Seed of the Day

A is for Accountability: Knowing what comes in, what goes out, how it does and why. Accountability is arguably the first port of call for every leader. For some it's with resources, it may be money or even people. Whatever the case may be for you, take the responsibility to see that by your care and effort, you can account for them all.
Don't allow negligence rob you of the good you stand to gain. You can't take that risk in leadership, it's too costly.

How to Avoid Defaulting on Your Goal

In everyday conversation the term goal and the manner about achieving it brings to the fore the observed cause of its failure. Most goals are reduced to mere wishes irrespective of their significance in the stand of things. Wishes are driven by mere emotions and emotions don’t achieve goals. The term goal can comprise a broad activity the sum of which may not usually turn out to be the whole. The sheer excitement of the significance of a task may drive most people to get emotional rather than pragmatic while setting goals as well as going about achieving them, this can end up being counter productive.

Following the 3 keys to keep up with a goal here are 3 more virtues to help you build a steam head towards achieving your goal.

1.       

     Accountability - developing the ability to give account of every effort, time and resource committed to the goal. To fulfill a task or bring about the reality of an idea, having a goal alone is not enough. Every goal is a mini project in its right worthy of a plan, a time span and perhaps a budget if necessary. All these however will amount to little when there is zero accountability. If a farmer by conscious effort cultivates his land, it will yield the desires produce, if otherwise by negligence he fails to cultivate, the farm will still grow plants but this time unproductively. Accountability includes but is not limited to asking yourself the right questions, knowing what is expected of every input and seeing that expectations are met. If I’m going to be spending an hour a day to achieve this goal what percentage of the whole am I expecting to complete in that hour? Accountability puts the backbone into people who might otherwise let their responsibility slip.

2.    

            Responsibility: most people see themselves as the function of their success and not their failure. One may rightly agree that success has many fathers while failure has just one. Seeing yourself as the sole function of either the success or failure of your goal puts you in good position psychologically and motivationally to own as well as live up to the responsibility goal wise. When you own up to responsibility of eventual outcome prior to events you kill the chance of excusing yourself when the difficult aspects of activity approach.

3.    

            Commitment: in this three action plan I discussed the far reaching effects this virtue can have on achieving a goal through a set plan. Responsibility begets commitment, people comparatively feel important when they are assigned responsibility over something. They must believe in a way they are trusted to be handed the said responsibility, so a normal person as not to disappoint that trust, will commit to the responsibility. A worthy goal deserves a plan and the plan is anything to go by, it must be committed to.

The probability of achieving a goal driven by emotion alone is 5 times lesser when compared to having a plan about it. It is 7 times more certain that you will complete a goal when you affirm it by committing someone else you will do it. It becomes almost 100% certain that a goal will be completed if there exist a specific accountability appointment someone else not lacking in the necessary commitment live up to the expected responsibility the task brings.

How Responsibility begets Commitment and Improvement

Nothing adds pep to work like commitment. Showing consistent commitment to a goal may encounter hindrances which come in different forms en route progress. Working on human basis you would rightly observe that expectations are often met with disappointment when you expect people to act in a certain manner without being told. Give someone responsibility and s/he will have reason to show commitment. 

Failure could be such a vice or perhaps an evil to some people that they would do anything to avoid it or be termed as one. To that effect they would strive to return what was committed to them in one piece rather than destroy it in attempt to improve it. Failure is not a vice rather fear is an evil. In attempt to avoid failure for the fear of its following effect people tend to choose options which may be counter productive.

Why did the servant in the talent parable hide his talent unlike his colleagues who braved it and multiplied theirs? Plenty are the possible answers but one of most interest is that the faint hearted servant failed to own the talent. Again the answers are plenty why he failed to own it. The fastest way to be wastefully unproductive is by seeing your job as another’s responsibility – a fast way to waste land.

The beginning of failure for most employees in this regards is the tendency to withdraw from this idea of ownership and responsibility. Whoever cannot obey himself, receives command. If you see yourself as working for yourself you will do the best for it, certainly a different case with some lazy fool – I mean that in a polite manner. Seeing it as working for yourself, certainly the ideas for improvement will flow.

Upon creation the world was basically committed to man. In essence ownership was handed over to him. Most people don’t see it that when responsibility is given to them no matter how temporal they are rightful owners of the lot. Again I mean this in a respectful manner. With an attitude of ‘oh I’m just managing it for the real owner’ you will not by any means earn the respect of the real owner. I have seen regular employees win the trust and respect of their employers with sheer responsibility and commitment to their task no matter how little. These ones are deserving of much irrespective of qualifications. Some other people spend years in  their job showing least commitment and even lesser improvement to their activity. There are far deeper reasons to lack of commitment and passion than responsibility. As we expect responsibility and accountability and responsibility from our subordinates, so does God from us. Failing to take ownership and responsibility of ones affairs will definitely plunge one to less advantage levels of receiving commands.