How well are you managing the tension between accountability and compassion?

Welcome to the “The Catalyst,” Kevin Noble’s weekly newsletter about becoming a more effective leader.

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If you were out running and someone honked at you, what would you do?

It’s typical to respond to someone in a nearly automatic way. It often doesn’t feel like a choice!

But your response is a choice. You can pause after receiving an input, go up the cognition ladder into thinking, and choose how you’d like to respond.

The hypothetical honker above was real for me recently. I was doing my hill runs, and I’d just gotten to the top of the hill and bent over on the side of the road to catch my breath. I heard several honks and slowly turned to face the noise.

An older lady leaned out of her window and yelled, “Keep up the good work!”

This was such a rare experience, it took me a minute to process. My reaction was to smile and wave; it was automatic. Then I was like…was that sarcastic? I mean, running up hill is pretty slow. And when she honked I was technically hunched over and out of breath – not really a “keep up the good work” look.

Just to try things out, I played around with choosing to view it negatively.

I could feel my face tighten and frown. I started to argue with her (in my head) as I walked down the hill. I would’ve finished my workout in a bad mood. When my wife got home, I would’ve said, “Can you believe some people?!” I’m tensing up again writing about it!

Ultimately I chose to take the driver’s statement at face value; I’m viewing her comment as sincere and supportive, not sarcastic. She saw a dude huffing it up a hill and chose to be a supportive neighbor. Thanks, mystery lady! You boosted my spirit!

You always have a choice in how to respond.

Of course, some choices can be harder to make than others. I mean, if this lady had yelled something legitimately cruel, I still technically have a choice. I could still smile and wave, but it would have been much harder to do.

Thankfully, those really nasty interactions are rarer. But since they do exist, it’s good to practice choosing how to respond on easier scenarios.

Can you recall a time when you were able to intentionally choose your response? Was it easy or hard?

Kevin

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A Quote

“ There’s a word for people who always respond to problems by blaming others or circumstances: victims. Of course, they’re often not actually victims. They just feel like they are, and that feeling gets in the way of good judgment. Chronic victims feel helpless, powerless, and often hopeless. Nothing is ever their fault; it is always someone or something else that got in the way. No one begins life wanting to be a chronic victim, but the slow accumulation of responses that avoid responsibility makes it hard for people to see that’s what they’re becoming. — Shane Parrish in “Clear Thinking”

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Three Things

1 – 🍫 Chocolate Prices Really Are Crazy – Have you been hearing about chocolate prices for a while? Prices have been stable for two decades and then went essentially vertical! Draught, underinvestment, and deeper structural issues got us here. Some projections expect prices to stabilize around $6000/ton, which is more than double the multi-decade trading range.

2 – ⏳ Toggl App for Time Tracking – I’ve been using my phone’s stopwatch function for tracking times on projects, but found a better option in the form of Toggl. I like how I can see the timer running in the browser tab while I’m doing work elsewhere.

3 – 🌞 Get Ready for 2045 – In the US the next total eclipse will be in 2045. The link to the Wikipedia article shows eclipse paths through 2100. The one in 2045 will go horizontally across the US and seems like it’ll be North of me. Will it be worth traveling to?

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Deeper Dive on the Tension between Accountability and Compassion

There are two forces exerting pressure at work. They’re unseen. They operate on your team. They operate on your boss. They operate on you.

They are accountability and compassion.

While not exactly opposites, these forces can create a tension. And as we know from the drama triangle, tension creates conflict, and conflict can create negative outcomes if not handled well.

Accountability is making and meeting commitments. It’s hitting your goals and objectives. It’s delivering action items. It’s doing all of this on time and with quality.

Compassion is being sensitive to the emotional needs of others. It’s about caring and concern. It’s relating to the experience of another person.

Being able to manage these forces in a way to create outcomes (accountability) with people (compassion) is an important element of leadership.

In order to put the potential for tension into focus, let’s first look at each force in the extreme.

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Too Much Accountability

Accountability is about making and meeting commitments. Being accountable is being asked to “account” for your actions. It’s the language of business.

