“Life is so much better when we shed the victim thinking
and simply choose the path of personal accountability.”
-John G. Miller, The Question Behind the Question

Sometimes the greatest challenges in business lie not within the actions of competitors or the needs of customers, but from within one’s own company, and ultimately within ourselves. This month’s newsletter provides you with some paauwerful tools (sorry, I couldn’t resist spelling it that way!) that will help you take personal accountability for addressing the challenges you encounter.

Just after graduating from college, the first full-time job I landed was as an administrative assistant for a higher education institution. This was a job I kept while supporting my husband through medical school.  Although I was not passionate about the work itself, I gave it my best effort. It paid the bills during our first four years of marriage.

Several support staff in the organization perpetually played the victim role; they frequently held a “pity party” to air their grievances about work conditions and to pontificate about how unfair life was. A few co-workers invested a lot of their energy in trying to “look” busy so they could deflect as much work as possible. Because my desk was generally orderly and was not piled high with papers, the woman I shared an office with advised me to pull files from the drawers and stack them on my desk so I would look busier than I was. She said, “That way they won’t keep giving you more work!” My reply to her: “But that’s why I am here, is to work! Why would I want to deflect work if I am all caught up?” She really thought I was an odd one! I think she also felt a little threatened by ability to be so productive…as if my productivity would make her look bad. I wasn’t there to compete with her. I was simply there to work.

Some of my co-workers carried a sense of entitlement, and they frequently asked really lousy “victim” questions like these: Why does this always happen to me? When is someone going to give me a break? When are they going to fix this problem? My co-workers never stopped to ask how they might be part of the problem...or part of the solution.

John Miller, author of The Question Behind the Question (QBQ), suggests that this victim mentality comes as a result of asking poor questions. If you have not read this short book, I highly recommend it. I’ll share a story to illustrate some of the powerful points the author makes about QBQ.

A few years ago I received a phone call from an administrative assistant (I’ll call her Carol) who had found me while doing some online research about how to increase personal productivity. She was calling with questions about some productivity tools she had read about on my web site. By the end of our conversation, she was very eager to get The Paper Tiger software and a tickler file system – both were tools that she was certain would significantly increase her productivity at work. The next step was to get approval from the non-profit organization she worked for so she could order the products off of my web site.

A few days later I got an email from Carol, informing me that there was a budget freeze in her organization.  Not only was she unable to make any purchases, but she was also told that she could not implement the Paper Tiger during work hours. Her organization had been forced to lay off support staff during a recent budget crunch and Carol’s responsibilities had increased, so her boss did not want her taking time away from her “work” to learn and set up a new system.

To my surprise, Carol was determined to forge ahead, despite these challenges. I could tell that she was passionate about the mission of her organization and the kind of work they were doing. She knew how important it was to be more productive so she could handle the additional responsibilities she had recently inherited. Carol had decided to purchase the necessary tools out of her own pocket and to work after hours to get everything set up. I was amazed to learn that this hourly wage-earner was willing to invest her own resources of time and money in order to increase productivity.

As I thought back to my years working as an administrative assistant, I couldn’t help thinking of the support staff I’d worked with 20+ years ago. Put in Carol’s circumstances, they would have asked questions like these: Why do I have to do everything? When are they going to provide me with more help? Why can’t they at least pay for products that would help make my work easier?

It’s understandable why someone would think this way, especially when feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. But the bottom line is that these are lousy questions to be asking. Our society is full of victim thinking. How can we possibly serve those around us -- and ourselves -- when we’re so busy playing the victim? These negative questions don’t solve any problems! Nothing positive or productive comes from asking them. These questions also imply that someone else is responsible for the problem and for coming up with a solution. What ever happened to personal accountability?

John Miller reminds us of the good news: “That moment of frustration also presents us with a tremendous opportunity to contribute, and the QBQ can help us take advantage of it.” In other words, we can make better choices in the moment by asking better, more personally accountable “I” questions rather than victim-like “they” questions.

Using the QBQ model, I imagine that these were some of the kinds of questions Carol asked herself: What can I do to increase my personal productivity? What can I do to develop myself? What can I do to support our organization’s mission?

Are you curious about what happened with Carol? After she purchased The Paper Tiger software and the tickler file system materials with her own funds and implemented it on her own time, her productivity went way up. Her supervisor could not believe how quickly she could retrieve information and how consistently she was meeting deadlines.

Three months after Carol’s initial purchase, I received a request for multiple network copies of the software and several more tickler file systems, as well as a request for some of my time to help with implementation of these tools. This time it was paid for by her organization.

About a year after Carol’s organization implemented the software and tickler files, I called to ask how things were going. Someone else answered Carol’s direct line, and I was told she no longer worked at that extension; Carol had been promoted to a management position! When I reached Carol, she told me about some incredible transformations that had taken place in her organization since they had implemented the Paper Tiger and tickler file system.

Recently I shared this story with a colleague. She expressed concern that Carol was being too much of a pushover and needed to set limits and boundaries so the organization would not continue to heap more responsibility on her. I explained how QBQ worked… Instead of blaming, complaining and spending energy trying to deflect additional work, Carol had asked the QBQ: What can I do? Then she designed her own solutions and took action. She took personal accountability rather than becoming a victim. And Carol did what she did because she chose to, not because she had to. (Remember to check your self-talk: I should…, I gotta…, and I have to… represent victim language; I choose to… is empowering and builds on personal accountability.)

The QBQ Challenge

As you read the statistics below (and possibly identify with some of them), identify the QBQ – the Question Behind the Question – that will enable you to choose a path of personal accountability.

Organization & Information Management

• The average U.S. worker wastes six weeks per year retrieving misplaced information from desks or files. At a salary of $75,000 per year, this would translate to 12.3 percent of total earnings. Visit our Cost of Disorganization Calculator to determine what this costs you or your company annually.
  
• Americans as a whole waste more than nine million hours each day looking for lost and misplaced items, amounting to a national loss of nearly $150 million per day.
  
• Despite visions of a paperless office, 80-90% of all information in most offices is still maintained on paper. By the year 2005, there will be 50% more paper in offices than there was in 1995.
  
• 80% of filed papers are never referenced again. 50% of all filed materials are duplicates or contain expired information.
  
• In every survey taken over the last 20 years, managing paperwork falls in the top ten time-wasting activities of managers.

Time Management

• Spending 15 minutes every weekday morning mapping out your day can save you an average of six hours of wasted time during your work week. That’s a 480% return on your investment of time.
  
• During the last 25 years, our leisure time has declined by 37% while our work week has increased by a full day.
  
• An average interruption during the work day consumes ten to twenty minutes in getting back on track, not counting the actual time spent on the interrupter; 80% of our interruptions usually come from 20% of the people with whom we work.
  
• The typical businessperson experiences 170 interactions per day (e-mail, face-to-face, telephone, etc.) and has a backlog of 200-300 hours of uncompleted work. Effective time management is critical.  
  

John Miller points out that “we need QBQ so our organizations can be places where instead of finger-pointing, procrastinating and ‘we-theying’ ourselves into the ground, we bring out the best in each other, work together the way teams are supposed to, and make great things happen.”