Holding People Accountable

Over time I have found I often let people "off the hook" for something they have promised and yet I hold myself hard to task for my own commitments. I find it very easy to create a story in my own mind if someone fails to deliver and I give them the benefit of the doubt. This isn't necessarily right or wrong, but it doesn't work well to get things accomplished.

I have learned to hold others accountable when I have a formal coaching relationship with them. And when I was a teacher full-time, I held my students accountable. So why did I start to go easy on others? I do believe in consequences for behavior and my wife and I tried to raise our kids with this in mind. Perhaps it all started for me after I left the corporate world and found I no longer had control of consequences management in a clear way for others. In a hierarchy, the rules of consequences are usually fairly clear, but in a world of horizontal relationships they are much less clear to me.