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Free Resources for Building Accountability in your Culture without Leaving Dead Bodies in the Road

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by Henry Evans-Managing Partner

Our team at Dynamic Results wishes you a very happy new year. Last year we delivered our Accountability Method to organizations, business schools, and government agencies in many parts of the world.

We’re starting this year by giving you a quick video reminder with some ideas around how you can be a model of accountability in your organization. Watch the video and then learn more by visiting our book page.

Here’s a transcription of the video above:

See the reason you got these negative feelings and connotations around the whole word accountability is that we’ve all been raised to think of accountability as a punitive process. After a relationship or project has failed, we go see who we can blame and that’s what accountability is. We want to change that. It’s actually our mission as a company to change that. That that’s how it is learned and that’s how it’s conducted but it’s not the place it has in organizations.

So when you learn English or whatever your first language was, it took you five to seven years to learn that language. It took five to seven years for your mind to form these neuron paths that help connect the meaning and structure of sentences and words so you can use them to communicate with other people.

I’m going to take that five to seven year process and explain it in about thirty seconds. And I’m going to feed you the language of accountability in about thirty minutes.

Ambiguity is a predictor of future failure. Now, I’m not talking about a creative process. If you’re doing brainstorming, you want to be as ambiguous and as open ended as you can be, we do that with our clients at the beginning of a strategic planning process, but when you’re turning that plan into actions, we need clarity, clarity that a third person could understand.

Have you ever caught yourself saying, “I laid this out perfectly clearly, but these idiots didn’t get it.” Have you ever let that narrative run inside your head? It ain’t them, it’s you. Once you accept that leadership role, you got the job of being clear. That’s your job. I tell you what accountable commitments should feel like. They should make you nervous. When you’re communicating this to a second person, you should nervous like “Oh man, I really have to do this now.”

That same feeling you used to get when you weren’t an officer and your boss came and said, “You gotta do this.” And you got the feeling of “Oh man, I’m on the hook.”

My clients who tend to outperform their competitors are very good at self-generating that feeling. Now I’m not talking about getting angst and getting a heart attack. I’m not talking about being miserable. I’m talking about having a good healthy nervousness around the commitment that you’re making. It’s a way to measure if it’s real or not. It’s real, it’s here (points to his stomach). It’s not here (points to his head). And the organizations that tend to outperform the competition have a good fire burning here, in the belly. They can feel that.

Enjoy, and as always visit the Dynamic Results book page to see how people like New York Times Best Selling Author, Marshall Goldsmith, have responded to these insights..

Stay close to us as this year as we will be rolling out new ways for you to access the method that is helping our clients outperform their competition.

For now, know that we have developed a simple method to help any individual build Accountability in to their culture in an emotionally intelligent way.

Our best to you in this new year.

As always, we welcome your comments. Join us on facebook to share your experiences or email us at [email protected].

Reflections: Creating Accountability with Emotional Intelligence

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by Henry Evans – Managing Partner

Most miscommunications and relationship challenges are caused by a lack of clarity on the front end of your communications. In our book, “Winning With Accountability, The Secret Language of High Performing Organizations”, we address this common challenge.

Once we feel we have communicated an idea well, we often move on without any validation. In this video, we give you two ways to get reflection in an Emotionally Intelligent way and in a way which will increase the accountability of your interaction.

Here’s a transcription of the video above:

Hi, I’m Henry Evans. Founder and Managing Partner at Dynamic Results. And today I’m going to talk to you about one aspect of our accountability method called Reflection.

Our accountability method based on our book “Winning with Accountability: The Secret Language of High Performing Organizations” is being embraced by multi-national organzations and MBA schools worldwide. One aspect of it is this idea of reflection. And Reflection is getting a comment back from someone you’re trying to convey a message to about what they heard. We believe the effect of your communication is measured the result of the people listening to you. It is not measured by your own self assessment. And we think they will act upon what they understood rather than what you said.

There are two primary ways of getting reflection from people:

The first one we feel is a little demeaning, particularly to people who are smart and capable. The second we feel has a much greater basis on emotional intelligence, but let’s look at the first one.

The first one would for me to convey and for me to ask you something like, “What did I just say?”. Do you feel a little insulted by that? I feel a little insulting when I ask that.

The second way which we think would be much more emotionally intelligent would be to be vulnerable and leave it in the realm of possibility that I didn’t even convey my idea very clearly in the first place. And that would sound like this, “You know I know what I meant to say just know, but what did you hear?”

Vulnerability according to the table group, is a conduit to trust and trust is the foundation to all relationships. So we like that way of checking in better for reflection than the first one.

And yet an even better way of getting reflection would be to say, “You know we discussed a lot of things during this meeting, but what are the action items that we’re taking away from this meeting? What are we going to do as a result of what we just said?” That’s another emotionally intelligent way of getting reflection back from people.

As always, we’re trying to give you quick, concise ways to improve your business, communications, and your business results.

Enjoy, and as always see how people like New York Times Best Selling Author, Marshall Goldsmith, have responded to the book by clicking here:

Dynamic Results Book Page

Stay close to us as this year as we will be rolling out new ways for you to access the method that is helping our clients outperform their competition.

For now, know that we have developed a simple method to help any individual build Accountability in to their culture in an emotionally intelligent way.

As always, we welcome your comments. Join us on facebook to share your experiences or email us at [email protected].