How to create accountability not dependency

For me the role of a coach is to partner with the client; supporting them raise their awareness of the opportunities and challenges they have; and leave them with the accountability for the behaviour changes they commit to. After all, you cannot be there with them, day in, day out in their business. Another way of putting it is, you partner deeply, with an eye ensuring that, in time, your Client becomes self-sufficient. Arguably not the most commercially savvy, but the right thing to do.

I recently caught up the Managing Director of a business, 100 days after we’d run a psychological safety breakthrough session.

The breakthrough session includes the quantitative results of a short robust survey completed by the team, of how they feel across the domains of psychological safety. For example their willingness to ask each other for help; how open discussions really are; how included everyone feels.  It takes just three minutes. This is combined with a dialogue around their perspective of how things play out in the team. In my experience, it results in the team having conversations they have not had and in turn identifying invisible barriers and enablers they were not aware of.

In this case, an issue was jargon being a barrier to inclusion. Colleagues being unable to contribute because they simply did not understand commercial and financial terms being used; and an unequal share of voice in meetings.

The route to self-sufficiency and focused implementation is deep reflection on what’s driving the quantitative scores coupled with healthy candid dialogue about the behaviour change colleagues want to see; and then agreeing actions with collective accountability for seeing these through.

Now, when the Finance Director shares business performance numbers, they follow up terms like GC (gross contribution) with a simple explanation of what it means, so as not to take for granted all colleagues in the meeting understand. It seems so simple, takes only a few seconds, but how often have so many people been lost in a meeting due to the many acronyms used and unknown to colleagues?

In each team meeting, senior members of the team are taking it in turns to observe colleague participation, supporting conversational turn-taking, and more equitable share of voice. At the last session the colleague responsible did not have to make any interventions as the team adopted more active listening, tacitly inviting more participation and consistently generative dialogue.

The team also agreed to have an anonymised suggestion box, in case colleagues did not feel they could openly share ideas or concerns. 100 days in, the box remains empty.

The leader shared with me how sustained collective responsibility is transforming into self-sufficiency, with new behaviours genuinely being baked into the culture of the team. The team are leaving less value on the table, they feel more engaged and comfortable speaking up.

Is this the same for you?