Three Distinctions: Accountability, Being Accountable, and Holding People Accountable
Company breakthroughs are only possible when you know the principles and practices of accountability. You need to be aware of several distinctions, beginning with accountability itself. This might be characterized as the actions that people are assigned that would be consistent with the mission of the organization. For example, if it is the mission of the organization to provide services, then it is someone’s accountability to make sure team development, marketing, sales, service, and so forth, are in place.
Accountability Reports to Accountability
Accountability breaks down when we stop relating to others according to their accountability, the role they play in the workplace. This is where things go off track and actions come to a halt. If you relate to another person as your work buddy or a friend, rather than honoring that person’s established or declared accountability, then it is very difficult to hold that person accountable. There is always a reluctance to step on that person’s toes.
Accountability should create a gap (read: reverse salient) that causes people to expand into it. If I’m the team leader, and I create accountability, that requires me to grow and, in turn, that should cause everyone who reports to my accountability to have to expand and grow as well.
Being Accountable Means Being Count-on-able
This is where measurement comes in. Being accountable is not doing. In fact, accountability per se is really not something you do. You can do something all day long and not be accountable for the results.
Being accountable requires that people be count-on-able. This means making promises and keeping promises. People who are count-on-able are good for their word. They do what they say they will do.
Holding People Accountable Means Holding Each Other Accountable
Holding people accountable requires that we hold each other accountable for promises made, not just that a boss holds his or her employees accountable. In a connected organization, everyone holds each other accountable for fulfilling promises. It takes rigor and a willingness to look like the “bad guy” to keep integrity in the organization: If a person promises to produce a particular result, someone (or a team) holds that person accountable for fulfilling that promise. It requires saying, first, “You said this, but you didn’t do this”; then, declaring what’s missing; and, finally, requesting a promise to clean up the situation (or renegotiating the original promise). No shaming involved.
These aspects of accountability are missing in just about every organization I’ve known. It takes some effort to achieve a high level of accountability, and you have to be careful not to establish accountability in a way that sets people up for failure. It’s best to determine the most important areas where you need to distinguish accountability and then to slowly and deliberately grow it in those areas. Wholesale, radical change of the way you deal with accountability will not work even for the most transformed organization.
Here’s what I want you to leave this chapter with:
A new method to distinguish accountability for yourself so you will know what you’re working toward
The capacity to ask your team members to be accountable, so that they willingly step up to the plate to sign up for accountability in your organization
The knowledge of how to get on the right track in your relationships at work so you become responsible for results
The understanding that accountable leaders are good stewards
The five elements of accountability, which I call the Five Steps to Effective Promise Management
Closing Your Accountability Gap: Effective Promise-Based Management
Organizations with clear intentions of high performance—of reaching or even exceeding the goals and objectives they set for themselves—require a new approach to managing their accountability.
How often do you say you are going to do something or tell your team you want something done and everyone nods his or her head in agreement … but it doesn’t get done? Action just seems to evaporate into thin air, right? The failure to complete tasks is at epidemic proportions in business. When what you set out to do falls off the radar for any number of “reasonable” reasons, you set the stage for a new cycle of apathy and cynicism. Unless you attach your commitments to a system that ensures their existence, you will pile up a stack of broken promises that guarantees you will not see your strategy executed—by you or anyone else.
Managing others often is designed to keep certain uncomfortable circumstances, issues, or problems in business from recurring. That’s an easy pattern for most managers to fall into, and much of the time it involves avoiding a confrontation with employees.
I don’t know too many people who relish confrontation unless they are narcissists and don’t care what people think of them. It happens to even the best managers with the very best of intentions, and managing this way causes more issues than it solves. It creates what we don’t want in our organizations: more entitlement, more apathy, more cynicism, more inertia, and less accountability. It diverts people from the mission of the company, and it keeps managers and their teams focused on the wrong activities. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The Accountability Scorecard™: Start a Conversation FOR Action
By using the Accountability Scorecard, you can build a simple management principle into your organization: Stop talking about what you’re going to do, start making authentic promises to take action—and then, take action.
Business is a network of conversations, and the conversation that makes the most positive impact on a team committed to accomplishing a major goal is the Conversation for Action. Conversations for Action are the bread and butter of accountability. Notice it’s a conversation for action and not about action. When you talk “about” what you’re going to do, there is no intention to be in action. A Conversation for Action, however, calls people to be in action.
How often do you assume that “talking about” is the same as the action itself? It’s easy to collapse the two into one, and many organizations are stuck in inertia as a result.
