Team celebrating

In today’s world of business where nothing stands still and a fluid approach to workload is an essential skill to develop, there is sometimes a blurred line between work and personal time…

This month, I’m delighted to share a very positive example of our theme “accountability” and where an Early-in-Career colleague of mine displayed some very effective behaviour and embraced the concept of personal accountability.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I was travelling to a venue in the south of England when my colleague sent me a text message from a venue that we were running an event from on the Monday. The text said…. “Hi Greg, I’m at the hotel now for the event tomorrow. I just went to ask which rooms we had booked for tomorrow and there seems to have been some sort of mix up. They thought that we had the rooms booked for today! Thankfully the girl on reception has said that it should be fine and that it may have been a mistake their end but she asked me to pop back down in about an hour just to check which ones we have”

It’s worth looking at this next to our accountability steps model. Setting out with an accountable mindset enabled my colleague to take ownership and approach the room booking mix-up knowing that “things happen because of me” and not “things happen to me”. To complete the picture for you, the colleague that was so helpful and supportive would not normally be working on a Sunday and they were drafted in to assist running the event which is not normally part of their role in the business. There was in fact no reason for my colleague to check which rooms were booked for the following day’s event. A less accountable person could easily have left that responsibility to me.