Accountability & Problem Solving

So when I say accountability, I'm not talking about making somebody feel guilty, forcing an apology, or saying, why did you do that over and over again? I'm talking about teaching someone to recognize what happened, what was my part in it, and what can I do next? Because making a mistake isn't always the problem.

The bigger issue is what do we know what to do after the mistake happens or what we can do differently next time.

So sometimes we think accountability looks like you need to take responsibility.

You know better.

Tell me what you did wrong.

And those statements don't necessarily teach a skill.

For many of kids and adults that we work with, accountability is actually a combination of several different skills.

They need to recognize what happened, understand how their behavior maybe affected other people, communicate about it, tolerate being corrected, then figure out a different response for next time.

So instead of treating accountability like something a person either has or doesn't have, we can treat it like any other skill.

They may need to be taught, practiced, reinforced, and then generalized.

So accountability is not the same thing as blame.

There's a difference between the saying, you ruined everything, and saying, okay, that didn't work, so what happened? Blame focuses on the person.

Problem-solving focuses on the situation and the behavior.

We want someone to eventually say, you know, I yelled because I felt frustrated.

I grabbed it because I wanted to turn.

I didn't finish the work because it was too hard.

I told you something that wasn't true because I thought I was going to get in trouble.

Now we have something we can actually work with.

Accountability shouldn't end with, I did something wrong.

That's why I always say sorry is like an important thing.

Like we want people to say, you know, when they do something wrong, we want to hear I'm sorry for something.

But it doesn't matter if it doesn't change, right? So I'm sorry is like a really nice thing today.

It's something nice to say.

It's something that, you know, we teach our kids to say is I'm sorry.

But what changes? Do they know what to do differently next time? Or what do they do in that situation when something is wrong? So instead of doing saying I did something wrong or I'm sorry, which is still important, you can still admit you did something wrong.