After falling ill for the 4th time in 6 years with chronic pain, I had to ask myself how was I making myself so sick?
It was only when I was ready to accept that I was making myself ill, the opportunity to change things appeared in my grasp.
Leaders who are accountable are the ones who change things.
They look for all the ways in which they have created the situation. Blame is not part of their psychological make-up.
Just like any other skill, practice makes us better at it. And once we get better, accountability grows in sophistication. We start to see how our internal chaos causes external chaos.
These 5 books show us the many facets to accountability, and the many approaches to it.
🔷 Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes—But Some Do by Matthew Syed Click here'- https://amzn.to/49RhW77
Syed explores the dichotomy between industries that learn from failures and those that don't, emphasising the importance of a culture that moves beyond blame to genuinely understand and learn from mistakes.
🔷 An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. Click here:- https://amzn.to/4cVOXS8
This book introduces the concept of Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs), where personal growth is part of the company's operational structure. Leaders would need to rethink accountability and build a new culture based on mutual growth.
🔷 The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
Combining Benjamin Zander's experiences as a conductor and Rosamund Stone Zander's psychotherapy insights, this book presents a set of practices for breaking away from old patterns of leadership. Shifting mindsets from a scarcity and blame framework to one of possibility and opportunity.
🔷 Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse
Carse's philosophical insights distinguishes between finite games, played to win, and infinite games, played for the sake of continuing the long game. Applied to leadership, it encourages leaders to view accountability and growth as part of an infinite game, focusing on long-term possibilities rather than short-term blame or victories.
🔷 Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet
While this might appear as a conventional leadership book at first glance, Marquet’s narrative of transforming leadership aboard a U.S. Navy submarine offers radical insights into distributing leadership responsibility.
It showcases how relinquishing control and creating a culture where everyone feels accountable can lead to unprecedented success.
Let's start small and ask ourselves, what's the one small thing we can be accountable for and aim to improve the situation incrementally.
Happy reading!
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