How Can I Stop Workplace Drama and Get My Team to Take Accountability?

Why Is “Open Door Policy” Ruining Your Leadership and What Should You Do Instead?

Cut the emotional waste and boost productivity with Cy Wakeman’s No Ego. Discover why “venting” is toxic, how to replace entitlement with accountability, and the reality-based leadership tools that turn high-drama employees into high-performing problem solvers.

Ready to stop babysitting egos and start leading a winning team? Read the full summary now to learn the specific questions that silence drama and spark instant accountability.

Genres

Personal Development, Management, Leadership, Corporate Culture, Career Success

Inroduction: Learn how to transform your workplace into a drama-free zone of empowered employees.

No Ego (2017) is a fresh take on leadership and a challenge to conventional wisdom. Focusing on eliminating workplace drama and emotional waste, it provides practical strategies for fostering accountability, resilience, and innovation. Wakeman’s approach empowers managers and workers alike to embrace a culture of personal responsibility – a culture that, ultimately, will reduce stress, increase engagement, and engender a productive and positive work environment.

Cy Wakeman No Ego – How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement and Drive Big Results What does great leadership mean? Is it about catering to everyone’s preferences and patiently listening to every complaint? Or is it about helping your employees focus on what’s really important and making them more resilient and accountable? You’d probably pick the latter, right?

And yet many leaders are bending over backward to listen to every opinion and provide whatever their employees ask for. Egos are being coddled left and right, but does all this coddling really produce the results we’re looking for? Maybe, instead of focusing on making everyone happy, we should be putting our efforts into creating an empowered, strong and adaptable workforce that can change with the times. This is the argument behind reality-based leadership. In the sections ahead we’ll look at the logic and tools behind this approach, as well as learn how to build a team that spends less time venting and more time achieving.

Getting rid of emotional waste.

Getting Rid of Emotional Waste Years ago, as a new manager, the author Cy Wakeman was told she should have an open-door policy. But what she quickly discovered was that this policy practically ensured that she would spend a huge chunk of her day listening to people recount every detail of their personal workplace drama. Employees weren’t coming to her to seek coaching or solutions, they just wanted to vent. Not only that, but what they were complaining about weren’t facts – things that were actually happening – but rather things they imagined were happening.

You may have picked up some managerial advice that says it’s good to let employees vent, but it’s not. Instead of fostering a healthy, productive environment, this approach ends up fuelling a workplace culture of victim mentality and low morale. To describe employees who waste time arguing with reality instead of confronting it, Wakeman coined the term emotionally expensive. These individuals are prone to contributing opinions rather than taking actionable steps, seeing themselves as victims instead of problem solvers. But her open-door experience did lead to a revelation. Instead of letting employees unload their complaints, she started asking pointed questions that forced them to reflect on their role in the issues they faced.

Questions like, What do you know for sure? or What’s your part in this? shifted the focus from blaming others or external circumstances to taking personal responsibility. Wakeman was teaching employees to edit their stories – the emotional narratives that distract from the facts – so they could focus on what truly mattered – finding solutions and making decisions that drive results. Her method had a powerful impact. The members of her team became more independent, productive and efficient problem solvers even as other departments continued to struggle with unresolved workplace drama.

This first-hand experience led to a large-scale data collecting project. The results showed that, on average, employees spend more than two hours a day entangled in drama, costing companies enormous amounts of money in lost productivity. This doesn’t just affect junior staff – even senior leaders spend hours each week managing the fallout from workplace drama. The data also identified five major sources of workplace drama – ego behaviours, lack of accountability, resistance to change, poor buy-in and disengagement. In these areas, traditional leadership tools often make the situation worse because they inadvertently feed the ego, tolerate dissent to non-negotiable decisions and foster entitlement without accountability. In other words, many current strategies coddle the employee.

This creates a workforce that expects leaders to keep them motivated and happy which is neither sustainable nor realistic. Wakeman’s approach – reality-based leadership flips the script. It’s about confronting reality directly and helping employees bypass their egos. The method is simple yet effective. It uses intentional mental processes to reduce drama and emotional waste, leading to significant improvements in both individual and organisational performance. Leaders who adopt these strategies can better manage workplace dynamics, calling their teams to greatness by encouraging them to recognise and act on their own potential.

The unfriendly ego.

The unfriendly ego Before we get to the various tools and approaches you can use to reduce emotional waste in the workplace, let’s answer the question of what differentiates reality from ego because effective leadership requires understanding and managing the ego both in yourself and in others. Now, we all have an ego but it doesn’t always act like a friend. The ego is the part of the psyche that tries to match experience with our sense of self-identity and in doing so it can come up with some fanciful, unrealistic ideas. When things are going well, your ego can tell you how great you are and if things aren’t going well, your ego can come up with all kinds of external excuses.

