Are you promoting a culture of self-responsibility to increase your team’s performance?

Understanding the “change, accept, remove” principle can lead to better performance.

It makes sense conceptually that a business will be far more productive if staff are taking responsibility for as much as possible, and going above and beyond the call of duty, rather than pointing the finger with an attitude of “that’s not my job” or “it wasn’t my fault……”.

And obviously there are many points in between these two extremes, so if you are not at a full self-responsibility culture – here is some food for thought to improve your team’s performance and therefore bottom line for your business.

Where are your staff spending their energy credits?

In previous blogs we have discussed the concept of energy credits. Remember that energy credits are maximized when every part of “Brain, Body and Belief” are working together well. As a business leader you want to make sure your staff are coming to work with as close to their maximum 100 energy credits as possible.

Once they come to work with their energy credits, it’s important that you are helping people to spend them wisely. Spending 30 energy credits on something that should only take 10 isn’t the smartest way to improve your bottom line.

Complaining, negativity and blame all take energy credits and stop you from actually fixing the situation. If you are giving energy to feeling annoyed you aren’t giving energy to constructively fixing the situation. As a business leader you want your staff to be directing their energy credits constructively – not complaining around the water cooler.

And people’s brains are wired for defense so it’s important to make your staff feel safe. If anyone in the business is being negative or complaining – this can perpetuate through other staff members and lead to defensive behavior rather than constructive behaviour.

3 simple decisions to give your staff for any situation

Let’s face it – in any business there are always going to be things which don’t go according to plan and therefore have the potential to derail people and result in frustration and negativity – potentially a big drain on energy credits.

In his book “The Power of Now” Eckhart Tolle explains that in every situation, regardless of whether it’s work-related or not, you really only have three choices around how to deal with it:

1) Change the situation

This is where you empower staff to think constructively about what changes they can make to ensure the same unwanted result is not repeated next time. This is not about laying blame on anyone. It’s more about looking at the processes involved and where changes need to be made.

It’s about people owning the situation and firstly considering what they could have done to prevent the situation. For example rather than pointing the finger and saying that another person didn’t get the information to them on time, it’s realizing that they could have gone to the other person a few days before due date to see how that person was going with the information and if they needed any help to ensure the deadline was reached.

2) Accept the situation

This means full acceptance of the situation and that everyone involved has accepted that it is ok for this situation to occur again. Full acceptance means that there will be no negative chatter or commenting in the kitchen behind people’s backs.

3) Remove yourself from the situation

This one is easy – If someone refuses to either constructively change the situation, or accept the situation, then they are very welcome to remove themselves from the situation – ie leave the business. This may sound harsh but everyone has choices and the more control you give someone in a situation the more that everyone wins.

Where people are working with you because they feel they do not have any other choices – there is an argument to suggest that you may not want them working with you in the first place.

It’s important to set the culture that you want to have people working with you who really want to be there. This is a far more positive and productive situation for your bottom line.

Are you rewarding self-responsibility behaviours to make them more likely to occur again?

Explaining the “change, accept, remove” model to staff and rewarding them for showing examples of using this model to resolve situations and change mindset is a big step to encouraging a culture of self-responsibility and high performance mind-set.

When staff know that they are going to be rewarded and not reprimanded for putting up their hand and suggesting something they could have done to help a situation everyone is far more likely to come up with constructive ways to consistently enhance your business.

Rewarding constructive behaviour is far more beneficial than reprimanding sub-optimal results!