Summary of How to Claim Your Leadership Power | Michael Timms | TED
Key Wellness and Leadership Strategies from "How to Claim Your Leadership Power" by Michael Timms
Michael Timms shares a personal story about struggling with getting his children ready on time, which leads to a broader lesson on accountability and Leadership. He outlines three core habits of Personal Accountability that can improve Leadership effectiveness and foster better teamwork and problem-solving in any context.
Three Habits of Personal Accountability
- Don’t Blame
- Blaming others triggers a fight-or-flight response that shuts down the brain’s problem-solving ability.
- Blame destroys teamwork, learning, initiative, and accountability.
- Cultures that avoid blame encourage openness, error reporting, and continuous improvement.
- Instead of blaming, focus on understanding and addressing problems collaboratively.
- Look in the Mirror
- Leaders must first acknowledge their own contribution to problems before holding others accountable.
- Self-reflection helps identify how one’s own actions or inactions may have contributed to an issue.
- Modeling accountability encourages others to do the same, creating a safer and more productive environment.
- Asking, “How may I have contributed to this problem?” fosters ownership and constructive dialogue.
- Engineer the Solution
- Avoid the natural tendency to blame the person closest to the problem.
- Use Systems Thinking to analyze how environment, processes, and design influence behavior.
- Example: The US Air Force redesigned cockpits to reduce pilot errors, showing how system design impacts outcomes.
- Focus on identifying where the process or system broke down and redesign it to prevent future issues.
- Asking, “Where did the process break down?” helps find sustainable solutions rather than assigning blame.
Practical Tips and Insights
- Model accountability personally before expecting it from others.
- Create clear, visible systems to support desired behaviors (e.g., clocks and schedules to help children manage time).
- Foster a blame-free culture to encourage learning and initiative.
- Use self-reflection to improve Leadership and personal effectiveness.
- Apply Systems Thinking to solve problems sustainably rather than superficially.
Presenters / Sources
- Michael Timms (TED Speaker and Leadership Coach)
Category
Wellness and Self-Improvement