S2E55: Stop Enabling

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman. Hello, No Ego listeners. Sy Wakeman here. I have a very special treat for you. I am bringing you another bonus podcast series. This time, Dr. Sasha Shulka joins me for 4 weeks of bonus session material. And we talk about distortion in your thinking. We talk about limited beliefs that many people, especially women, bring to their lives and to the workplace. You are not going to want to miss this special series that we've produced for you. 4 weeks in a row on Wednesday, we will release Bonus episodes, and you will love them. You're gonna be challenged to really take a look at the way in which your thinking gets distorted from that almighty ego. And we're going to talk about some great techniques and strategies to move out of thinking distortion and back into a level of empowerment that will help you move forward and find all that peace and happiness you're looking for in life. So look out each Wednesday for a special bonus coming your way. Let me know what you think in the comments. Welcome to another episode of the No Ego Podcast. I am flying solo today. This is Saia Wakeman, and I wanted to jump on and respond to a question I'm getting almost every day out on the road. After I present my view of what I would call healthy accountability, personal accountability, I talk to leaders about how they can foster and facilitate accountability And when I get done, someone inevitably raises their hand and says, but so I have a question for you. How can I make my employee do X? How can I make my boss be more whatever, fill in the blank? How can I get my colleagues to, and whatever their heart desires? And it's really a tricky question. It's your ego playing a bit of, uh, um, games with your own mind, because here's the reality, folks, you cannot make anyone do Anything. I spent years as a therapist helping people understand that the desire to control another person, the thinking that you can actually make somebody do something or that someone's actions have anything to do with you is called codependency. And if you're a leader, one of the things I'm going to assign to you at the end of this episode is that you get really fluent in the terms of codependency and you check yourself for codependency. And you graduate from codependency, you work a program on codependency. Codependency was a term that arose during a time when we were starting to learn about addictions. And wherever we found an addict, someone misbehaving, we found a codependent or many codependents who were enabling the misbehaving. And while all the attention went to the addict who wasn't doing what society would hope for them, The true fuel for that misbehavior came from the codependence. So this episode and the next episode, I'm going to be talking about codependency, boundaries, and accountability. So back to that question: Sai, how can I make somebody do something? My answer is you cannot make anyone do anything, but you can stop enabling them. So accountability isn't about holding people accountable or making people do something. Even if they complied, it will be negative compliance. They will. Do it until they get the chance not to. And so it's a really high-energy, unsustainable way to move through the world if your view as a leader is that you're going to hold people accountable. So I want to talk about a different view of accountability. Accountability isn't about what you do to another. Many times it's about the ceasing of enabling others. It's really looking as a leader for what is your part in The behavior or the mess? How are you fuel— fueling that behavior or that response? And this leads back to your own personal accountability. So instead of focusing on changing another, it's focusing on how can I remove whatever reward I'm giving for that behavior or whatever assistance I'm giving, whatever mixed message I am giving. And that's what I want to talk about today on this podcast. Many times people don't realize as leaders how mixed our messages are that we're sending about accountability. And we don't realize that although we say we want to foster accountability, we do a lot of things that erode that very message on a regular basis. So I want to give you some examples as we get, um, Um, our minds around this. So let's go back to the basics. First of all, when people have good information, I believe they make better decisions. And there's 2 ways that people get corrupted information. One is your ego playing you. That could be your own bias, your own story, your own distorted view of the world as you're seeing the world through the lens of ego and you're seeing yourself as a victim and everybody else is the villain. So So when we're looking through ego and we're into low self, we're definitely seeing the world in a distorted or corrupted way. And those distortions can be either overthinking, they can be catastrophizing, they can be blaming others for our current situation, however that might happen. That's one way that we get bad data. And so we teach you a lot of ways that you can self-reflect. Reflect and edit your story and bypass your ego so that your view of the world is more honest, more reality-based. Now, the biggest motivator in the world is reality. And if people are in touch with reality, they