Grant Leboff: Steve, one of the things you talk about in your book is the importance of taking responsibility for your own life. I think one of the phrases you use is “You’re the chief executive of your own life.” What do you really mean by that and what does that look like for an individual?
Steve Head: Well, in my book, actually that’s the very first part of it because I think it’s about taking personal responsibility, because in almost every area, in every company, every business, every situation I get into, fundamentally the reason why things either don’t work quite as well as people like them to or don’t get the results they want is because there’s an element of lack of personal accountability, so to not talk about that and not suggest that as a key concept would be missing the point
Actually, if you go into a Waterstone’s or somewhere like there, and you look at the first twenty self-help books, I can pretty much guarantee that the first chapter or early chapters in virtually every one says the principles are great, but you have to have a sense of it’s down to me before I start. It’s the same way with your kids. Any parent will tell you that. That’s what you want from your kids. That’s a fundamental core principle. It’s in all high performance material, so that’s why that’s the start point of my book and why that would be the first principle I would probably share from this stage.
Grant Leboff: Do you think there’s a lack of that? When you go into organizations, when you speak to people, because you spend your life going to organizations and working with teams and working with individuals, do you think there is a reluctance to take responsibility?
Steve Head: Well, you’ve got to be careful of the language, because if you go to a company and you say half of you don’t take enough responsibility, it’s very vague, right? There’s two frames of reference. I talk about this concept called victim and accountable; because that’s language people recognize, and we do whole exercises around it. If you’re a victim, everybody recognizes someone in a victim state. They’ll go they don’t take responsibility, they moan and whine, they blame others, and that sort of language. When somebody is in an accountable state, what are they like? They take responsibility, they say it’s down to me, they use different language.
It’s not to say that you’ve got somebody who is; either not accountable or accountable, i.e. victim or accountable. It’s to say that certain days, certain times, certain situations we can be drawn into a way of behaving. Just being aware of it is the first thing. To go into a room and say, I’ve been briefed half of you aren’t really taking full responsibility is not what it’s about. Where it really manifests is when this changed. If you go through redundancy, reorganization, downsizing, whatever mergers, that’s when you’ll see people go this is not fair, I can’t believe it’s happened again.
The message isn’t to go in and say well get over it, although that probably is the raw message. The message is to go in and say well, is there a way that I could look at this different so that I can handle it better. If I go in to the situation truly believing I’ve got no control, it’s not down to me, it happening to me, what’s the point, there’s a very good chance it won’t be a very good outcome for you. That’s the point. It’s not to say it’s good or bad, it’s just to raise awareness and give people the tools to get them into a better place.
Grant Leboff: The point is that taking responsibility is the first step to them being able to do something about …
Steve Head: Yeah, and when I do exercises, if you actually saw the words people come up with . . . You’ve got an audience of one hundred fifty people and you get them to write down someone in a victim state, because we can all think of one, right? I talk about mood hoovers a lot, someone who’s critical or negative, and people think of a mood hoover, yeah, I’ve got one of those in mind. Okay, what are they like? They’ll describe a lot of words that they’re negative, critical, whatever, and then you go all right, so what would accountable look like? Which one would you rather be? Who would you rather work for? That’s a choice. Then you’ve got to show people how to do it, because the first stage in my job is to not just say something bland and then walk away. It’s to say well, you probably want to know how to get there more often, get your kids there more often. That’s a good one. Parents like it. That’s what I do.
There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English
