Creating a Culture of Loving Accountability: Transforming Feedback from Fear to Compassion
In the words of Tamara Renaye, “Accountability feels like an attack when you’re not ready to acknowledge how your behavior harms others.” With that in mind, we must foster company cultures in which people present and receive accountability feedback openly, not defensively. What do you do when a promise is intentionally or unintentionally broken?
Let us consider how to hold people lovingly (instead of fearfully) accountable. The energy that we use to tell ourselves and others that something is offtrack plays a big role in how we get back on track. If you’re being guided into place by fear, you’re breeding a workplace culture of fear. If you’re being guided into place by love, you’re breeding a workplace culture of love.
Although I can appreciate the influence of terse and powerful feedback in circumstances that are high stakes, there’s almost always another way to communicate and relay your feelings.
Fear-based leadership is bound to ignite guilt, shame, and a depletion of confidence. None of those things serve your people in making your company’s vision a reality.
In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown shares the following:
Empathy and values live in the contours of guilt, which is why [empathy is] a powerful and socially adaptive emotion. When we apologize for something we’ve done, make amends, or change a behavior that doesn’t align with our values, guilt—not shame—is most often the driving force.
We feel guilty when we hold up something we’ve done or failed to do against our values and find they don’t match up. It’s a psychologically uncomfortable feeling, but one that’s helpful. The discomfort of cognitive dissonance is what drives meaningful change. Shame, however, corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better.²
Phew! I told you that values work was deep work!
Permission to be human. The first act of living your value promises will be teaching yourself and your people that it’s possible to fall on your face and get back up.
It is OK to not be perfect and to learn from the imperfections. You can hurt someone’s feelings unintentionally and learn how to communicate more effectively in the future. The key is to keep going. Just because it wasn’t a picture-perfect conversation the first time doesn’t mean that you don’t have a second (or even a twenty-second) chance to do better. Take responsibility where you can, apologize if necessary, and put it into your personal growth tool kit.
Because accountability is such a big muscle to strengthen and most people don’t know where to start, our organization offers an entire soft skills track of training.
We do this after the value promises are established to intentionally and precisely guide team members in living these powerful words and giving them the support to reset and realign when they don’t.
A simple survey that asks team members to anonymously evaluate themselves in how often they keep each value promise (never, sometimes, always) will allow you to quickly point to where the greatest opportunities and proven practices exist. We always start with the greatest opportunities and strategically work our way up.
For example, if an entire team is saying that they only sometimes “provide transparency by explaining your actions through clear communication, including using a common language that applies to all stakeholders,” then that’s a great place to invest in coaching and training on how to be more transparent and thoughtful in both internal and external communication.
Holding people lovingly accountable typically resonates on the surface, but it is much harder to implement when you’ve never experienced or given that form of feedback.
It’s a practice to strengthen within all your relationships, and it is great to start with folks you know, love, and trust so that you can learn what it feels like when you do it correctly as well as when you fumble through it.
Using the example from the section on Expectations – Agreement = Disappointment about email communication with coaching clients, let’s consider what loving accountability might sound like:
I’d like to debrief with you on the scheduling process for the flow of future coaching sessions. One of your core values is work-life balance, so I know how important it is that we create the sense of ease and grace in our partnership. I really appreciate your diligence in getting it out, and I wanted to loop back on what we can do differently to streamline the coordination moving forward. When are you free for us to talk it through?
This is what fearful accountability sounds like:
Why didn’t you check in with me before this email went out? Did you miss my instructions on this process? Now I have over one hundred emails to comb through, and I’m wasting so much more of my time because you didn’t do what I expected you to do. I mean, seriously, man, what happened?
How do you get into your heart space before providing loving accountability?
It starts with conscious self-awareness and understanding your own energy around the issue. Is your intention to make them feel the pain that you feel? Or is your intention to create the space to be heard and to meet expectations together in the future?
It can be hard to decipher where you are in the heat of the moment. In those cases, it’s always a best practice to give yourself twenty-four hours to respond. Then tune in to your feelings and emotions, and once you are in a place where you truly want both you and the other person to be better as a result, you can then approach the conversation. You might also appreciate the heart-centering practice that’s outlined in chapter 9.
Permission to be human. If you’re a newbie at this and want to practice, be vulnerable and authentic about holding people accountable.
You might even say, “I’m in the process of learning how to hold people lovingly accountable. I’m not sure that I know how to do it yet, but I would really appreciate it if you’d be open to growing with me. I want us to be on the same page with meeting expectations, and I want it to feel good between us when we have these conversations. I’m open to your feedback on how it lands with you. Does that work for you?”