What are Conversations for Action? They are the spoken acts of making, managing, and keeping promises. Performance is dependent on keeping promises, and with the Accountability Scorecard (www.ThirteenersBook.com), we take it a couple of steps further by having team members journaling regularly for their promises and then tracking each individual’s actions and their impact on the team’s progress. We provide feedback so that progress is visible and directly and positively impacts performance.
The Five Steps to Effective Promise Management
Promises are critical assets that you need to manage as effectively as you manage other asset resources in your organization. Here’s how:
1. Make promises. Make clear promises to take action and produce a result that will move you and the organization closer to annual and/or monthly goals.
4. Publish promises. Issue promises publicly so that everyone can see who’s pulling his or her weight. Attach promises to something (like the Accountability Scorecard sheet) that’s tangible and visible to everyone so there’s no question that a promise was made. There are no hidden or side deals.
5. Journal promises. Keep a journal of promises so they don’t disappear or go out of existence.
4. Act on promises. Complete promises on time to maintain integrity. If that doesn’t happen, find out what’s missing that prevented the promise from being kept. No shaming should be done for nonfulfillment.
5. Measure promises. Feedback is the critical element of consistency and reinforcement.
It’s simple: Say what you’re promising to contribute to move the team closer to its agreed-upon goals; publish your promises where everyone can see them (on the office wall or on the online Accountability Scorecard); make periodic notes about your activities; take action on your promises; and report to your team or accountability manager about keeping your promises. Finally, assign a percentage-of-completion
value to your actions, so everyone on the team knows and can see the weight you are pulling, with them, to achieve the agreed-upon results for your team and organization.
These actions are critical to building teams that operate productively and effectively. Once you’ve successfully managed the first promise to its conclusion, you should re-promise for the next needed action.
The Accountability Scorecard approach is beneficial to teams for the following reasons:
Individuals can contribute meaningful actions to a team intention.
Dashboard feedback graphics are used to show team progress.
Each individual’s performance contributes to the entire team’s results.
What Is Required for Effective Team Accountability?
When you’re in action on your promises, you’re being accountable, and your goal must be to get all your team members to be accountable as well. To achieve that goal, all you need is each individual’s stated commitment to the team that he or she is willing to be held accountable and will use the simple tools needed to manage his or her promises.
As for yourself—the team leader—here’s the key to achieving accountability: Stop managing people. Start managing promises.
Promises are your currency of action. Anything else is not worth the paper it is printed on. If you’re responsible for getting things done through other people, scorecarding your promises will help you manage promises effectively.
It is critical to organizational performance to get everyone on the team engaged and aligned with the right effort. With the Accountability Scorecard, everyone on the team sees and knows what everyone else on the team is committed to and is taking action to accomplish. This is the most powerful energy you can create for your team and your organization. When everyone is engaged in promising and measuring, unprecedented results are not just a new possibility—they will be a new reality.
Seven Deadly Sins of Accountability
As you move forward, also be aware that organizations encounter seven classic pitfalls when inventing accountability. Be on the lookout for these:
Having too many goals
Not requiring promises from employees for how and when goals will be achieved
Not being aligned with the goals employees are working on
Not assigning champions for goals
Coming off your stand for employees’ greatness and not expecting that they can accomplish impossible goals
Allowing conditional goal setting (e.g., “I can get this done if you can do this for me”)
Allowing goals that are neither understandable nor measurable—goals that you will never be able to tell if they are actually completed
Accountability Is Up to You
Remember, once you have a commitment to a promise to take action, that promise becomes an asset to your organization. If you fail to complete the promise, the impact can be as damaging to the bottom line as if you had failed to manage any of the financial or other capital assets of your organization. You wouldn’t waste the assets on your balance sheet, so why would you waste your promises?
Access to the action of accountability is through speaking, so a promise is a spoken act. It’s an act that calls you to be, so it’s a very important and distinct conversation. You can’t give someone accountability, even if you’re the supervisor or owner of the company.
Accountability is something you declare you are taking on because you said you were taking it on, not because someone else is demanding that you do so. People can make requests all day, and you can accept those requests. But unless you determine that you are going to be accountable for the action you have promised, no one can give you accountability for anything. Accountability is up to you.
STOP MANAGING PEOPLE.
Start Managing Your True Assets That Will Produce
Your Greatest Return On Investment:
START MANAGING PROMISES.
You can look at Stage Four on your downloaded Process Map.