get really good information about what works, what doesn't work. And evolution favors what works and what feels good. And so we have 2 ways that That direct relationship with reality gets distorted. As I said, one's the ego. The other is enabling— is when people bend reality in our favor or buffer our direct relationship with reality. As if we're about to fall and experience what the ground feels like, somebody puts a quick pillow under our tush to muffle the direct voice of reality so that we get less clear information about what works and what we're doing. in regards to our own pain and suffering. So as leaders and as people seeking success and happiness in life, we really have to look out for ways in which our view of reality gets distorted. And that's why we work hard to give you tools to bypass that ego. And it's why my view of accountability is a bit different than what you normally are hearing out there in the marketplace, because I focus less on Teaching you how to hold people accountable and more on helping you really self-reflect on the ways that you enable the opposite of accountability, that you enable learned helplessness, or that you enable the very behavior you're not wanting to see. Now, these ways that we enable can be really subtle. So I'm going to give you some examples. I want you to start self-reflecting and find your own examples so that you can start to see where you might be sending some mixed messages or corrupting somebody else's view of reality and denying them some really good information that if they had direct access to reality, they would make better decisions. The, the best motivator in the world is a direct connection with reality. Leaders, you can't motivate others, but you can quit interfering with that most motivating force in the world. So here's an example. When I was an early leader in healthcare, and this is back in the days of paper, I Yeah. We would come in on Monday morning after having the weekend off, and the caregivers that I was leading would leave on my desk a stack of papers of how patients had been unsafe. See, we had a process and a form that if you saw an unsafe situation, let's say you saw somebody walking a patient without a gait belt, which is a way that we can help stabilize and if necessary, move that person to the ground in a controlled manner so they don't fall. It's an inexpensive, low-tech way to really make sure we keep our patients safe while they're mobile. Let's say you saw somebody that was walking a patient without a gait belt. The expectation was you would get one of these forms and you would report that. And then as a leader supervisor, I would follow up on that and do teaching or coaching or counseling, whatever the case may be. Now we're preaching accountability, and yet here's the mixed message. I give you a full And it's a full page of room for you to tell me how our patient was unsafe. And people use the entire page, giving me all the details and telling me the story. So I would come in Monday morning and I would pick up a paper, a stack of papers about how my patients were unsafe over the weekend. And it was far beyond what I could do something except— After the fact, maybe try and do some teaching. But it really disturbed me that I'm talking about colleague-to-colleague interactions and fostering accountability and making sure that peer-to-peer relationship is one that really keeps our patients safe. And yet, I sent a double message by using the hospital procedure of giving you an entire page to report this incident. So I changed The form to drive different behavior. I wanted to clean up the mixed message. So instead of giving you a whole page to report on what you saw, I gave you the top fourth of the page, a couple of lines for you to say, here's what I saw that was concerning. And then I implemented self-reflection in the form of a form. The next line I had you fill in the blank is, and It started with the prompt, and what I did in the moment that was kind and professional was... So I want to know, when you saw that, what did you do to ensure the patient was safe in that moment? How did you relate to your colleague? And then the third question or prompt was, and what I did to ensure that the next shift carried through with this, meaning we didn't want something to be fixed on one shift and not transfer over to the next shift, was fill in the blank. And then lastly, what I'm willing to be part of long-term is fill in the blank. And you'll start to see what I did with that one form. Instead of relieving you of your responsibility by just saying report it, I said tell me what happened and then bam, self-reflection. What'd you do in the moment? What'd you do to ensure that the next shift was I'm carrying this forward? And what are you being— what are you willing to be part of long-term in regards to redesigning processes or mentoring people To make sure it doesn't happen in the future. And so piece by piece, form by form, interaction by interaction, I started to pick up on how, although we talked about accountability on the day-to-day, we sent a mixed message and enabled people to not be accountable because they were doing their job when they filled in a form of tattling on another. Now, we do this in other ways too. We talk about accountability and then we give give