Sean: Authenticity, accountability, and acceleration. What do these mean? And why is it so important to you?

Jeff: I'm going to go in reverse order. I'm going to start with accountability. Accountability is, I believe a largely misunderstood concept. Everybody wants more of it, but they're not getting it because they're looking at, I'll just use the word wrong. Because I constantly hear people in their company saying, I wish I just need to hold my people accountable.

Everybody wants to hold their people accountable. They tell managers, you got to hold your people accountable. And I'm saying, no, actually that's wrong because if you're holding people accountable, you're doing their job for them. What you need is to create a culture of what I call self-accountability and what I've learned over the last 10 or 12 years is that everybody thinks they're incredibly accountable.

And most of us are not accountable at all. That we're horrible at it, but we think because it feels good. So I'll say I'm really accountable. And we keep, we have in our finger pointing at other people, you need to be more accountable and you know that same. We all know it. If I point my finger at you, there's three fingers pointing back at me.

And that's more true about accountability than anything I've ever seen. Because I go into organizations and I'll, I remember vividly the first time this happened. It was years ago. I'm talking to this team of leaders. I mean, I got 15 people in the room and I'm talking about accountability and most people are listening, but I'm watching the CEO and he's like rolling his eyes and almost scoffing.

And at one point he stops me because, "well, you know, this is good stuff, but I got to tell you, our organization is really great at accountability already." Now, if you tell me that, I know you're not. Because no one tells you you're great at something, unless you're not. We brag on the things we're not, frankly. That's what I've learned about leaders.

Leaders need to understand, they have blind spots, they have gaps, and that's what the work is about. And they can't, you can't work on your blind spots alone. It is impossible to work on your blind spots alone because we have a false sense of ourselves. You have to have outside help. Now, maybe that's a coach. I think that's one of the great jobs of a coach. That's what I do as a coach. I help leaders identify their blind spots and help them understand why they have them.

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