Brain Food Friday – Personal Accountability Trumps Other Competencies

If you hire for one skill and one skill alone, please let it be this: personal accountability. Personal accountability is the most important trait someone can bring to the job.

To understand why this competency is so important, let’s examine the negative state first. People without personal accountability are most at risk to quickly and irreparably fall into a victim’s mindset, particularly if the person’s sense of self is not well developed.

Once stuck in that negative loop of self-pity thinking, it is very difficult for the mind to re-wire.

Someone without personal accountability will never be able to see anything that occurs as their fault. They may even become belligerent about things going wrong. They see errors and wrongdoings as the result of other people’s shortcomings or because the world is against them.

In a work environment, this lack of personal accountability can have a very harmful effect on the people around them, causing co-workers to become distracted, disengage from their work, or isolate themselves.

Now the positive example: The person who has highly developed personal accountability believes failures are a temporary state of being. They are adept at picking themselves back up after mistakes or downturns, reworking their thinking or behaviour, and moving on in a positive direction.

People who have developed personal accountability will do what it takes to do the job. Personal accountability should always be in the top 7 skills sought in job candidates.

Bottom line: If you are hiring and you are not looking for personal accountability as a skill, you will run into problems — sooner or later.

Source: TTI SI

Submitted by: Sophie Mathewson, PCC – Prism Group Int’l – [email protected]

If you would like one month of complimentary access to our Personal Accountability e-learning module, please send me an email with the words “Personal Accountability” in the subject line and I will gladly send you a link to the video tutorial and PDF workbook.

 

Prism Group Int’l is a central Ontario-based boutique consulting and coaching firm specializing in supporting progressive organizations and leaders in creating respectful, emotionally-intelligent working environments with the right people in the right jobs, who build constructive working relationships and are focused on producing the desired results.

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