Think of a public company CEO. They have a high amount of accountability. Every quarter they have to speak to a large group of investors and analysts. They “account” for their actions and outcomes over the past quarter. They provide a new set of guidance for the upcoming quarter.

The investors and analysts – collectively, “the market” – has very high accountability and almost no compassion. It’s pretty black and white. Did the CEO and company do what they said? Are they reliable and trustworthy?

The market doesn’t care how hard it was. They don’t care how the CEO is feeling.

If you dial the accountability up a notch further, it turns into drama and the persecutor role. It’s about blame and finding fault. It’s not hard to find articles blaming the CEO for the performance of their company.

You can find this same behavior when you zoom into any part of a company. There are leaders who create levels of accountability so high that there’s no wiggle room, and no compassion for the real people involved. Deadlines are deadlines, and it doesn’t matter what it takes to get there.

Work all night? Do it.

Push others around? Has to happen.

Sacrifice your health? It’s gotta get done.

While super high accountability may work in the short term, it can be a brutal regime to live under. It creates negative feeling and burnout. Your employees have options and will likely choose to leave an environment where accountability is too high.

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Too Much Compassion

Compassion is about relating to the emotional needs of others. It’s seeing what’s happening with the person responsible for the deadline.

We’re human and all need, and deserve, compassion.

But in the extreme of compassion we find the other dimensions of the drama triangle; rescuer and victim.

Have you ever worked with a leader who was so afraid of conflict, and so empathetic, that it was like deadlines didn’t even matter? They weren’t willing to have any hard conversations. People can sense that and some start to take advantage of it. It’s difficult to work hard when you see other people on your team missing commitments with zero consequence.

A leader operating with too much compassion can start to fill in the gaps of their team themselves, or allow deadlines to slip.

“Oh, you didn’t get the report done in time? I’ll do it.”

“You hard a hard week? That’s okay, we’ll just try again later.”

Most teams don’t operate in a closed ecosystem, so these slips have cascading effects on the company’s overall ability to get things done.

With super high compassion you may lose your people who operate with high accountability, because they want to achieve big outcomes and be part of a high performance team. And leaders who run teams that aren’t accountable will eventually find themselves out of work.

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Managing Tension in These Forces

So if too much accountability can be a bad thing, and too much compassion can be a bad thing, what’s the solution?

Like Nate Regier says, the solution is the blend the two. We’re operating in a gray zone. We’ve got to figure out ways to get things accomplished in a compassionate way.

Ben Horowitz is right. We have to find a solution that keeps us balanced between too tense and not tense enough.

In the rest of this newsletter I’ll share a framework and then some tactics to manage this tension in a healthy way.

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The Framework

There’s an analog to exercise. If you work yourself too hard with too much weight, you’ll break your body. If you do nothing but sit on the couch, your body becomes less capable of doing work. That’s the tension between accountability and compassion.

Too much accountability and you get into persecutor, which is blame and ruthlessness. Too much compassion and you get into rescuer/victim, which is boredom, apathy, and no outcomes.

Just like in exercise, you have to balance effort with recovery. You do this with a goal to improve your capability. If you can manage more effort than rest, you’ll get stronger.

At work, if you can improve your, and your team’s, ability to manage high accountability – without going too far – then you’ll create an upward sloping line of improving ability to get things done. And you can do this without feeling like you’ve lost compassion.

So if you plot a sine wave that includes those periods of increasing accountability with periods of calm agreement, and you include the concept of creating upward slope, it starts to look like this image below.

Let’s explore a few of the tactics for how we can create an environment that is capable of producing increasing outcomes in a compassionate way.

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Idea 1 – Find people who hold themselves accountable

If you’re clear on the environment you want to create, then you can be intentional about finding people who will work well in that environment.

As a leader, you don’t want to have to constantly run around holding people accountable. If the only reason something gets done is if you follow up with your employee to ask where it is, you’re fighting a losing battle.

You want to find people that are capable and willing to hold themselves accountable. Be intentional about looking for this characteristic in your interviews.

