Firm Development

Do you choose Accountability or Compliance?

This is Part Two of this article series on Accountability and Freedom. Click here to read Part One. You don’t want to miss the beginning of this story.

Joe Woodard says, “Confrontation is a positive interaction with a momentary negative emotional response.” While that definition has dramatically changed the way that I approach difficult conversations in a very good way, I have found that the length of the momentary negative emotional response can vary widely depending on who I am interacting with.

In C’s case, it lasted quite a while. I confronted C with her freedom, trying to show her that her choices had led her to where she is, and that she had another choice to make. She could either choose to learn and grow with the opportunities being presented, or she could choose not to.

When she skipped the class that was intended to be the equivalent of her final exam for her internship, I offered her an alternate assignment. I challenged her to write about what she had learned from her experiences in her internship with us. She asked about the required length of the essay, and I told her that it didn’t matter. What was important was that she actually put effort into her self-reflection and grow. I suggested that she go as deep as she could with it, and to see if she could find ways to take herself to the next level. She agreed to the writing assignment over choosing to leave the internship, and she put on airs that she was in agreement and that everything was fine.

Again, she was lying.

When C emailed me her 12 page essay a few days later, it came with an email notifying me that she had completed the required number of hours for her internship and informing me that she would not be fulfilling her commitment to come in for wrap-up and goodbyes.

The entire paper was a personal attack on me. She called me “sadist”, herself a “whore”, and even went so far as to say that the assignment itself was “rape.” I realized in that moment that these words were not coming from a person who was mentally whole. The negative emotions she must have felt were tangible in her writing. This was not coming from a place of wellness. She had chosen slavery.

I promptly forwarded the essay to C’s supervising professor at her university to let him decide the outcome of her pass/fail grade. I wanted to be done with this destructive influence I had allowed into my life.

Nonetheless, the stabs she had taken at me hurt. Part of me could see the unfortunate trap she had woven for herself. I knew that her words about me weren’t true, and I pitied her for the lies she bound herself in.

Part of me got lost in my own doubts.

The #1 fear of every entrepreneur is the fear of being called out as a fake. She knew that, as I had taught her about Impostor Syndrome, and she took advantage of it. She said the things that she knew would hurt the most.

What hurt even more was the betrayal of trust. Not once did she thank us for being her hosts, and she didn’t even acknowledge how much damage she had done. She abused our generosity and hospitality, taking advantage of us in our own home. I felt like I had failed in my commitment to her as mentor, and I allowed these doubts to gnaw at me.

It took me several months to stop taking her words and actions personally. Taking Ed Kless’s webinar on The Top Ten Business Myths re-framed the whole situation. My leadership skills were actually serving me very well, but we cannot save everyone. We can only reach out so far before we, too, fall out of the boat. I confronted C with her freedom by offering her that assignment, and C adamantly chose slavery through compliance. She had many other options available to her, including collaborating on another solution or choosing to leave. It seems that she thought rebellion in compliance gave her some moral high ground. She chose to make everyone around her an oppressor, and never took responsibility for the outcomes of the choices she had made.

As a result, my team made a fantastic new policy to add to our team manual:

No Fakes or Slaves Allowed.

This went into our Standards of Conduct section, where we list intolerable offenses that may result in immediate termination. In our book, this kind of behavior is right up there between theft and violence. Even in our small, employee-owned business model, it’s important to have clarity on where our hard boundaries are. C pointed out a big hole in the fabric of our corporate culture. Thanks to Ed Kless, we have now filled it with Truth and Freedom. What’s more, we have the tools to explain why it is important so that people can make an educated choice. C was not a good fit for us, and now we know how to see that trait in the future.

Accountability and Freedom Prevail.

Perhaps if I had this understanding and these tools when C was with us, I could have used them to help her redirect the situation. Maybe we could have developed an understanding that would bring her more happiness and success. Perhaps not. In the end, it is not my job to teach anyone anything, only to present opportunities to learn. Whether they choose to take those opportunities is up to them. These same ideas go hand in hand with the choices we need to make to break the poverty mindset.

I know now that I don’t need to continue to engage with people who are not interested in learning and growing. I know that freedom is accountability and accountability is freedom. That is how I am able to do big things with my life. I help others, and I endeavor to make the world a better place. I choose the company of others like me.

Kris Kristofferson was wrong. Freedom is not just another word for nothing left to lose. That is, unless what you have to lose are your fears and inhibitions. Freedom is Accountability.

