Coaching practices for Taking Responsibility Leadership

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Taking Responsibility Leadership, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• When something goes wrong my first move is to find who dropped the ball, and when it goes well I quietly feel it was mostly me
• My team dropped the ball again and my first instinct is to point at them or at circumstances
• Everyone brings their problems to me to solve, I jump in and fix each one, and now I’m the bottleneck for everything while my people never grow
• When something goes wrong my first move is to find whose fault it was, and being right about that leaves me stuck
• I put someone on the hook for the result but kept all the real decisions and the budget myself, so now they have to come ask my permission for every little thing and the whole thing crawls and stalls.

Practices that may help

1. Look out the window for credit, in the mirror for blame
   When things go well, credit others; when things go wrong, look at yourself first.
   Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
2. Take extreme ownership
   When the team fails, the leader looks first at what the leader did or failed to do.
   Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
3. Give the work back without abandoning people
   Resist taking ownership of problems that belong to the people facing the adaptive challenge.
   Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
4. Take extreme ownership of outcomes — even ones that aren’t your fault
   Claiming ownership of everything in your domain — even external failures — is the fastest path to fixing them.
   Discipline Equals Freedom: Jocko Willink's Framework
5. Transfer authority with the responsibility
   Give people the decision rights and resources the task actually requires.
   Effective Delegation, Made Practical
6. Habit 1: Be proactive
   Take responsibility for your responses; act on what you can control, not on what happens to you.
   The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Made Practical
7. Separate the doer (R) from the owner (A)
   The person who does the work is often not the person who owns the outcome — make this explicit.
   The RACI Matrix, Made Practical
8. Create a culture of peer-to-peer accountability
   Teams that only hold each other accountable through the manager haven’t built real accountability at all.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
9. Raise awareness and build responsibility simultaneously
   Help the person see their situation more clearly while also connecting them to their ownership of it.
   The GROW Model: Coaching Conversations That Actually Move People
10. Assign one owner to every Action Step
    Any Action Step shared by multiple owners effectively has no owner — every step needs exactly one named person responsible.
    The Action Method, Made Practical

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.