Jerry's Blog

For more than two decades now, my colleagues and I have worked with companies to help them improve their execution at the frontline - i.e. on the floor, in the cubical, or wherever work is accomplished. We profess no particular expertise in any industry and yet, without fail, we have been able to achieve significant gains in productivity, efficiency, yields, safety, quality, or whatever metric our clients say is the most important to their bottom line.  20% - 30% gains are minimal. 40% to 50% are common and 50% to 60% improvements happen regularly.  We have worked in steel mills, engineering firms, chemical plants, utilities, call centers, high tech, low tech, highly automated, and very labor intensive. No matter what the industry, we get the results.  The thing is... we do not consider ourselves special. We do not have a magic wand. We do not have particularly spectacular resumes and we do not necessarily come from the best schools. What we do have though, is a basic understanding that a breakdown in the accountability cycle of the organization is the most significant barrier to achieving spectacular results in most organizations. By helping organizations repair this breakdown in accountability, we help them execute their processes more effectively which in turn leads to breakthrough performance. 

We also know that if we can do it for large organizations with thousands of employees, you can do it yourself within your own workgroup.  There is no reason why any competent manager at any level of the organization has to wait until told by someone else to tackle this opportunity. Anyone can do it at any level. Do get me wrong and think that it will be easy because it's not. This is "Culture Change 101" and few things could be harder.  However, by following the few simple steps outlined in the pages that follow you can fix the broken or missing links in your group's accountability cycle and achieve break through levels of performance improvement.

During one of the recent hurricanes in the Gulf Coast Region of the US, one of my clients had major damage to their facilities. So much so that they had to replace all the siding on a very large structure before they could resume operations. The contractors they brought in all told them that it would take 3 months to do the job. So our client decided to do the job internally. They brought in a couple of project managers from other parts of the organization and hired hundreds of construction workers. My team had been on site doing leadership development work with the supervision when the storm struck and put our project on hold. However, our client asked us to get involved during the 3^rd week of rebuilding efforts and it became apparent that they were not on track to meet their deadlines. He wanted us to help them get back on track and to understand why they were off track.  Within a few hours the why became astoundingly obvious - there was more work to be done than could be done in the time given. Yes there were the usual items of poor planning, lack of procedures, etc., etc., but given the conditions this was not unexpected or even unreasonable. No the real problem was that the when President of the organization said I want the plant back up and running by XX, can you do it? Everyone said "Yes Sir" even when they really had no idea how long it would take. What we found was a propensity to say whatever the boss wanted to hear and then start making excuses as to why they did not make the plan. This was not just one person, but everyone up and down the chain of command. To make it worse, everyone knew it. For example, when we pressed one supervisor to pick up the pace because he was falling behind the critical path, he would just smile and say that it was alright because no one was going to make their commitments because everyone had more work to do than possible in the time allotted.

We asked, what happens when you don't hit your commitments? Most replied along these lines: "There will be a lot of yelling and angry comments, but since everyone failed, what can be done? It'll blow over in a few days and we'll be back to normal." When discussed with the Senior leadership team at the facility, there was no surprise, no shock, no denial. I fact the #2 man simply said, "That's the way it has always been since it was built. It's the disease here at xxxxx"

If this was the only place I had seen this disease I would have agreed. Unfortunately, I have seen it in many places, in many forms. All which lead to a breakdown in the accountability cycle of the organization.

That's what I'm calling it anyway. This financial mess that we have found ourselves in as a country. It is a pure breakdown in the Accountability Cycle across all sectors of our country - Business, Government, Personal, and Social.  The expectations were set - I loan you money to buy a home, you pay me back. Never mind that the expectations were unrealistic - Home prices will continue to climb forever, you only have to pay interest until the balloon payment hits and then we will refinance if for you, you can't afford it but we will do it for you anyway. We signed up for it by the thousands and when the time came to pay the piper, we just walk away from it, refusing to take responsibility for our decisions. Sorry Mr. / Mrs. Banker, the house it not worth as much as the paper it's written on and apparently neither is my word. Good luck, see ya, have a nice day.

By no means am I laying everything at the feet of the homeowner who was trying to get the best house he could for his family. Speculators trying to make a quick buck, home builders recklessly plowing ahead even when the indicators and common sense said to stop, unscrupulous loan originators stretching facts and overlooking details, and mortgage holding companies that failed to do their due diligence when buying up those packages. All these groups have a hand in this breakdown. Don't blame the government for not warning us. Anyone with a little common sense could see it was an unsustainable bubble. When housing gets to be seven, eight and even ten times income there is no way that it can be sustained. But we kept going, heedlessly rushing into the euphoria of easy money. And now it's reality check time and no one wants to ante up. No one wants to face the consequences of our national failure. Fingers are pointing and politicians are all clamoring to be the first to say, "I told you so...You should have listened to me." Of course none really did, not loud enough to be heard anyway.