To put it mildly, the ego is an unreliable narrator. It’s for good reason that the Buddha once referred to the ego as the root of all suffering. So, while the ego is the source of most workplace drama and emotional waste, reality is your friend. It provides clear, reliable information that helps you make sound decisions and grow. Once, Wakeman listened to an employee who was sure that the company policy of scheduling an ice cream social at 2pm was evidence of a toxic workplace environment and a management plot against her team. This employee’s ego was hard at work turning a simple event into a tale of conspiracy and mistreatment.

Wakeman knew the truth was far less dramatic and helped the employee see through her ego-driven narrative. This leads us to a core belief of reality-based leadership. Suffering isn’t caused by our circumstances but by the stories we create about those circumstances. To bypass the ego, leaders move away from the traditional ideas of being the person who provides answers and directives. Instead, great leaders facilitate self-reflection by asking questions like, what do you know for sure? Or, what could you do to add value?

These questions help employees focus on reality and their role in creating positive outcomes rather than getting caught up in ego-fuelled drama. The ego’s worst enemy is accountability. When leaders ask questions that hold people accountable through self-reflection and conscious decision-making, it deflates the ego and shifts the focus to reality-based action. For instance, Wakeman recounts a situation with a project manager who initially responded to a challenge with a list of reasons why success was impossible. Rather than indulging him or shutting him down, Wakeman guided him through a series of questions that led him to shift the conversation from why we can’t to how we can. This small shift in perspective unlocked a solution that kept a major project on track.

The lesson that every employee should learn is that your circumstances are not a barrier to success. They are the context in which you must succeed. In the next section, we’ll get into more detail about how leaders can convey this empowering message.

Self-reflection and self-empowerment.

Self-reflection and self-empowerment Shifting your focus to a new kind of leadership, especially one that is less about giving orders and more about fostering better mental processes, might sound radical. But this approach has far-reaching benefits for the leaders, the employees, and the organisation as a whole. In a way, reality-based leadership is true leadership in that it is less about being authoritative and more about empowering people to manage themselves effectively. To facilitate this new mindset, the author has developed the concept of no-ego moments.

These are opportunities for leaders to help managers and employees recognise when they’re operating in ego mode. By developing an awareness of when the ego is taking over and creating false narratives, you can learn to quiet your mind and let reality take charge. One practical technique is to stop believing everything you think. Sit quietly and listen to the internal dialogue, questioning whether these thoughts are true, and recognising that the ego often fills our minds with unnecessary drama. Likewise, when employees start feeling suspicious or doubtful of others’ intentions, these feelings are a sign that one’s own intentions and behaviours need examination. We should also be wary of making assumptions.

The best way to get back on track is to stop guessing and enquire directly to get clear answers. Reality always wins. Self-reflection is key to recognising projection, where employees confuse the person with the problem. This often happens when the ego feels threatened and seeks someone to blame. By helping employees break down issues into clear, factual statements, leaders can guide their teams to clarity and effective problem-solving. Further, the ability to ask good questions is a skill that should never be underestimated.

When guiding a team through self-reflection and problem-solving, questions like, what part of your reality are you struggling with, and what would make this successful, help employees see the choices they’re making and how different decisions might lead to better outcomes. Another recommendation is to reinforce the value of a network. Problems can often be solved by reaching out to a strong network of colleagues and peers rather than always turning to the manager. So it might be time to recommend that an employee seek the advice of someone with a proven track record in a certain area and see how they handle the situation.

All of this is designed to move leadership away from control and toward the cultivation of self-awareness, accountability and growth in their teams. By doing so, they not only improve individual performance but also create a more resilient and adaptable organisation. In the next section, we’ll expand on this by focusing more on the all-important topic of accountability.

All opinions aren’t of equal value.

All opinions aren’t of equal value. Managers and leaders are no doubt familiar with the topic of engagement. There are many internal surveys focused on measuring employee engagement, but these are often inadequate. For starters, these assessments tend to treat the opinions of every employee equally.

But does it make sense to look for solutions in the responses from employees who are checked out and shirking ownership in their job? Let’s take a relatable example. Let’s say there’s a college student who is having trouble engaging in his studies. He’s not turning in papers on time and when he does, they’re not very good. If you gave him an engagement survey to fill out, he might say that what he needs to succeed is a better laptop, a better desk, chair, high quality headphones, a personal tutor, more money in his food allowance and a professor that sends more reminders about deadlines. Should these responses, which show a disregard for accountability, be treated with the same weight as the responses from someone who doesn’t look for excuses and takes personal ownership over their results?