surveys where people can anonymously vent basically in the form of a survey. And when we go out to do after-action survey planning, we basically ask others, what can I do to fix your workplace? It's another mixed message. It's another way to enable— anytime we reinforce another's view that they are the victim and that we're the villain, or we reinforce their view without question, without challenge, that That, that their circumstances are the reasons they can't succeed, when in fact reality is just— your circumstances are the reality in which you must succeed. Whenever we're saying we want accountability, but our day-to-day work is eroding that, that's where we need to check. So instead of me going out and just saying, hey, here's what we learned in the survey, it seems that you guys struggle with this, what are your ideas for how to make this better? And the employees make a list for me as a leader to write down, pack up, put in my pocket, go away and fix. I started to just infuse self-reflection, which is the main driver of accountability, into almost everything we did. So my Engage Action Planning tool that many of you are using under the book No Ego is another way to infuse accountability into our daily conversations. I talked about what would great look like if this workplace were great? Where do you think we could create some amazing things? And I had you describe that. That was list number 1. Where could we improve ourselves? What would be helpful as far as transforming our workplace? And I didn't just take that list then as my to-do list as a leader. I put up a second list, which then said, and what are you willing to do to get that personally? Now, there are times that that kind of stopped the action. People were used to telling me what they wanted and what I should fix and how they wanted reality different, but they weren't necessarily very fluent in the beginning with saying, and here's what I'm personally willing to do to get that. And so a lot of times we would have some silence and they would almost run the clock. They're like, oh my gosh, the hour meeting's over. Um, You know, gosh, sorry we didn't finish that. And part of enabling people is finishing this work for them. A lot of people as leaders go on and they go, well, we talked about in the meeting, but I have a due date on Monday. I'll just fill in all this stuff and hand it in so that we can be done with this after survey action planning. Sometimes enabling is just letting the open questions sit out there. I would take those forms, I would just put it in the break room, and I would just leave it obvious that what we wanted, list number 1, and what we were willing to do, that list number 2, just weren't in sync. That list number 2 was not near robust enough to get that which we wanted. And then I would prime the pump. I would start individually with some of my high accountables. I would say, what idea do you have? Why don't you go write that up and visually start to build this list that built in accountability, that if I want transparency in my workplace, then one thing I'm willing to do to get that is talk directly to a colleague about a situation between us rather than going to a third party. It could be so simple. And then when those 2 lists seem to be more in sync, when list 2 is robust for— enough for list 1, I would bring out list 3, which is how can the organization or I as a leader support these efforts? And what I started to help people do is sort your issues out in the same way a high accountable would sort them out, even if you're not accountable yet. See, when high accountables are suffering, they sort different from low accountables. Low accountables suffer and they assume that it's the organization or reality that's at fault. And so what needs fixed? The organization needs to do something different and reality needs to be different. And their whole list is about how to fix reality and bend it or have the organization buck Mm-hmm. But in this way, I help people sort like a high accountable, which is what high accountables do when they're suffering, is they say, what's my part in this? And then what's left is the organization's part. And that's where the shared accountability comes in, so that in every situation I have a place I can have impact, and I need to greet that with willingness. And then what's left is good data for what the organization can do to help. And so I want you to start Yeah. So, you have to start thinking about how you say you want to foster accountability and how you do things on the daily that send a mixed message. We say we want people to go directly to the person they have the issue with, and yet in HR, we have step-down meetings where we exit out the leader as if we can't share honestly in front of them, and then try and mine the employees for things they can't share because the leader Is present or when the leader is present. I just want you to start inventorying all the ways you give people a mixed message. We talk about wanting to foster accountability, and then we give a lot of channels where people can anonymously, without any accountability, share a complaint or a concern. Now, if those concerns are Yeah. In a place where there's power differentiation, of course, we want a hotline for people to be able to call anonymously for