Crucial Accountability Quotes - 39 quotes

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Crucial Accountability

Crucial Accountability is a guidebook designed to help individuals and teams improve workplace accountability. Written by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, the book provides practical tools for managing violations, broken promises, and poor performance. It emphasizes the importance of holding people accountable to enhance relationships and achieve better outcomes. The book builds on the skills from "Crucial Conversations" and introduces techniques to address performance issues effectively, ensuring that expectations are met and problems are resolved constructively.

quote icon …more often than not, we don't speak up when we should. Sure, sometimes we bring up an issue at the wrong time or in the wrong way, but that's not the predominant mistake made in most families and companies. Going to silence is the predominant issue in these situations.

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quote icon If you're going to speak up when others remain silent, if you're going to hold people to a standard that differs from that of the masses, get the word out. Send out a warning. Differentiate yourself from others. This is particularly wise advice for those moving into new positions of leadership, parents taking over blended families, etc.

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quote icon With time, we have come to understand that while being true to one's values may be noble, if you do so in a way that dishonors your peers (making fun of the less vigilant, bragging about your own commitment, etc.) you're upholding one value only to deny another: teamwork.

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quote icon When it comes to deciding whether we're going to speak up, we kid ourselves into making the same mental math errors. We choose the certainty of what is currently happening to us (no matter how awful it might be) over the uncertainty of what might happen if we said something. This of course drives us to silence, quietly embracing the devil we know, when there's a good chance that we really should have spoken up.

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quote icon Here's the path we take: We see what that person did and then tell ourselves a story about why he or she did it, which leads to a feeling, which leads to our own actions. If the story is unflattering and the feeling is anger, adrenaline kicks in. Under the influence of adrenaline, blood leaves our brains to help support our genetically engineered response of "light or fight," and we end up thinking with the brain of a reptile. We say and do dim-witted things.

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quote icon Perhaps the largest error we make in exaggerating the cost of confronting an issue stems from the erroneous belief that the existing world always punishes people who are naïve enough to speak their minds.

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quote icon Here's the added danger: if he selects the wrong problem from this lengthy list of possible problems and handles it well, he may be left with the impression that he's done the right thing. ... you have to identify and deal with the right problem, or it will never go away.

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quote icon When you've gone to silence because you're afraid you're not skilled enough to have an accountability conversation, your assessment may be correct. If this is the case, enhance your skills. … When you're thinking about going to silence, ask yourself if you're copping out rather than making a reasoned choice.

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quote icon Tell-tell signs that you should be speaking and not clamming up include the following four: Sign 1: You're acting out your feelings. You think you are suffering silently, but you're not. Sign 2: Your conscience is nagging you. Sign 3: You're downplaying the cost of not taking action, while exaggerating the dangers of speaking up. Sign 4: You figure that nothing you do will help.

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quote icon Let's say that despite your best efforts, you keep returning to the same infraction. Your emotions are getting worse, not better, and in retrospect you believe that you're choosing to talk about what's easy, convenient, or obvious but not what's important. In short, you have every reason to believe that you're repeatedly dealing with the wrong issue.

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quote icon As the problem continues, talk about relationship, what's happening to us. Relationship concerns are far bigger than either the content or the pattern. The issue is not that the other people have repeatedly broken promises; it's that the string of disappointments has cause you to lose trust in them: you're beginning to doubt their competency and doubt their promises, and this is affecting the way you treat one another.

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quote icon When you’ve gone to silence and your conscience is nagging you, you probably ought to speak up.

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quote icon When you've gone silent, but your body language keeps sending out hostile signals or you're dropping hints or relying on sarcasm, you probably ought to speak up.

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quote icon Crucial conversations deal with high-stakes interactions where emotions run strong and opinions vary. Crucial accountability deals with a subset of these interactions. After parties have come to a common understanding and assignments have been made - meaning things are on course - someone fails to complete his or her assignment. All accountability conversations start with the question "Why didn't you keep your commitment?

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quote icon The best tool for choosing from the host of possible infractions is to ask what you really want and don't want. And since you're talking to another person, you ought to ask what you want for yourself, for the other person, and for the relationship. If you don't think about all three of these essential aspects, one may take a backseat, and you won't solve your most important issue.

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quote icon We're drawing conclusions about another person's unseen intent.

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quote icon If the broken commitment is really bothering you, you're unlikely to be a good enough actor to hide your feelings. You may try to choke your feelings down, but eventually they'll bubble up to the surface in unhealthy ways. If you don't talk it out, you'll act it out.