A handful of months ago (circa 2015) my accounting firm was contacted by a woman asking for an opportunity to do an internship with us. For the sake of anonymity, we’re going to call her C. We had a phone interview with C, getting deep into our corporate culture, vision, and other important discussions the same way that we would with any new member of our team. C sounded very excited to dive in and learn from us.

It turned out that she was lying.

We have had interns in the past. It is a fun chance to help someone get into the profession on the right foot. We don’t gain anything from having interns except for the opportunity to learn and grow together. It is similar to hosting an exchange student in our home. It is a charitable act on our part, as we invest a great deal of time, energy, and resources. The reward is that it’s supposed to feel good. We volunteer to make the world a better place, bringing our industry to the next level. It never occurred to us that someone would abuse our hospitality in that situation.

C spent two full months with us, and in that time there were only a few times that she showed her true colors. The first was early on when there was a confrontation over her lack of follow-through on an assignment. Then it did not come up again until the very end, when she told us that she had no interest in learning anything from us. It turned out that she was only there because she needed the internship to finish the degree it had taken her 8 years to complete. She had been actively lying about her intentions and interests the entire time. She had been telling us what she thought we wanted to hear so that she could get a passing grade and be on her way. It almost worked.

Almost.

As C was finishing her final week with us, her self-destructive habits that had defeated her in obtaining her degree up to that point firmly took hold again. She chose to skip out on an opportunity to participate in a full day intensive mastermind course that I was teaching. I was seeing this activity as the equivalent to her final exam for the internship. It was a chance to work with other business owners on a deep, vulnerable, human level to focus on making leaps and bounds of personal and professional growth. It was the culmination of the learning opportunity we had offered, and she chose not to show up.

In the end, she wasn’t there because she wasn’t meant to be. She wasn’t ready for growth of any kind, and she would have detracted from the experience for those present. It was a great class, and she really missed out.

Her loss.

With the choice to skip this seminar, her carefully crafted veneer was cracked. I could see that there were big things that she wasn’t bringing to the table with us. I asked her about it, and the truth started to come out. It came out with venom. C told me that she was only here to finish her degree. She admitted that she hated her teachers and thought they were worthless. This was a big part of the reason why school had taken her 8 years. She also told me that I was a fake who had nothing of value to offer her.

Hindsight being what it is, I realize now that there was probably nothing I could do to help her. She told me straight out that she believed that authority figures were inherently evil, and that she saw me in a position of authority. My big mistake was that I felt like I had a responsibility to her, despite the fact that she had already fully negated the fundamental values of our commitments to each other. Rather than just booting her out the door, I gave her a choice. This choice led to several months of hard lessons and soul searching. Then I finally found the lessons that I needed from C.

I found the missing piece… and the missing peace.

A couple of weeks ago I was taking a webinar on The Top 10 Business Myths, presented by Ed Kless through CPA Academy. It was a fantastic webinar. If you are not already familiar with Ed Kless and Ron Baker, be sure to check out The Soul of The Enterprise. It just so happened that my schedule lined up for me to take this webinar at over 300 miles per hour while soaring 30,000 feet above the ground. The wi-fi is not the greatest under those circumstances, especially while streaming a live webinar. The gems I collected between outages were so good, I had to follow up with Ed personally afterward to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

While all ten of Ed’s myths were fantastic, there was one myth that rose above the rest for me. It was that “Leadership is about changing others behavior.”  Ed presented the idea that freedom and accountability are the same thing. In order to be accountable, you must be free. In order to be free, you must be accountable.

“Leadership is confronting people with their freedom.”

When I heard those words come through my earbuds on the airplane, it was like a haze parting in my mind. Later, I asked Ed for more information about these ideas. He advised me to look up Peter Block’s book Freedom and Accountability at Work.

Ed took these ideas a step further, saying, “Compliance is a choice to be in slavery.”

If you don’t have freedom, you are a slave. We cannot get people to be accountable. We must choose it of our own free will. The difference between accountability and compliance is one of mindset.

Ed referred to Viktor Frankl’s quote from his book A Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

When I think of this, I picture William Wallace screaming “Freedom!” right before he dies at the end of Braveheart. No one can take away our ability to decide how we feel about the situation we are in. That choice is up to each of us. Who do you want to be? What mindset do you want to spend your life in?

Do you choose Freedom or Slavery?

...continue reading Part Two here...