big, dangerous issues. But many times anonymity kills accountability because in kind of the cloak of darkness, people can do, say, and write things that they would not necessarily do publicly. And so that's one area where we can test ourselves to see if while we're saying we want accountability, we're Definitely giving a mixed message. I also want to talk about other ways that we enable. Now, enabling is something where I am helping you do the very thing I don't want you to do. And then I take a look at what you did and feel like I'm the victim of it. So let me give you an example. When I was counseling, it was common that a parent would come to me because they had just learned that one of their kids was using some type of chemicals. And I had a mom come in one day and share with me that she was devastated. She had just learned that her 15-year-old was using chemicals, smoking pot and using barbiturates and some other prescription drugs. And she just was really feeling as though this had just invaded her family. And so the first thing I did was Of course, share empathy. You know, gosh, I'm so sorry to hear that your 15-year-old is using chemicals. It's just a really bad time in their brain development for them to be engaged in that type of behavior. And then I wanted to move her into some accountability to investigate how she might enable this behavior. And I said, you know, drugs cost money. Where does he get the money? And she said very tearfully and kind of a victim mindset, well, he uses his gas money. For drugs. And I asked her, well, where's he get gas money? And she said, well, I give him gas money. And I said, well, that might be one way you could directly impact the situation. You might consider not giving him gas money. And she immediately switched and she said, well, how would he get to school? And I helped with reality by saying, it doesn't sound like either he goes to school or It sounds like he gets to school without using his own gas money. And I said, so you might consider that if he's using gas money for drug money, let's stop calling it gas money. Let's call it drug money. And I'm just wondering, you might consider not giving him any money, and because it's drug money. And she struggled so hard. She's like, what kind of mother would I be to not give my own kid gas money? And do you see how she had distorted reality? I kept saying, well, it doesn't sound like you're giving him gas money. It sounds like you're giving him drug money. I said, so let's call it for what it is and let's restate the question. What kind of mother would stop giving her kid drug money? And you guys are laughing by now because the answer is like a good mother, right? One who wants to see her child well. What happens when we start enabling is we jump into trying to control the situation and protect people from their natural consequences. It's like, well, what if then he couldn't get to school? And it's like, well, it sounds like then he would learn what happens when you use gas money for drug money. Now, here's where the ego comes in. She's like, well, what would that make me look like if my kid didn't show up for school? And I would say, well, hopefully a mother who was not enabling her child to use drugs by giving them gas money. And it took many sessions for me to lovingly just help her first clean up her relationship with reality about what her part in this was and enabling, and then for her to then stop buffering her son from that reality. Now, he will either use chemicals or not, not just depending on what his mom does. I'm just saying she was able to withdraw her fuel for his behavior that she stated she wasn't supportive of. And this is really important, folks, because a lot of times we nag people and coach them and harp at them and threaten them, and we threaten What, um, we want them to do and what will happen to them if they don't. And boundaries, which we'll talk about next time, are really different. You need to set boundaries for yourself on what you're going to be willing to do or not do in the future, rather than trying to control others and set boundaries for them. So here's an example of that. I worked with a parent who was newly married and had blended their families. And she was very frustrated that her new husband didn't enforce manners at the table when they were eating dinner. She had a very set group of values, I guess, around how people act at the dinner table. And what she would do is she would consistently threaten and try and set boundaries for other people. She would say to her husband, you have to regulate these kids. You have to tell them to, you know, Sit on all four legs of their chair. You have to. And I just said, "You know, how's that working for you? Trying to hold him accountable." And she said, "Well, it just gets to be where I get so upset. I hate dinner. He's mad at me. We fight about his kids." And and I said, "What if you tried a different way?" I said, "What is it that's important to you about the way people behave at the dinner table?" And she said, "Well, I've worked all day. I just want a nice peaceful dinner." I said, "So if that's your goal." What boundary could you set for yourself instead of trying to control them that would get you what you wanted? And she came up with the boundary she said is, she said, you