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quote icon Anyone who has ever held others accountable realizes that a person's behavior during the first few seconds of the interaction sets the tone for everything that follows. You have no more than a sentence or two to establish the climate. If you set the wrong tone or mood, it's hard to turn things around. In fact, a bad beginning might ensure a poor ending.

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quote icon If leaders start out with strong emotions, believing that they are on the moral high road, the interaction is likely to turn out badly for everyone regardless of the underlying cause.

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quote icon We lose all sense of reality when we fixate on the horrific possibilities that might befall us. The severity of the possible outcomes distorts our view of the probabilities. If an unlikely outcome is bad enough, we often describe it as a certainty rather than a possibility.

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quote icon The truth is that many accountability conversations fail not because others are bad and wrong but because we handle them poorly.

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quote icon …remember that asking others to account for their actions lives and dies on the words people choose and the way people deliver them. Those words, and particularly the way they are delivered, live and die on what people think before they open their mouths. No amount of preparation can save a conversation if the person who brings up the failed promise isn't in the right frame of mind.

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quote icon Problems rarely come in tiny boxes. Certainly not the issues we care about. Those come in giant bundles.

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quote icon How do you dismantle a bundle of accountability problems into its component parts and choose the one you want to discuss? ... Do you speak up and run the risk of causing a whole new set of problems, or do you remain silent and run the risk of never solving the problem?

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quote icon If the solution you're applying doesn't get you the results you really want, it's likely you're dealing with the wrong problem entirely.

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quote icon At the heart of most decisions to stay quiet, even though we're currently suffering, lies the fear that we won't be able to make a difference, We believe that either other people or the circumstances themselves make the problem insoluble.

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quote icon If you're going to differentiate yourself from your spouse or coworkers by holding people to a more rigid standard, don't be smug about it. Set expectations in a way that shows respect for people with different views.

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quote icon When you want to clarify the focus of your accountability conversation, stop and ask yourself, "What are the consequences to me? To our relationship? To the task? To other stakeholders?" Analyzing the consequences helps you determine what is most important to discuss.

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quote icon We learned that in order to find people who were good at holding others accountable, we simply needed to ask leaders who their most valued employees were. Almost without exception the top-valued employees selected by the leaders were positive deviants who had learned how to hold others accountable.

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quote icon Those who observe repeated infractions and discuss each new instance as if it were the first one live the same problem (the same day) over and over, and nothing ever changes. Accountability experts never live Groundhog Day. The first time a person is late, she's late; the second time, she's failed to live up to her promise; the third time she's starting down the road to discipline, etc.

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quote icon The ability to reduce an infraction to its bare essence takes patience, a sense of proportion, and precision. First, you have to take the time to unbundle the problem. People are often in too much of a hurry to do this. Their emotions propel them to move quickly, and speed rarely leads to careful thought. Second, while sorting through the issues, you have to decide what is bothering you the most. If you don't, you'll end up going after either the wrong target or too many targets. Third, you have to be concise. You have to distill the issue to a single sentence. Lengthy descriptions of violated expectations only obscure the real issue. If you can't reduce a violation to a clear sentence before you talk, the issue almost never becomes more understandable and focused as a conversation unfolds.

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quote icon We establish the climate the moment we assume the other person is guilty and begin feeling angry and morally superior.

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quote icon When you've gone to silence and are trying way too hard to convince yourself that you've done the right thing, you might want to examine whether you are intentionally minimizing the cost of not speaking up and exaggerating the risks of doing so.

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quote icon Our two favorite silence-driving math tricks are (1) down-playing the cost of not speaking and (2) exaggerating the cost of expressing our views.

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quote icon Accountability issues are almost never contained in the behavior of the offender. They're much more likely to be a function of what happens afterward. The problem lies in the consequences.

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quote icon Whatever the underlying cause, if you're going to break from tradition and elevate a standard that had been nothing more than a rough guideline to a hard-and-fast law, people should know. You have to issue fair warning. You have to reset others' expectations, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't look smug.

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quote icon Maybe you've experienced the same phenomenon. Someone repeatedly violates an expectation, and you play nice for several weeks until one day you can take it no longer, and so you launch a verbal attack on the offending party. The tongue-lashing seems to be going well until you notice that everyone in the surrounding area is staring at you, not the guy who kept breaking commitments.

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quote icon And thus began our first attempt to study "positive deviants"-people who struggle in the same circumstances as others but find a way to produce remarkably better results.

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quote icon These were individuals who were so pleasant that they created good morale, but they only achieved mediocre results because they rarely held others accountable. In the second camp, you'd find leaders who could solve problems all right, but only by demeaning and threatening others in a way that led to low morale and eventually poor results. But then...a few individuals who ... They found a way to be both honest and respectful - and rarely had to invoke their formal authority to get things done.

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