Does your team believe that they can control the events that affect them? When employees assume personal ownership of their company’s results and accept responsibility for their own performance, they become more engaged and work at a higher level.
Are You In or Out?
People with an external locus of control have little faith in their own ability to change the environment. They play the blame game and don’t hold themselves accountable.
Those with an internal locus of control attribute outcomes to their own control. They honour commitments and responsibilities. They do what they know they should do when they need to do it. They seldom make excuses.
Applying the Oz Principle
You can provide the opportunity for employees to become accountable by encouraging them to expose and eliminate negative attitudes.
The Oz Principle defines accountability as “a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results” in four steps:
- See it. Recognise and acknowledge the reality of a situation
- Own it. Accept responsibility for your contribution to your current experience
- Solve it. Change the current reality by identifying and implementing solutions to your problem
- Do it. Commit to follow through with the solutions identified, especially when there is great risk in doing so.
Turn it around
Start the process by getting your team to identify a situation that upset them, and writing down the name of the person involved. Get them to list all the reasons that this situation and the individual angered them.
Ask them to think about who is at fault and who is right. Encourage them to own the situation, and to think about the most effective ways to resolve the problem. It’s about recognising dissonance and resolving it by doing the fair, or right, thing. •