know what, I want a really peaceful dinner and it seems like things are a little chaotic tonight at the table. So I'm going to take my dinner and go eat in the den to have some peacefulness and contentment around dinner. And, um, would love if things got a little less hectic here to rejoin. But in the meantime, to meet my needs, I'm gonna go do dinner in the den. Now, the motive wasn't to control her husband, right? But guess what happened? Her husband got introduced to an unfiltered experience with his kids at the dinner table, and he didn't like it very much. He was sitting there with his kids who were misbehaved, and he missed his wife. And so what started to happen is he started to offer his kids some suggestions about how they could make dinner more peaceful. And invited his wife back to the table. See, enabling often leaves us nagging rather than boundary setting, and leaves others feeling like the victim, like they can't control their kids to please us, and the chaos ensues. So I hope you're picking up a little bit on what enabling is. Let me give you a couple of other examples. When I was working in a clinic system. We had brought about 18 clinics under our ownership in a medical system. And what was really great about that is we were able to leverage technology so that we were all on the same electronic health record. And we got better information about the true impact we had on the health of our community members, the health of our patients. And we started to see that we weren't doing as well as we thought we were doing in caring for people that had diabetes, that when you looked at the national averages, our people reported more complications than our benchmarks would suggest that they should. So our medical director, I'll just call him Steve, was wonderful in that he loved to use data to impact community health, and he was pretty scientific in his approach, and he really looked to the evidence and to best practices. So when he saw this data, Yeah. He rolled out what we'll just call the diabetic initiative. And it was based on best practices that one thing we could do to really impact our outcomes was that on the daily, nurses would call, they would do outbound calling, they'd reach out to a list of patients, and we would just, you know, take a different list each day and work our way through our patient population. And we would reach out to them and make sure they were getting into the clinic. For their regular checkups, and there's some best practices on how often they should do that. We'd make sure they're coming into the clinic. We'd problem solve with them if they had access to the types of food they needed, testing supplies, if there were any other life situations that were keeping them from caring for themselves in ways we knew would lead to them living healthier lives with diabetes. And as I rolled this out, 99% of the nurses saw the beauty in it. They thought, oh my gosh, this is modern medicine. We're taking care out to where the patients are. They just got it and they complied and did a beautiful job. One nurse came to me and was very irritated by the whole prospect. And she just continued to say, I, I'm a nurse, not a telemarketer. I do not do outbound calling. I will not be working a list. And she had all these sinister ideas about what we were trying to do. She really believed that we were just trying trying to increase our revenue in the clinic by calling and bothering people so that they would come in and we could charge their insurance company on a more regular basis. And I just started to work with her because I believe if people have good data, which is why we want you to give clear feedback, if they have good data, they make better decisions. So the first point of data I gave her is I pulled a couple of journal articles that talked about modern medicine and how patient outreach was a really, really a best practice. And I thought, you know, gosh, she'll just see that she hasn't really kept up with the times and that she's not practicing in a modern way. And I'll give her this good data. And, you know, that didn't work. She still said, I'm not doing it. So she came back to me and she said, my doctor, Dr. Smith, told me I don't have to. And before we bought the clinic, the doctors employed the nurses. But since we owned the clinic, I employed both the nurses and the doctors. And so I thought, you know what, I'll give her better data. I'll show her the organizational chart that she reports into. me and she'll be like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, I didn't realize that change. And, you know, she'll step up. And what I found out is even though I put lots of arms around her, gave her lots of good data, I can't control the behavior or decisions of others. Even in the face of good data, their ego can distort their view of the world. She refused to comply, and eventually I transitioned her out of the clinic. So So she was no longer an issue, but I would tell you, Dr. Smith was an issue. So one day, the medical officer, Steve, called me and said, Cy, I would like a report on the diabetic initiative. I would like to see, by physician, compliance levels, and I would like to see impact in the outcomes of those patients. And that was exciting because we got to really mine our data. This is in the early days