The Spiral of Accountability™
Over the last few years several of my clients have approached me with a problem that they struggled to define; they just knew their teams had an issue that was preventing them from being successful. When I dug into the problems plaguing these teams, I found that quite often the team members’ lack of accountability was at the heart of the issue. But what does lack of accountability really mean? How does it happen? What does it look like? And, most importantly, how do you fix it?
I created a new definition of accountability based on this reflection and my many years of experience working with teams like. Becoming accountable means one considers the situation, gathers perspectives and information, challenges assumptions (theirs and others), and brings forth the very best response to pursue and find solutions through collaboration.” Verbs, actions. This I can work with. Next, I needed to figure out a way to simply and clearly explain this definition with my client. I am a visual person; I love models. They size up a dynamic and show it in a way that is easy to conceptualize. I needed a visual model. I created the Spiral of Accountability™.
This visual represents the accountability dynamic. It shows the progression of both destructive behaviors and productive behaviors and how they can cause a spiral down to misery or a spiral up to a team that is In Synch.
It all begins in the fog in the middle. This is when something occurs that causes pause. It doesn’t make sense, or it is bothersome or worrisome. There isn’t a clear path forward. Sometimes this pause generates negative self-talk, “I am new to the team, I can’t question this.” Sometimes this pause generates negative talk of others, “he is always doing stuff like this.” Sometimes the pause is truly just not understanding what is going on and that ambiguity can generate fear. We begin to create a story in our head to fill in the information we do not have. In the absence of information, human beings make it up, and usually not on the good
side.
Let me explain with a story. Early in my career, I lived in Texas and worked for several years in healthcare, specifically at a for-profit psychiatric hospital. I remember a time in 1990 when I noticed that our senior leaders were in closed door, multi-day meetings with corporate bigwigs. When our leaders emerged, they were quiet and distant. I was in middle-management, and we were confused and clearly out of the loop. We were in the fog. If we allow the discomfort with the ambiguity to cause us to spiral down it leads to further negative self-talk such as “this is not my problem” or “this won’t work.” These kinds of sentiments begin to sound more absolute and evolve into destructive behaviors like avoidance, gossip, and blame. Next, we will begin to recruit others to help reinforce our negative feelings. After all, it’s no fun being
alone in our misery.
In my Texas scenario, we did just that in the beginning. Our staff members would ask us what’s going on and we had no idea what to tell them. The rumor mills were running at full capacity. No one was getting much of anything done due to the distraction. We were all in a state of fear. Were we closing, being sold, is everyone getting fired????? It was easy to join in the rumors and speculate with information we did not have. The stories we made up in our heads and with each other became very dramatic and we started to bond together, “how can they do this to us?”; “we should just all barge in there and give them a piece of our
mind!”; We had a fully generated group of commiserators and were in full blown misery.
Alternatively, if we can get comfortable in the fog, we can get curious, and take the time to consider possible pathways out of the fog. If we start asking questions such as “is there more to this?” or “is there another way to look at this?” we will begin to spiral up and out of the fog.
If we are curious and open, we will find that as we seek more information, the fog continues to lift. The information that is uncovered leads to better judgement and decisions. We can use our skills in dialogue, productive conflict, and influence to pursue potential solutions and build collaboration. This path leads to our team being in synch.
As middle managers, we came together and realized we couldn’t just stand by. We needed to choose a different path that would enable us to spiral up or our staff’s attitudes and performance would suffer to the point of affecting patients. To do that we would have to get curious about what was happening behind those closed doors and not assume we knew. We would have to be brave enough to seek clarification from our leaders so that we could truly know the actual situation. When we chose to actually do this, we discovered the meetings were an intense training around a new quality program corporate was implementing. We also found out that our leaders were stressed out about how the rest of the organization would react to the program, so they were keeping the initiative under wraps. It turned out they were in the fog and spiraling down just like we were. Once, as a leadership team, we realized we were in the same place, it was easy to change our focus from complaining and commiserating to considering our options of how to go about implementing this new program and getting staff on board. We were ready to communicate and collaborate rather than assume and make excuses.
This is simply a high-level overview of the Spiral of Accountability model. I have much more information and nuance to share with you. Please check back for additional blog posts as I explain these concepts further. And stay tuned for my forthcoming book!
