Action Audit 360, pt. 1

A few weeks back I introduced the concept of Action Gaps – those places where we aren’t following through on expressed interests or commitments with actual actions when the time comes. As I discussed in that post, these Action Gaps can be very costly to our social status and professional reputations, and can cause greater damage in our close personal relationships. Yet, even more profound is the negative impact these Action Gaps can have on our self-confidence and trust in ourselves. In short, they weaken our integrity and compromise our ability to fully show up all throughout our lives.

 I followed up that initial post with another piece on running an Action Audit as the process of seeking to find where those Action Gaps might be lurking in our own planning and promises. The first place to start with this Action Audit is with ourselves via the process of a Self-Audit where we turn our focus onto our behavior to see where we make plans and promises to ourselves but then don’t follow through with action. Examples mentioned include telling ourselves we’ll go to the gym or skip dessert, but then, when the time comes, we simply don’t go to the gym and do end up eating that dessert. So that is step 1 of the Self Audit – to bring more awareness into our own behavior to identify where we have Action Gaps.

 Whether these gaps are large or small, or simple or complex, they all ultimately result in lower self-confidence and lower trust in ourselves. These lower self-appraisals in turn impact our ability to garner trust and confidence from the people around us. Any goals we have for developing our leadership skill and ability are thereby made more difficult to accomplish. Therefore, it becomes imperative to identify these Action Gaps with the intention of working towards closing them.

 Once these Action Gaps begin to come to greater awareness, we can then start to be more mindful on closing them by either being more realistic on the planning side or more diligent on the action side, or ideally both. The goal here is greater integrity between our words and deeds, and making necessary adjustments on both ends to close those gaps. And while this seems simple in theory, there are plenty of obstacles in the way that make it difficult to make immediate changes. The main challenge we covered in that follow up post was to make a hard and clear distinction between the process of integrity enhancement vs goal accomplishment. As a reminder, Action Gap closing is much easier when approached with the former objective in mind.

 Part 2 of the Action Audit is the much more difficult and scarier proposition of directly seeking information from your friends, family, and colleagues on where they’ve seen you creating Action Gaps. We call these assessments an Action Audit 360 in that they are designed to provide a full 360 degree view on how you show up (or don’t) across multiple domains of your life and the relationships therein.

 Potential recipients of an Action Audit 360 request can include personal friends, partners, and relatives, but usually focus on professional connections such as colleagues, supervisors, and direct reports. We often “code-switch” in how we relate to different people in our lives and across different contexts, and part of the idea of the 360 degree view is to identify patterns within each of these contexts as well as the larger ones that span across them.

 For example, we may come across as warm and caring towards our employees and/or direct reports, but that same concern and care may manifest as softness and indecisiveness in how our Boss or other, more senior Leadership might view us. Or perhaps we are particularly respectful and patient with our spouse, but come across as a bit rude and contemptuous with a long-time friend.

 The point to be made here is that all our relationships are unique collaborations between us, the other person, our shared history, current context, and future expectations. Therefore it is reasonable that how we show up in each of these relationships may differ - sometimes widely, sometimes quite narrowly. However, we still have a core personality, adhere to certain principles, and have other less malleable traits and characteristics. These should be observable across multiple relationships to some degree as well.

 Through running an Action Audit 360 assessment of your Action Gaps and how they manifest in and across a wide range of your relationships you should be given some unique insight into opportunities to improve all of them. Obviously, you’ll want to make note of what specific things pop up that might be unique to a particular relationship with an eye on addressing that item within that relationship. But the bigger thing to look for is what patterns might emerge when comparing the feedback you receive from all the recipients together as a whole.

 We’ll return next week with a more detailed breakdown of how this part of the process usually unfolds, what dynamics make it a bit tricky, and provide a simple template you can use to get things started.