for, like, exciting stuff. So I pulled those reports together and I called a meeting with the physicians because I have a commitment I make with people I work with that if I'm going to take some data publicly, I'm transparent with that. I'll let you see that ahead of time. I'm not going to protect you from your reality, and I'm not going to have you be a victim and be surprised by somebody who finds out data that you yourself didn't see and help me verify. So I was meeting with the physicians and I was showing some of the physicians had just wonderful compliance great impact. Dr. Smith had zero compliance and negative impact. His patients were actually declining given the status of other patients. And he saw the information, but again, his ego distorted his view of the world, and he just dismissed it. And he said that it didn't matter to him. And he actually saw insult where there isn't any, which is a key trick of the ego. And he started to accuse me of setting him up. And he, he said it to me by the end of the meeting. He had escalated that he didn't want to ever talk to me again and that he would never do outbound calling. And he was making a lot of threats. And so I left him peacefully. Next morning, I went in to meet with the chief medical officer. And as I was going in to meet with Steve, my phone rang and I looked down and it was Dr. Smith. And those of you that know me personally know I'm kind of an optimist. I'm like, oh my gosh, what a difference a day makes. He said he would never call me, and look at him—he's calling me. And he said he'd never do outbound calling, and that's the only way he could call me. And I didn't have time to take the call. So I went and met with Steve, and then I called Dr. Smith afterwards. I said, "You know, Dr. Smith, how can I help you?" And he—he was urgent. He was like, "Um, did you meet with Steve?" I said, "I did." He goes, "Well, did you show him the numbers you showed me yesterday?" I go. I did. That's my commitment to you. I will show you before I show other people. And he started to get really urgent. And he said, well, did you also tell Steve that I see the highest number of patients in the clinic? And I said, you know, gosh, we weren't talking about throughput. He goes, well, did you tell him that I have the highest acuity level? I have the sickest patients in the clinic. And I said, you know, we weren't measuring or talking about acuity. We're just talking about compliance with this initiative. And he said, oh my gosh. He goes, well, if you didn't add that, he goes, I bet with just the data that you gave him, he was furious. And I said, you know, he looked very angry. And he said, I got to get off the phone. I got to call Steve. And I said, you know, he said he would be calling you. And Steve, in fact, did call Dr. Smith. Now, I didn't throw Dr. Smith under the bus. It wasn't with motive of retaliation. But what I did realize is that up until Dr. Smith and I worked together, that every administrator he had had that presented sent in his data, put an asterisk by his name. This is a key way we enable. He's not compliant with this, but remember, he sees the most patients in the clinic. He's not compliant with this, he's not performing here, but he's a rock star. And remember, he's the one in 1983 that stayed with our system when all the other docs left. See, we excuse people's current behavior by putting an asterisk by their name for past benefit they brought, even when that behavior is no longer beneficial. So Asterisks, he sees the most patients in the clinic. For those of you in healthcare, you know that we no longer get paid for how many people we see. We get paid for how many people we don't see and how many people we keep healthy rather than bring into the clinic. So he was still getting bonus points for things that no longer even benefited us. But I tell you this story because I want you to do some self-reflection on perhaps you enable by putting asterisks by people's names. Mm-hmm. You know what? They're unfit for human consumption, and we can't assign them to any project that has other people involved. But man, are they really a technical wizard in this area! Now, those of you that know my employee value equation know that the ego doesn't do very good math, and we put a lot of asterisks by people's names to kind of falsify our our equation or our records. And I just want you to start. Yeah. So you have to start looking at how you put asterisks by people's names. One way we enable is the way we assign work. Let's say that we have 4 people on our team and a project comes in, and I go, oh my gosh, Sarah would be perfect for this. But wait, she has this really rigid preference that she can only get like one new project a month, and it's only been 3 weeks, and so I don't want to upset her, so I should give this to Stan. Oh my gosh, but Stan doesn't even like this type of work. He's really carved his job down to only doing the type of work he likes, and he'll be really upset if I give this to him. Well, let me give it to Ellen. Wait a minute, I haven't given Ellen projects like this because she's a novice, and so she's not really ready for it. I know, I'll give it to Alicia. She already has 19 projects, but she never complains, and And so we'll just, we'll put it onto Alicia. And then you end