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Idea 2 – Give space for autonomy, mastery, and purpose

In Daniel Pink’s “Drive,” he asserts that the characteristic of drive comes from having autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It’s an intrinsic motivator, not an extrinsic one (like money).

For every one of your direct reports, make sure you get to know their intrinsic motivators. Connect their purpose to your team and company’s purpose.

Give them the space to develop mastery. Support them in their training. Allow them to make, and learn from, mistakes. Give them the ability to focus on a smaller number of projects. Allow them the time and effort to build mastery, which is not an overnight process.

To the extent you’re able, improve your team’s autonomy over their time, technique, tasks, and team (credit to Daniel Pink for this language). Your employees what agency over when they work, how they work, what they work on, and who they work with.

All of this applies to you as the leader. Connect your purpose to your company’s purpose. Develop mastery for yourself. Improve your own autonomy.

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Idea 3 – Watch for tension, and back off if needed

Just like in working out you’ve got to listen to your body, at work you have to listen to yourself and your team. Work is hard, but is it too hard?

Have you been sprinting for too long and everyone is gassed? Are you reaching your current limits? Remember the sine wave; you can’t hold high tension and accountability forever.

If you’ve really reached your current limit, then back off. Give time off. Delay current deadlines. Reduce scope and priorities. Find an area of less conflict to move forward. Give your team time to recharge before sprinting again.

Also, going back to idea 2, listen for the concerns behind any voiced complaints. Is there an opportunity to strengthen autonomy, mastery, and purpose? These reduce the energy drain on people.

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Idea 4 – Start with compassion

Every person is deserving of compassion and as a leader you should always be listening to the person. What’s going on in their home life? How are their work relationships right now? What’s the team dynamic?

Ask about them as a person, not just as an employee. Make sure you get to know them.

Don’t assume that because someone has always held themselves to high standards and high accountability that they can do it forever. Keep checking in on them. Make sure they know you care about them as a person. Allow space for them to ask for a break. Maybe even better, if you have people with high accountability, make them take the break they don’t know they need – they may have trouble taking it for themselves.

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Idea 5 – Struggle With, not Against or For

Sometimes accountability takes too strict a form of “you’re” accountable. It’s throwing someone into a stormy ocean and saying: Swim back to shore. That struggle can be too much.

Work is hard, so everyone will have some sort of struggle, and you often won’t know in advance when you’re about to exceed the limit.

When that struggle inevitably happens, the goal is to to struggle “with,” but not struggle “for” or struggle “against.” That means you don’t go into persecutor and blame with no help. That means you don’t take on all the difficulty yourself.

You sit side by side with the person. You acknowledge their worth as a person, and acknowledge they are capable. You help them brainstorm ways they can get through this. You support them with access to other resources they may need.

You’re in this together, but they’re going to do the work.

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Bringing it All Together

There are two unseen forces in tension at work; accountability and compassion.

Being able to manage these forces in a way to create outcomes (accountability) with people (compassion) is an important element of leadership.

Too much accountability and you get into persecutor, which is blame and ruthlessness. Too much compassion and you get into rescuer/victim, which is boredom, apathy, and no outcomes.

The goal is to balance accountability and compassion to create an upward slope of increasing capability.

Some ways you can do this are:

– Find people who hold themselves accountable
– Give space for autonomy, mastery, and purpose
– Watch for tension, and back off if needed
– Start with compassion
– Struggle With, not Against or For

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Call To Action

As always, start with awareness. How are these forces acting on you and your team?

Are you closer to the high accountability – producing high outcomes but on the edge of burnout?

Are you closer to high compassion – high vibes and harmony but having limited outcomes?

Life is complicated, so it won’t be that clear, but the goal is to start to see these unseen forces.

From there, investigate each idea. Are the people on your team holding themselves accountable? How is autonomy, mastery, and purpose for each person? Are you leading with compassion? Are you struggling with, or are you struggling against or for?

From there, make small adjustments as needed for your environment.

I’m always here to help. Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz if you want to talk through your circumstance and these topics. I’d love to hear from you.

Kevin