What you tolerate / accept, is what will persist
Day 18
Today’s prompt is a bit of a throwback for me, and is critical to understanding how progress gets made.
What you tolerate / accept, is what will persist.
I’ve heard statements like this a few times, in a few ways, in a few different places. If you see something that isn’t in alignment with the outcomes you are working toward, and it continuing to happen stops progress toward that outcome, then that will impede progress toward the goal.
Applying this statement to the individual:
If I continue to spend my entire paycheck every payday, I’m going to not have any retirement savings, or perhaps not even an emergency fund, and perhaps to put my future financial health at risk.
If I continue to accept myself consuming more calories than I am burning, I am going to gain weight, and perhaps put my physical health at risk.
If I continue to set goals but not spend time and effort working on them, I am going to continue to not see the outcomes I’m looking for, and put my desires at risk of never coming to fruition.
And so therefore, what I accept, is what will persist. If I choose not to accept the status quo and take action, then there is progress toward the desires, toward the goals. It’s not a guarantee, for nothing in life is 100% certain, but it increases your chances greatly.
Applying this statement to the leader:
I don’t mean this to be a dictatorial call to action to go fire all the people who don’t get in line. In fact, I mean the opposite of that. This is more about what the leader does and how the organization responds. What I do mean is that leaders need to be clear about the expectations in behaviors, actions, tasks, and outcomes. Leaders need to provide clarity, connection, alignment, and focus to their teams when it comes to delivering value and guidelines, guardrails provided over time to help hone in those behaviors.
We have to address the behaviors and activities that aren’t in alignment with the outcomes we’re working toward in the way we want to work toward them. That is a call to the leader to take action to provide feedback and guidance to the organization. It’s beneficial for both the leader and the organization to be clear about what the goals and outcomes are, and how we expect to work together to get there.
This also means that leaders need to have clarity to themselves about what is important in the operations of the organization. They need to be able to articulate activities and outcomes that are important, and then they need to be able to help their organization understand WHY it’s important. If leaders don’t have opinions about what’s important to how they operate and deliver value, they’re leaving it to chance that the organization will figure out what’s important.
Leaders need to provide that clarity, connection, direction, alignment, and focus, or risk missing on outcomes.
Questions:
As an individual, what are you tolerating or accepting? How might that spur you to action to do something differently to help you move toward your goals?
As a leader, are you expectations about outcomes and ways of working clear? What can you be doing to help your organization with clarity, direction, alignment, and focus?