Rocketeer Leadership Behavior 10 - Accountable
Be the Most Reliable. Solid as a rock. A foundation stone to build upon.
Our tenth and final Leadership Behavior is Accountable. This one is for leaders that take a stand, deliver on their commitments and communicate in a sensible way with integrity. Accountability starts with personal accountability, being true to yourself and following through on your own realistic commitments, and then learning how to hold others accountable. Here’s the slide from our internal deck:
The Accountable Rocketeer Leadership Behavior has the following sub-points:
Dependable and communicates effectively when unable to deliver upon commitments
Confirms actions, posts and directives promptly
Takes responsibility for their own part of relationship issues
Exhibits personal behavior consistent with values
Courageous when it’s difficult
Strong integrity and respect for time
For me the basis of being accountable is respect for time. I find that if I value the time and energy that we put into the things we do, it is easier to hold accountability and keep integrity with what we stand for.
Because you want to respect that time and you value it, you can make decisions quicker and take ownership for the controllable’s that you can control. Sometimes, great leaders even take responsibility for a problem that’s not their own fault because they know that they can have an impact on moving the situation forward.
At ServiceRocket, our purpose is to be the Most Reliable partner for our customers. We can’t do that without truly appreciating and embracing this Leadership Behavior.
Anti-Behavior: Passes the Buck
The Anti-Behavior for this Leadership Behavior is: Passes the Buck
Teflon… nothing sticks, that’s not me. Ever seen a problem bounce around from one person to another and then someone puts their hand up and just owns in and allows everyone to move on….
Our Inspiration
We leveraged the core of this Leadership Behavior from Scaling Leadership by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams along with it’s anti-behavior. And then we adapted it for our culture and The series of books and research by these authors and the underlying Leadership Circle framework is used heavily at our company and linking these together made so much sense. In that body of work it distinguishes between leaders being in the state of high creativity or high reactivity. The anti-behavior logically has a canceling effect on the creative side.
The sub-points were inspired by our Rocketeer managers along with the Leadership Circle. I’ll write more in a future post how we use this leadership framework in our company across the globe in a scalable way.
Some great resources for this Leadership Behavior include*:
Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Mastering Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams
Scaling Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams
Principles - Ray Dalio
Why do we have Leadership Behaviors? Isn’t this what Core Values are supposed to do? See my previous post below on ‘When are Core Values not enough?”, but in short Leadership Behaviors give you explicit coachable items to work with your team to help them get better. Telling someone they have fallen on a behavior is much easier to correct and improve, whereas telling someone that they have failed against values is akin to telling them that they’ve been banished from the tribe.
In my opinion, companies need to define these behaviors if they are truly invested in growing their employees to reach their potential. We outline this in our Rocketeer Promise.
When are Core Values not enough?
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*I have some amazon affiliate codes on book links, I may make billions from these and quit my job.
**Over time these posts will be updated with more links, tweaks and changes as we learn more. Nothing is ever final at ServiceRocket, and we don’t like “unveiling” things.