What Do Connected Leaders and Connected Companies Look Like?
As you embark on making your company a THIRTEENER, you should have in your sights a vision of that goal. That is what you should be striving for.
The Unstoppable Leader’s Manifesto
Leaders who end up building THIRTEENER companies use a distinctively different set of tools to create a profound connection with their employees and among their employees. They have learned to think differently about the conversations they participate in—with themselves and with others. They engage committed people and awaken them to the possibility of producing greater results. Employees who work for these astounding leaders know exactly what I am talking about.
These remarkable leaders have almost uncanny clarity about how human beings really think and act to produce results. They honor the perspectives of others and stand for people’s remarkable desire to contribute to a vision they are completely connected to. Our business is to honor these leaders and teach others how to become as extraordinary as they are.
I have assembled the insights of those leaders into a manifesto of sorts—one that encapsulates the views and connected thinking of THIRTEENER leaders. I present this manifesto next. (You can also find it online at www.ThirteenersBook.com.) If you find it helpful, you can print it, have it enlarged, and hang it on your office wall.
The Connected Leader’s Manifesto for THIRTEENERS
* * *
WE ASSERT:
Business is a community—a marketplace of human beings with a common, rightful, or proper concern or interest.
Human beings relate to each other in business within a unique network of conversations. Business is the network of conversations one chooses to engage in at work.
Human beings naturally desire a world that consists of a perspective of unlimited possibility. To invent such a world, the connected leader must be able to disengage from the past and imagine a future that the past says you can’t achieve.
Connected leaders must work with their employees to reinvent the conversations in their business to create a new future.
Human beings in business usually operate with no awareness of the immense impact that negative, hidden conversations (that is, viral memes) have on business outcomes. Therefore, the leader must commit to uncovering his company’s hidden viral memes.
Higher performance is possible only when positive conversations that make a difference are well communicated, clearly understood, and aligned with the purpose of the organization. Therefore, the connected leader must work with employees to create the positive conversations that will replace the negative viral memes within the organization.
Wherever there are secrets or anything that cannot be discussed at any level of the organization, you will find a seriously dysfunctional organization. Therefore, the connected leader must not keep secrets.
When employers pretend to be open or pretend to care, it undermines their relationships with employees. Therefore, connected leaders must “lead out loud” by showing vulnerability and asking all employees to contribute perspectives and ideas that will help the company succeed.
A connected leader must not let the past own the organization’s future.
The Consciously Connected Leader
We live in the “Age of Connectedness” in business. Our challenge as connected leaders is to help our employees move from “unconscious disconnectedness” to “conscious connectedness.” That is the job of the leader who wants to execute his or her strategy.
Unstoppable and connected leaders don’t rely entirely on strategy to build their organizations; they leverage the principle of connectedness. Unconscious and disconnected leaders are reactive, behave automatically, and are at the mercy of circumstances they can’t change. Consciously connected leaders act intentionally and cause things to happen to stay on purpose.
As a consciously connected leader, your objective is to transform your organization and your teams into a “connected culture” by bringing conscious connectedness to the executi
on of strategy.
At the core of transformation in your company is the transformation of yourself into a consciously connected leader.
What a Consciously Connected Leader Looks Like
Here are the key characteristics of the kind of leader you want to transform yourself into. A consciously connected leader
Supports the team and finds ways to remove barriers, so the team’s work gets done faster and more effectively. As a consciously connected leader, you make your team your priority. Your job is to allow people to struggle to discover solutions under your guidance and coaching. Never hand them “ready-to-wear” solutions that weaken your team’s ability to think and solve problems. By doing this, you’ll have the ability to take a vacation once in a while, knowing that you’re leaving your organization in good hands.
Helps subordinates discover something for themselves and in the process become bigger (not smaller). As a consciously connected leader, whenever you engage in a conversation with subordinates, never diminish them for their perspectives. Ask them first what they think would be a good approach to solving whatever issue they bring to you, and in this way, help them develop their thinking and rely on their own cognitive abilities, rather than react with thoughts that ultimately undermine their view of you, the company, and the situation they find themselves in. The latter can be the breeding ground for new negative memes.
Knows that benevolence goes a helluva long way. Arrogance, or an attitude of “I’ve been through this before, and why can’t you ‘get it’?” won’t help a company become unstoppable, so the consciously connected leader makes it safe for employees to say whatever they need to say. Giving employees the opportunity to contribute virtually assures that they will become unstoppable.
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