up feeling understaffed. But when you think about the people you robbed from developing because you don't assign, the people whose anger or bullying you cater to because you don't assign, the way that you even divvy out work needs to be with an eye towards the development of others and keeping people current so they don't get pigeonholed into a certain type of work. It's keeping people ready and keeping people growing. And the minute you defer from that because of the emotions people might have about receiving the work, you're enabling. Let me give you another example. When I worked in healthcare and we first put in a timekeeping system, there was a clock on even floors. So you had to check in and punch in on even floors. So if you worked on floor 3, you need to stop for 1 minute at floor 2 and badge And I don't know why that was the— what they decided to do, maybe cost savings, but that's what our reality was. Inevitably, people would race past the second floor, get to the third floor, realize they didn't badge in, and then make, in my opinion, an uninformed decision based on bad data. They would say, oh my gosh, I forgot to badge in. I'm going to go to Sai and have her as a manager do an exception report and badge me in, and I'm going to race off to the meeting. to work. And we worked in the organization, it was all about servant leadership. And so most supervisors, if somebody came to them and said, hey, will you badge me in? They said, of course. To me, it was problematic for 2 reasons. One, for you to run back down and badge in would take you about 2 minutes. If I did an exception report, it took about 10 minutes. Now, this isn't about my time. This is about the organizational resource of So you could save 2 minutes and transfer work to me that would take 10 minutes, and you were doing it based on poor information. You didn't realize how long that took. You might make a different decision. The other thing that was troubling for me is that many of these people were nurses, and I was just about to give them the keys to the narcotics cabinet, and they couldn't remember to badge in. And I know people are human and make mistakes. Once in a while. These are chronic offenders. And I was like, wait a minute, how can I trust you with the important things if I can't trust you with the small things? Like, how we do little things a lot of times is how we do the big things. So I didn't just refuse to badge in. We're a service-oriented leadership team. What I did do was just stop buffering people's relationship with reality. People would say, Sai, will you badge me in? And I said, of course. And that takes about 10 minutes. And so if you would please go have your team cover you for 10 minutes and then come with me, I'd be glad to do that. See, when we just go do it for somebody, we take away the natural consequence of them being inconvenienced. So I would sit down with them and I would start to badge them in, and then I would get into the system and see that they weren't up to date on their TB tests. And so I would get that arranged quickly, and they need to watch a quick video on fire safety, and we would have it. Yeah. And I would be very productive. I would do, you know, that one-on-one. We'd get them badged in, and we made great use of the time. So I could justify now the 10 minutes. It was really useful. And in the future, I found many people made better decisions. They would race past second floor up to third floor, and they'd go, dang, I forgot to badge in. And then they would make a decision. I could run back down. That would take a minute or two. Or I could go get Cy. That will take 10 minutes. I think I'll just run back down. Better decision based on data. What happens after people run down the stairs 4 or 5 times in a week is they get really in touch with that natural consequence and their memory improves. And so again, I don't want you to do this in an unhealthy way where you're trying to force the issue and make people see and punish them for not badging in. My name is yes, I am glad to help. I will help though without relieving you of your natural consequence because that's your best information. your direct relationship to reality that I don't want to distort. So that if you are working your own ego, you're removing that distortion, and I as a leader am not enabling you, you have the best shot at making reality-based decisions. And it's really that shared level of accountability that I need my, my colleagues and my staff working their own ego piece, and I need to work my own program to not enable. And that's tough at times. For those of you parents out there, It's tough. I got a call one day from my panicked 15-year-old, Will, and he's like, Mom, I forgot my backpack and it has my math homework in it and I have to hand my math homework in. I forgot my backpack at home and if I don't hand my math homework in, I'll have to stay after school. If I stay after school, I'll miss practice. And if I miss practice, the coach won't let me start in Friday night's game and, and I'll let the whole team down. And that was such a loaded request because I would be the parent ultimately, if I didn't get this backpack, sitting on the bleachers on Friday night with the college scouts in the crowd and all the other parents saying, why isn't Wakeman starting? And