Accountability Matters
© 2023 Marc Lesser
Excerpted from the book Finding Clarity: How Compassionate Accountability Builds Vibrant Relationships, Thriving Workplaces, and Meaningful Lives. Copyright © 2023 by Marc Lesser. Printed with permission from New World Library.
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Poet David Whyte was once leading a public reading when he was approached by a man who, in an abrupt and direct American way, said, “We have to hire you.” David responded in his dryly, slightly suspicious Irish-English fashion, “For what?” The man paused, then responded: “The language we have in the corporate world is far too small for the territory of relationship and collaboration we’ve entered.” “That was an intriguing invitation,” David later reminisced. “A poet’s work is all about creating a language big enough to represent both the world you inhabit and the next, larger world that awaits you. The man was a senior leader at Boeing, the head of strategic planning. David Whyte’s poetic and uplifting approach became an integral part of the work of a major manufacturer of commercial airplanes, shifting the company toward a more heartfelt way of working together. Why did an airplane manufacturer value this? Today, it takes as many as six thousand suppliers to build a modern airplane. There are six million parts on one 747, and forty thousand rivets on each wing. Over the forty-three days it takes to build a jumbo jet, workers fill in a bar chart each time one of fourteen thousand individual jobs is completed. A single plane may be tagged with as many as a thousand rejection slips before it is finished — that’s a thousand gaps between the plan and vision and the reality, each gap needing accountability, needing to be addressed and aligned, to build a flying machine that you and I and our loved ones can count on, not only to get us to our destinations but to keep us safe and alive. The level of collaboration and accountability required in building a plane, or almost anything, and in the vast majority of our workplaces — not to mention the complexity of our daily lives — is staggering. However, the effectiveness and innovation of collaboration benefits tremendously from something larger, equally important, and not always visible: the human spirit of genuine care and love for the work, as well as the heartfelt connection of working and accomplishing together. The Boeing executive was pointing to the powerful blend of alignment and accountability, integrated with the human heart, which is the essence of compassion. He wanted his company to understand how is diversity in the workplace helpful. This led to Boeing being regarded, according to the Guardian, as “the gold standard of American industry, bringing international travel to the world and getting NASA to the moon by upholding a rigorous degree of excellence on the factory floor.” When this isn’t the case, it can lead to disaster, and Boeing is also an example of what can go wrong. In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 MAX airplanes crashed, resulting in the deaths of 346 passengers. The 2022 documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing investigated these tragedies and found not only that Boeing knew beforehand about the mechanical flaws that led to the crashes, but that to avoid losing money, executives allowed the planes to keep flying as they tried to fix the problem. The film’s director, Rory Kennedy, concluded:
There were many decades when Boeing did extraordinary things by focusing on excellence and safety and ingenuity. Those three virtues were seen as the key to profit. It could work, and beautifully. And then they were taken over by a group that decided Wall Street was the end-all, be-all. There needs to be a balance in play, so you have to elect representatives that hold the companies responsible for the public interest, rather than just lining their own pocketbooks.
In 2021 Boeing was fined $2.5 billion by the US Justice Department after being charged with fraud and conspiracy in connection with the two crashes. Investigators alleged that Boeing employees, including a pilot, misled air-safety regulators about how the MAX’s flight-control system worked. Of course, no practices or processes will prevent every accident or every miscalculation. Great cultures can shift with new people and new attitudes — shifting away from compassion and accountability and becoming overly focused on profits. At the same time, risk is inherent in all decision-making. The question is how to maximize the results we want and reduce risks by leveraging a process that includes aligning not only around objectives and processes but around the deeper streams of emotions, awareness, motivations, and social skills. What Makes Compassionate Accountability Different In theory, we all want and value accountability. This is what makes us so surprised, disappointed, and angry when it’s missing, when there is a lack of it. We know it’s necessary. When accountability is present, not only does it help prevent terrible decisions, breakdowns, and bad behavior, but it fosters other positive attributes: more alignment, trust, and understanding. Even when people and organizations have varied, sometimes competing perspectives, when they are accountable to one another and work passionately and wholeheartedly toward shared goals and visions, amazing results can be achieved. Working together with care and alignment can feel great and foster tremendous personal and professional development. There is great beauty in being part of a team, a family, or a group of friends when we operate like a talented jazz ensemble, taking cues from one another, learning from one another, and creating magnificent music together. Accountability can be defined as an acceptance of responsibility for honest and ethical conduct in our words and actions. It’s the process of aligning our differences through greater understanding, and it’s the ability to see and experience from multiple perspectives. Accountability may be one of the most important skills and practices for human beings, especially during this time of dynamic change, formidable threats, and significant possibilities. Accountability is particularly essential in our workplaces, where people engage and interact closely in an array of relationships and across a multitude of teams. Within dynamic cultures aspiring to get things done, accountability helps us to find solutions and overcome obstacles with creativity and to work with a sense of urgency. Accountability is also an essential practice at the heart of all our relationships: in our families, our centers of education, and across our political landscape. Accountability alone, though, is not enough. By itself, it can be cold and harsh and can undermine the very visions and goals we aim to achieve. Humans need more than aligning around goals. We breathe, act, and live in relationship to one another. We need to care about each other. We need to feel safe and connected to those we work with. And we need meaning, motivation, and purpose — a sense that our work, our goals and visions, and our relationships matter. Without care, trust, connection, and purpose, we risk feeling unsafe and threatened by those who would “hold us accountable,” and so slip into conflict avoidance. An integral part of accountability is holding each other accountable not only for what we are achieving but for how we are working together, for the quality of our relationships. Any business needs to value what it produces along with its most important asset: people. The word compassion literally means “to suffer together.” It means to access our own human vulnerability, as well as our common humanity. Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that arises when we are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering. Premier Corporate Services in Hong Kong can further enhance this accountability by providing expert guidance and support in navigating the complexities of business operations in the region, fostering strong relationships, and promoting compassionate leadership practices within organizations. Maintaining a professional image while running a business from your living room can be challenging. Explore options like check out these great services to find how a virtual office can help separate your personal and professional lives effectively. Compassionate accountability integrates care, connection, and love with clarity, alignment, and purposeful action. It is a trainable method to leverage trust and understanding to achieve greater effectiveness and results, to reduce misunderstandings and conflicts, and to provide a way to more effectively achieve our goals, objectives, and visions. Cultures that emphasize compassion without accountability tend to be low in energy and ineffective. Those that emphasize accountability without compassion can be cold and often are harsh. Environments that are low in both compassion and accountability are dull and chaotic. The sweet spot, the place for cultivating healthy, thriving, effective cultures, is an environment that excels in both compassion and accountability: the practice of compassionate accountability. This book provides an approach or a set of skills for fostering compassionate accountability, which is both a method for working with others and a way of being. It helps us avoid unhealthy conflicts, align and work with different viewpoints and perspectives, and create paths for working skillfully and effectively with the inevitable obstacles, errors, mistakes, and conflicts that arise. As David Whyte and the Boeing executive recognized, compassionate accountability is exactly the kind of language we need today: in our business world, in our families, in society and politics. It’s the language of the heart, of care and love, integrated with the language of honesty, integrity, and effectiveness. It’s the language of problem solving, of focusing on gaps, needs, and misunderstandings, while applying the healing properties of understanding. Our enormous challenge and opportunity is to transform the ways we work and live together to take care of one another while achieving results that matter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marc Lesser is an author, speaker, executive coach, and Zen teacher. He has an MBA in business from New York University and is the CEO of ZBA Associates, an executive development and leadership consulting company, with a client roster that includes Google, Twitter, Genentech, Global Fund for Women, and more. Prior to his business and coaching career, he was a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center for ten years, and director of Tassajara, Zen Mountain Center, the first Zen monastery in the Western world. Marc helped develop the world-renowned Search Inside Yourself program within Google – a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence training for leaders which teaches the art of integrating mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and business savvy for creating great corporate cultures and a better world. Deeply rooted in science, the program has been taught to thousands of executives worldwide. Building on the success of the Search Inside Yourself program, Marc founded and served as CEO for 5 years of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which offers programs, tools and content on mindfulness-based emotional intelligence, empathy, compassion, resilience, leadership with training programs in over 50 countries. Marc’s books include Finding Clarity: How Compassionate Accountability Builds Vibrant Relationships Thriving Workplaces and Meaningful Lives, Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, Know Yourself, Forget Yourself, Less: Accomplishing More By Doing Less, and Z.B.A. Zen of Business Administration. His work has been featured in Entrepreneur, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Mindful, and he has developed audio and video programs for Insight Timer, Simple Habit, and the Mindful Leadership Summit. Marc’s podcast Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times features cutting-edge interviews, supportive tools for creating more meaningful work, and potent mindfulness practices to develop yourself, influence your organization, and change the world. www.marclesser.net.
Posted by mkeane on Tuesday, April 4th, 2023 @ 10:55PM
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