loose cultures. Therefore, it is vital for people to closely evaluate whether they are comfortable with either tight or loose cultures. Similarly, companies must also assess whether the people they hire are comfortable in a tight or loose culture.
Prof. Michele advises entrepreneurs to create culturally ambidextrous organizations.
Listen to this episode on:
Spotify | YouTubeMusic | Amazon Music
Michael Norton – The Ritual Effect.
Michael Norton is the Harold Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author of the book Ritual Effect.
In this talk, Prof. Michael Norton discusses the power of rituals and their impact on us. He beautifully defines the difference between ‘Habits’ and ‘Rituals’. Habits are the what, while Rituals are the how.
Habits automate us, while Rituals animate us. He takes a lovely but simple example of a daily habit—brushing and showering. Brushing and Showering are habits that we cultivate, but some people ‘first shower and then brush’ while many others ‘first brush and then shower’. Rituals evoke a particular emotion or feeling, which makes mundane habits interesting.
Rituals add meaning to the things that we do. Because there is an ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’ and a ‘meaning’ to a ritual, it gets us going for a more extended period. That’s the reason some rituals have been around in the world for thousands of years.
Want to develop a new habit? Add a ritual to it.
You can click the above video to watch this lovely talk.
How To Build Personal Accountability?
The quality of your work and results show when you take personal accountability.
What is personal accountability?
Personal accountability is your willingness to accept the consequences resulting from your choices, actions, or behaviours.
Personal accountability makes you set benchmarks and expectations about yourself and what you want to achieve. You are seldom driven by what others think and expect of you. You are the master of your agenda, and you take complete responsibility for it.
When you take personal accountability, you will find it easier to achieve your goals. You also don’t procrastinate and put off important tasks. You will tend not to avoid problems, wait for or blame others for their shortcomings or delays.
So, what does it take to develop personal accountability?
When you start being answerable to yourself, you begin to develop personal accountability. This is indeed the most challenging and difficult first step to take.
When you want to be answerable to yourself, you need to have total clarity and conviction on the following ten things:
Do you know the ‘why’ behind what you are doing - it’s often called the purpose?
Have you spent enough time analysing if you really want to do this?
Do you have a benchmark of excellence, quality, and acceptable results?
Are your benchmarks significantly higher than what others want or expect?
What level of effort do you want to put into achieving that?
Are you ready for the consistency of effort it needs to reach there?
Have you assessed the time period needed to put in a consistent effort?
Are you willing to stay the course, irrespective of challenges and failures or time?
Will you honestly review the progress you are making?
Are you comfortable with your own internal success markers rather than external markers?
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
When you break your own promises, you lose trust in yourself.
Organisations must build a right balance of a ‘tight and loose’ culture.
If you want to develop a new habit, find rituals that give meaning to the habit you want to build.