they'd be whispering, well, this is the one weekend, the most important weekend of our kid's life, that she decided to teach him accountability. Like, that was the laydown that many of us as leaders get where we're like, we have to do this. We feel almost blackmailed. But I paused and I just led with empathy. And I said, Will, I am so sorry to hear that you forgot your backpack. I hate those days when I come to work and I don't have what I need. I didn't bring it with me. Those are tough days. So I'm glad as your parent to help you brainstorm how you're going to get through today without your backpack. And he was just despondent. He's like, Mom, you do not understand. And I just kept offering empathy. I'm like, I think I do understand. I've been there. It's really tough to get through a day without the tools you need. And, you know, it's just— you just kick yourself when you forget that stuff. And I was just giving him empathy. He's like, Mom, stop it. Just go get my backpack. And I said, you know, actually, even if I wanted to, I can't. I'm in Washington, D.C. So he starts brainstorming how to change his reality. He's like, well, will you pay an Uber driver to go to our house and give him the garage code to get in the house and have him bring my backpack to me at school? He He wanted to fix the reality and I wanted to grow Will into a more capable, accountable person. So no, I'm not willing to give some Uber driver, although I love Uber, I'm not willing to give some driver my garage code and have them bring Will the backpack. I said, but what I am willing to do is support you in this moment, thinking of ways that you could move through this as a responsible young adult. Do you want to talk about how to approach your teacher or how you're going to take accountability for this with your coach? And I wouldn't give him the quick fix. I held space for him to reflect on how he could handle it. And bam, all of a sudden he goes, Mom, according to you, I would need to use my next study hall, my free period coming up in an hour, to redo my math homework. And I shouldn't have to do math twice. And you'll start to see where he was trying to avoid his own rework and caused me a lot of But I held space for him to figure that out, and he came up with an amazing answer. And then what I could do as a parent is I go, well, I just love how creative you are under pressure in these situations. I think you're really developing what you're gonna need to go on, you know, and succeed in the rest of your life. I'm gonna get off the phone now so that you can go do your homework in your free period. See, most people, when they're coming through your door as a leader, aren't expecting you to hold space for their self-reflection and growth. They're expecting you to fix it. And fixing it robs people's development. Now, this is important stuff. You can't do it every time. Sometimes things are too urgent or client-facing, but you can do it more of the time. And I think it's so important. And by the way, use discernment. Will doesn't have a memory issue. He's never once forgotten his cell phone ever at home. He's capable. Now, there's other kids I might have to use discernment with that have a head injury and that memory is a tough thing for them and we're working on it. So I may actually be more willing to help one kid over another depending on where they're at in their process. And so I wanted today to just introduce you to this view of accountability That is not about holding others accountable. It's just stopping the interference you might be putting in place that interferes with them having a direct line to good information. And you can do this by staying very empathetic. You can do this by staying in relationship. You can do this by holding space for self-reflection, because self-reflection is the Holy Grail. It does 2 things. It moves you beyond your own ego and it moves you into accountability. So it cuts the corrupted data, the distortion. In 2 ways. And that's why I absolutely love self-reflection and hope you all are getting very, very fluent in it. Next solo episode I will have in a couple of weeks is going to be talking about healthy ways to set boundaries and healthy ways to call people up to greatness. And so your assignment, since I always give assignments, is do a quick inventory, find 2 or 3 ways that you realize that you're enabling Mm-hmm. Um, um, your own, um, colleagues and staff, because it's in those moments that you're robbing them from their own development and a much more rich experience, um, with better information as they move through the world. And our goal here is not to bend reality or save people from reality. Our goal here is to grow people so they can move more skillfully through their current reality. And that really is, Um, how we set people free. The ultimate freedom comes from me having skills that I can move through different realities more freely. That's freedom. Not that I can only move my way through a very refined, limited version of reality, and that I'm dependent on all of you, um, working around the edges for me. So set your people free, find out ways that you enable, and I look forward to hearing your great examples. Until next time, keep ditching the drama. This This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman.