Accountability as an act of mindfulness

Picture of By Darren Finkelstein
By Darren Finkelstein

The Accountability Guy®

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By now, we have understood that accountability means a clear success path for your organization. We understand the required changes that one organisation has to make in order to make its workforce adapt to the changes to be accountable. In our last blog, we also understood the seven pillars of accountability and how they can help us evolve over a period of time. How we can get everyone to understand and adapt to responsible behaviour, understand how important it is to trust each other and be proactive at work. Before we start to talk about being mindful at work, let us understand responsibility first.

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Accountability as a responsibility

When we say being responsible, then we are talking about thinking about your decisions and actions that can reflect on your behaviour towards your colleagues or leaders. Now how can we work on being responsible? How does it work and impact others? Being accountable means accepting responsibility for your own mistakes or failures and not blaming others. That way, you learn to build trust within the team members and teams. You learn to be proactive and work on the possible problems that might occur based on your decisions. When you are working on your way of responsible behaviour, then you will be able to welcome any feedback that comes your way and that will give you an opportunity to learn from it. This way, you will be able to maintain open communication amongst the team members and create better team dynamics. Your team members will learn to respect, trust, and understand each other; hence, they will produce better results.

How is being accountable mindful?

When I say being accountable is mindful, that means being responsible is mindful. That means you are aware of yourself and your feelings. What thoughts and decisions are running through your mind? What actions might you be planning or about to take next? Whether you want to stand up for your own actions, or you want to still support the fact that “everyone loves to blame, why should not I?” Is that the route we still want to take? No, we want to work towards accepting our mistakes and standing up for our own failures. That’s mindfulness! Being mindful is important and crucial not only for yourself, but for everyone working in the organization. The next question that arises is, “Why am I the only one accountable or mindful? Why not others? So, here, what do we do? As leaders or managers, we set an important example as their role model. Show them it is important and OK to make mistakes. We are only human; it is human nature to make mistakes. We can learn from our mistakes, but by blaming each other, we might not only not learn, but we will end up bringing insecurities, negativity, difficulties, and distrust with us as well. So, it is important that we teach them an important lesson because it is important to change and how it will help each other.

We need to teach them that we can find positivity, which is not hard, but it depends on our actions. We teach them about gratitude. How can gratitude lead to happiness and then how can happiness lead to a positive attitude and later, positivity? This will then dissolve any negativity that is left within the team members. So, being mindful at work can really make a difference as it can change the feelings about you and others when you are working together in a team. So, we bring in the important changes. We can build trust and learn to accept each other’s flaws and learn to work with them positively.

Final Thoughts

Mindfulness can bring a lot of changes that one organisation plans or even desires to build great and healthy dynamics within the team members. It will help them to eradicate negativity and bring in positivity and a positive attitude. It will eradicate distrust and build up trust and respect for each other. It will decrease the difficulties among the team members, improve their work relationships and make them work easily. It will remove the insecurities and increase the confidence amongst the team members to trust each other, and they will work happily together. They will be able to work with each other on the basis of understanding each other’s weaknesses and strengths. They will understand their team members and help each other grow and learn. This will ultimately build healthy relationships within the organization. They will stop blaming each other for their own mistakes and failures, and instead they will learn to face the challenges together. This will improve their responsible and mindful behaviour at work as well as in their personal lives.

Hence, accountability is an act of mindfulness, as it will make them more responsible human beings, and then they can be more proactive and goal-oriented.