Organisations should instead focus on engagement surveys as a tool to raise accountability. By filtering survey data through the lens of accountability, leaders can discern between feedback that reflects genuine organisational issues and feedback that stems from low accountable employees seeking ideal conditions. This can be done by adding items to the anonymous internal surveys that can identify a respondent’s level of accountability. On a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree, they can rate their responses to statements like my co-worker’s behaviour prevents me from doing my best work and when employees have a problem, their manager should try to fix it. Addressing external factors in an attempt to boost engagement often results in wasted resources while failing to drive sustainable engagement. Organisations will be better off measuring beliefs and mindsets correlated with accountability.

This approach can go hand in hand with the following three-step process. The first step is to stop coddling and start listening. Focus on feedback from highly accountable employees and use their insights to drive improvements. Then do action planning differently. Ask employees what they want to be different and what they are willing to do to achieve it. Work with the willing.

Invest time and energy in your best and brightest employees who are committed to growth. Finally, remove disengagement as an option. Focus on those who acknowledge that accountability is their job. If people refuse to get on board with the programme, ask them if they can see a plan for getting on board or what their plan is to transition off the team. Don’t treat non-negotiable scenarios as being otherwise. It’s wasting everybody’s time.

Building accountability in five stages.

Building accountability in five stages. Let’s wrap this blink up by breaking things down one last time. Accountability in the workplace comes in four main factors. Commitment, resilience, ownership, and continuous learning.

These are essential for cultivating a culture where employees are truly accountable for their actions and outcomes. Commitment must be seen as non-negotiable. Think of it like an Olympic team. If someone isn’t fully committed to the team’s success, it would be insane to keep them on board. Leaders should directly ask for and verify commitment rather than pinning their hopes on vague expectations. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from challenges and persist in the face of obstacles.

It’s not just about stubbornly pushing forward, but also about building relationships. Resilient employees actively engage with their networks, seeking advice and collaboration, which in turn strengthens their ability to overcome difficulties. Ownership is about accepting responsibility for the outcomes of one’s actions, whether they are positive or negative. Those who take ownership are eager to learn from their experiences and are open to feedback. Continuous learning is crucial for long-term accountability. It’s not enough to just take responsibility for mistakes.

Employees must learn from them and commit to doing better in the future. Now, leaders should know that there are also five phases of development for fostering accountability. First is challenge. Accountability drops when employees aren’t challenged enough. Leaders should ensure their teams are consistently given new and meaningful challenges. Second is experienced accountability.

Leaders shouldn’t shelter or protect employees from the natural consequences of their choices. Allowing them to experience these consequences is key to learning and growth. Third is feedback. Effective feedback inspires self-reflection rather than just providing answers. Short, factual feedback followed by an assignment for self-reflection can lead to significant personal development. Fourth is self-reflection.

This is the linchpin of accountability. Feedback should be brief, while self-reflection should be extensive. This process allows employees to confront their own thinking and behaviours honestly. Fifth is collegial mentoring. When accountability is integrated into the culture, feedback should come from various sources, such as colleagues, customers and vendors. This broad perspective is essential for comprehensive growth.

When implementing these ideas, leaders should take note. Be gentle. Wake people up without shaking them too hard. Check your own ego before trying to address someone else’s. Go slowly. Guide people carefully as they confront reality.

Believe in limitless potential, that a creative, innovative and ready workforce is possible. Practice compassion. Forgive yourself and others when you fall short and don’t be afraid to try again. Eliminating emotional waste not only makes work more efficient, but also more joyful. With less effort spent on drama, there’s more energy to celebrate success and foster a positive workplace culture. As you continue to lead with these principles, remember it’s a practice and you’re allowed to start over as often as needed.

Conclusion

The main takeaway of this blink to No Ego by Si Wakeman is that it’s time we redefined leadership by emphasising accountability, personal responsibility and eliminating drama and emotional waste in the workplace. Accountability is paramount and there are four factors to this – commitment, resilience, taking ownership of your work and investing in continuous learning. Leaders must also make sure their employees are challenged in their work and that they are receiving experienced accountability and feedback. Time for self-reflection is also extremely important, as this is when employees learn the difference between reality and what their ego is trying to tell them.

The author also argues that traditional change management is outdated, advocating instead for business readiness where employees work at being prepared to adapt and innovate in response to any challenge. The concept of buy-in is also challenged. It is suggested that it is not the leader’s job to solicit it, but the employee’s responsibility to commit or move on. At the same time, leaders are encouraged to approach their roles with compassion, transparency and a commitment to continuous growth, fostering a workplace culture of peace, innovation and joy. Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it.