Our Compassionate Accountability Process, Part 2
How to Practice With Your Team
It takes time, practice, and often coaching and mentoring to uplevel the quality of teaming in organizations — and that’s where our Compassionate Accountability Process (CAP) comes in. If you’ve been following us, you know that we believe in the power of ensembles: teams who work in flow and continue to learn new practices that contribute to their overall high function and excellence.
To be in flow together, we need to help each other set goals, grow, and hold each other (and ourselves) accountable. Our Compassionate Accountability Process (CAP) helps identify and deepen your commitments, become even more reliable, and supports a deeper sense of meaning, high performance and creative collaboration.
As a team development framework, CAP weaves together:
Individual Growth and Personal Accountability,
Peer-to-Peer Mentoring and Shared Accountability,
Group Goal Setting and Group Accountability.
CAP grounds your commitments in concrete practices, and creates a coaching and mentoring process that supports individuals in practicing their own shifts while also laddering up to departmental and organizational goals.
How to Practice Compassionate Accountability
Ready to try our Compassionate Accountability Process? (If not, read Part 1 of this series to get a deeper understanding of the term “compassionate accountability,” and learn more about CAP and its key outcomes.)
Here are the 9 steps to practice CAP, which are applicable in any peer relationship:
Name our intentions and promises: what are we trying to shift together?
Keep the promises we make to ourselves and each other.
Be honest, open, authentic, and willing to be vulnerable.
Support each other in identifying blocks or habits that interfere with our learning.
Bring a willingness to learn and a desire to provide a supportive mirror for others’ learning.
Be an attentive listener: we can often see possibilities and paths that our partner(s) can’t see themselves.
Be present and allow silence…don't rush to fill those important processing/thinking moments.
If you are used to taking up a lot of space in your relationships, make some. If you are used to making space for others (but not for yourself) take some.
Track your progress over time and celebrate along the way!
Imagine how these practices could elevate your experience of collaborative work! In our group coaching work, we findthat these elements are rarely all available to group’s as they form and develop. In fact, in many environments we are conditioned to tolerate teamwork that is transactional, inauthentic and confrontational, which is harmful to individual participants' health and self-perception and destructive for the team experience as a whole. It is our experience that many leadership courses do not support practical shifts out of old habits and patterns in group dynamics, nor train us to master these relational capacities.
Holding one another accountable is fundamental to the trust building which fosters a team’s meaningful action and success and the way we do so is just as important. Everybody makes mistakes, but when accountability becomes accusatory, it’s counterproductive. Rather than pointing fingers, it’s best to address responsibility with an attitude of co-learning and care to solve the problem, and have each other’s backs, so the team lifts up together. Feedback can be direct, caring, and collective.
How Our Compassionate Accountability Process Uplevels Teams
Our Compassionate Accountability Process benefits us as individuals, and alters how we participate and contribute in our relationships, and as team members. The act of offering and receiving wisdom from each other allows you to practice being open and vulnerable in a shared commitment to your own and each other’s growth. Becoming an ensemble requires developing the capacities and strengths of the team as a whole, rather than settling for the old paradigm of individuals playing institutional roles with some coordination or management of their efforts. CAP supports the personal, interpersonal and systems awareness it takes to become a high-performing ensemble.
Teams who practice our Compassionate Accountability Process report having deeper trust in their work relationships, higher performance, and a more purposeful, innovative work culture. CAP is just one of the ways we build better teams and more positive, vibrant workplaces. If you’re interested in learning more leadership team development tools & practices like this one, subscribe to our newsletter! We share real-world strategies for sharing leadership and power, plus stories from executives and teams doing the work.