The Ladder Of Accountability Can Be Applied To Everyday Life

You Can Become Your Own Worst Enemy

The ladder of accountability is a tool used in business to assess the “state of accountability” among individual employees. But this ladder is much more than that and can be an eye-opening experience that can be applied to your everyday life. The ladder is divided at a halfway point where the actions or lack of action you take can make a positive or negative impact on your everyday life. The top half where you have the “accountable behaviors” and the bottom half of the ladder is where you find the “victim behaviors”. Understanding the ladder is critical to identifying and assessing your actions in order to be a successful person.

Become A “Make It Happen” Person

Let me start by saying that people who are accountable are powerful people. They assume accountability and do whatever it takes to make it happen. Having said that the “victim behaviors” are pretty much the people who blame others, come up with personal excuses, use “I can’t” and wait and hope. The person can also be at the bottom of the ladder being in an unaware or unconscious state. These are the kind of people who usually sit around pointing fingers without realizing they can take action in order to make a change. The first step to change your situation or take action is to acknowledge reality. You must first stop living in denial and realize the circumstances. That’s how you will be able to tackle the situation head on and “embrace it”. Once you embrace the current situation you can start to find solutions. But finding solutions won’t suffice in order to fix the problem. You have to apply those solutions and “make it happen”. A lot of people will fail to do so because coming up with excuses and blaming others might be the easier way out. But at the end of the day, you are only fooling yourself.

Changing Your Way Of Thinking

For this article, I want to mainly focus on the top half of the ladder or the successful way of thinking. In order to do that I’m going to provide a simple scenario. Let’s say it’s 8 pm Sunday night and you forgot you have a deadline to turn in a report at work Monday morning at 7 am. The first thing you need to do is to acknowledge reality. You messed up and you forgot the deadline. The next step is to embrace it and look at the positive side. You have exactly 11 hours to work on this report even if you get no sleep. Following that, you will come up with the fastest and most efficient way to make this report. You start thinking of past reports you have turned in or how to use technology to do it faster. After you figured out what to do you just make it happen. This way of thinking is much different than to waiting until 7 am and try to come up with as many excuses as you can to why you couldn’t do the report. I can guarantee you that being or becoming an accountable person will drive you much more success in life.