The more humanity you show to others through your own journey in growth, the more willing others will be to do the same in their own lives. You can learn even more about these notions in chapter 7, especially the concept of intent before content.
What happens when someone breaks a value promise? Who is holding them accountable if they’re not? What kinds of trainings or support have you put into place so that people know how to hold people accountable from a place of loving-kindness?
Most humans don’t know how to hold people accountable from a place of strength, compassion, and empowerment because most of us are never taught how to do so.
If you didn’t see it modeled in your life or if you didn’t have someone coaching you, wanting the best for you and supporting that growth, then it’s highly unlikely that you know how to put these into practice once they’re out there in the world.
I often say that if someone doesn’t know how to give their loved ones constructive feedback or to set a clear boundary with them, then it’s highly unlikely that they know how to do it with their team members at work. Why? Because in many cases, we must learn with people who aren’t going to give up on us or write us off right away when we start giving that feedback and don’t yet have self-awareness about how we’re coming across.
For example, when I first talked to my husband about how annoyed I was by the mess he’d leave on the bathroom sink after he got ready in the morning, I came across as someone who was really pissed off. “Do you not see how disgusting this is? How can you leave the sink covered in all this mess and just go about your day? This makes me want to gag every time I see it. Don’t you care about how this impacts me?”
Do you think he took that feedback well?
Not at all. Over time he was able to articulate to me how badly I made him feel when I talked to him that way, including my tone of voice and energy. We had a conversation about why his behavior was such a trigger for me and how we could lovingly be more accountable for and thoughtful of each other’s needs.
Prior to gaining that self-awareness and realizing how my energy was harming him, I never really checked myself before getting frustrated with team members who were not meeting my expectations. I may not have been as blatantly rude as I was to my husband, but I didn’t have empathy or a sense of personal alignment with and grounding in my core values when I’d go in to make my point.
Without realizing it, I would use shame (“you are bad”) and guilt (“you did something bad”) to try to meet my needs.
Although I can still have a day where things don’t come off as I intended, overall I feel a massive shift in knowing what I need to do to take care of myself before I go into holding someone else accountable for value promises being broken. And that came when I invested in my inner work.
Think about how you’re holding yourself accountable. Are you kind to yourself when you’re not moving at the pace you expected to be? Are you generous when your body is tired and you simply can’t produce in the way you had hoped? Do you say mean things to yourself in your mind when you’re not perfect? Or do you give yourself grace?
Personally, this has been one of my greatest journeys and opportunities in life. I often suffer from bouts of imposter syndrome, not-enoughness, and guilt-fueled motivation. Even while writing this book, I’ve had several experiences of feeling like everyone’s going to find out what a phony I am, that I am not worthy of being an author, or if I didn’t get one more chapter written within my self-imposed deadline, then I would engage in self-punishment by reminding myself what a loser I was. How friggin’ productive is that? That is the definition of fearfully holding someone accountable.
Agreements with Ourselves
Consider don Miguel Ruiz’s four agreements:
Be impeccable with your word.
Don’t take anything personally.
Don’t make assumptions.
Always do your best.
If we were to each do these four things in regard to ourselves every day, life would be filled with a heck of a lot more love, and we’d truly be able to hold ourselves and others lovingly accountable.
I’ve been fortunate to travel to Mexico and study with the Ruiz family to learn the Toltec Wisdom and dive deeper into these four agreements.
don Miguel talks about the inner judge that lives inside of our minds. Constantly criticizing us and others for what things should or shouldn’t be. Constantly making us feel not enough and destined to fail. It’s when we notice that judge, recognize its voice, and then help it to see its way out that we can finally be free.
When I notice these tendencies popping up now, I am significantly more loving to myself, often responding to that inner judge with things like, “OK, I hear you, and you’re just my fear talking. I am doing my best. I am enough. And I know I have a choice in what I believe about myself.” I often end with my go-to mantra: “One step at a time, without judgment of pace.”
Consider the ways that you can begin to shift in your inner world so that you can massively transform your outer world.
Will you start with being vulnerable with a loved one? Asking for a candid conversation with a colleague? Or perhaps looking in the mirror to see how you can be more lovingly accountable to yourself? Meet yourself where you are and take the first microstep toward a new possibility.
Are you looking to become a more conscious leader and learn how to hold people lovingly accountable?
This is an excerpt from MaryBeth’s company culture book: Permission to Be Human: The Conscious Leaders Guide to Creating a Values-Driven Culture. Check it out today.