I was at the Agile Business Conference earlier in the month and Christopher Avery gave a very thought provoking presentation.

His core mission in life is to teach people about taking responsibility. He has spent most of his career working with team and leadership development and noticed that while all the leadership guru’s say that the first thing a leader must do is “take responsibility” none of them say how. In his research he found papers from psychologists that had looked at the process that we all go through when we hit a problem.

The first thing we do is look to “Lay Blame” on someone else (“I can’t find my keys…..someone has moved them“)

We then try to Justify what has happened (“I was in a rush last night and must have done something different”)

We then feel Shame when in effect we “Lay Blame” on ourselves (“I am so disorganised I’m always losing my keys”)

In trying to do something different to avoid the problem in the future we feel an Obligation which we feel has been put on us by someone else (“My wife keeps telling me I should always put my keys in the same place“). The problem with being obliged to do anything; e.g. going to a meeting that we really don’t want to be at, duty visits to relatives we don’t really like; is that eventually we rebel against what might be seen as a “guilt trip” and Quit the obligation (“I have to but don’t want to and won’t”).

In all of these states there is no learning or true growth. The problem is not actually being addressed and so is likely to happen again and may become a repeating pattern of behaviour. This repeating pattern may be the reason behind repeated failure; professional or personal, individual or team.

Chris Avery then goes on to make the contention that they only way to address the problem is for someone to take personal ownership of the problem; thinking clearly and unclounded by the emotion of the situation. This person does not blame, justify, shame or create obligations on others, they get the problem solved and learn the lessons i.e. they take Responsibility.

Chris goes on to say that the keys to responsibility are intention, awareness and being willing to confront the issue.

It is important to remember that this is a self leadership model. Once you start looking you see all kinds of places where people aren’t taking responsibility and the temptation is to try and pin this model on them. The problem is that by doing this you are immediately laying blame on others. Chris says by all means introduce others to the model (hence I am writing this piece) but they have to chose to embrace it (or not).

When it comes to effective and high performance teams the key is for all team members to take responsibility and for the team to avoid a “blame culture”. This model provides an insight how to fast track a new team into high performance.