Accountability in creating the right impact

At some point of time, you would have observed, yourself in a situation wherein things are not going as expected. For e.g. a severe miss in delivery. What to do now, take a deep breath, compose yourself, and comes the tough part to break the news to the Sr leadership. What are the possible scenarios:

1. Play safe, blame someone, while the team is working to address the problem.

2. Start immediately working towards fixing the situation, without informing anyone in leadership.

3. Inform the right stakeholders about the problem, own the situation, take charge and talk about all relevant details, what went wrong, what is the impact, how to stop bleeding on an immediate basis and work out a solution in long term.

What do you think, what should be the recommended approach. 3rd one - correct?

In last two situations listed above, while one is working to address the situation, dealing it right reduces the stress in the team and brings synergies in team collaboration. Let me talk about a concept called "Experience engineering" - managing a conversation with carefully selected language and a strong due-diligence, designed to improve how other person will interpret what they're being told, creating an impact. Pls note the idea is not to hide anything or falsely present the information about the 'miss'. The idea is to own accountability, acknowledge there is a problem and work towards the solution. Few of the techniques that have worked well with me in past are:

• Advocacy - demonstrating a clear alignment with stakeholders and an active support.

• Transparency - Honest conversations

• Positive Language - Using assertive language to talk towards solutioning.

• Anchoring - Positioning a given outcome as more positive and desirable by owning the situation.

• Always Keep it simple and to the point!

Remember - while it's not possible to go in past and fix the problem, what you've done now is made the conversation impactful, while maintaining trust in delivering the solution.

Just because there is nothing you can do doesn't mean there's nothing you can do.

#leadership #team #engineering #experience #collaboration #teammotivation #motivation #people #LifeCoach