The solution that is being proffered by Washington is to let them all off the hook. We have to do this they say to avoid a 1930's style calamity. I wonder if that would not a good thing. Many good things came out of the great depression. Parks were built. Roads were built. Families pulled together and got through. Yes, many people went hungry a good bit, but we are a nation of obese people that could stand to take a few national pounds off.  A lot of good, well thought out laws were enacted many of which are still in effect today and need to be rethought because of the change in the times.   Out of the Great Depression, we came to be the World Power. Admired by our friends and feared by all.  A bail out could just put us deeper in national debt, despised as a nation of whiners.

Why don't we take a national stand and hold those responsible for this mess accountable and face the consequences together as a nation. Then let's set the expectation with our government to fix our to rebuild our financial system with the proper safeguards in place. This is a great opportunity to right many wrongs in our system. It's not up to Bush, or Obama, or McCain. It's up to us to take a stand and speak in a unified national voice. To set the expectation with our government. To take responsibility for our past actions. To hold those accountable for failure. And to face the consequences head on.

Is the Accountability Cycle broken in your organization? It is in most organizations. Not at all levels, and not with every individual, but in every organization that I have worked with there has been a significant breakdown in their accountability cycle overall. Don't even get me started with the country in general and the resulting mess we have  going on in our financial institutions. I'll do my best to confine my tirade to corporate America and specifically to their ability to effectively execute their mission. What, you may ask, is the Accountability Cycle? The Accountability Cycle is a term we have coined for the process of: Setting Expectations; Accepting Responsibility for those expectations; Holding people accountable to fulfilling those expectations; and Facing the Consequences for success or failure. While this certainly is not rocket science, it is the one concept with which all organizations struggle.

 

The issue that I struggle with is which part of the cycle is the most broken. As a consultant charged with helping my clients improve their accountability cycle it is important to understand which part of the cycle is broken. So with each client I have to understand:

• Is the problem that management fails to set clear and specific expectations?
• Alternatively, is the problem that people refuse to accept responsibility for those expectations?
• On the other hand, is the problem that even with clear expectations, management fails to follow-up and hold people accountable for meeting expectations?
• Or, finally, is the problem that management fails to provide either positive or negative consequences for success or failure?

The more and more frequency, I am finding the answer to be yes to all of the above.  We are failing to do any of those things. We are failing to those things at work, in the home, in our schools, in our government, in our personal lives and in society as a whole. Where is it breaking down for you?

 

 

A post by Guy Kawasaki reminded me of another unintended consequence of using the wrong measures (see the Unintended Consequences post from 5/15). Actually, Guy was commenting on a video of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) discussing the pits falls of today's hiring practices.   Using the wrong criteria in your selection process could lead to disastrous results.  With today's technology, we are in data overload. For many, many things, we can have so much data available to us that we cannot possibly digest it all. What's more, much of the data conflicts with other data, which then leads to analysis paralysis. 

So what is the solution? There is no one solution, but taking careful time to think through all the different roads that a certain type of data could lead you to, before you start collecting the data, could head off potential problems down the road.

Setting SMART Goals and Clear Expectations are an essential part of the process of achieving higher levels of accountability with your peers and employees. Goals must be determined before expectations can be set and Expectations have to be set before someone can be held accountable for meeting them. Often we use the terms Goals and Expectations interchangeably. This happens most often when expectations are implied during the goal setting process. For example, when setting the goal to reduce errors in a process by 25% there is an implied expectation: you make 25% less mistakes. However, there are significant differences between goals and expectations. A Goal is something to strive for; a target to reach but it is not an obligation other than the obligation to try. An Expectation on the other hand
is an obligation considered reasonable, due and necessary. In performance management terms, the expectation is the minimum acceptable performance level and a goal is some point beyond the expectation that the manager and employee have agreed to target. Going forward from here, I will talk setting goals and expectation and the process for both are nearly the same as long as you keep in mind the differences: Targets vs. Obligations.

The goal and expectation setting process is not a complicated one. It can be difficult to pick the absolute right point to place as a goal or expectation, but in most cases it is less critical to be absolutely correct than it is to get a goal set and get commitments to striving to those goals. If you follow the guidelines for setting SMART goals, you should be fine. Many books, papers and websites give great detail to setting SMART goals but I'll run through the basics. First the acronym:

S - Specific

M - Measurable

A - Attainable

R - Relevant

T - Time Bound

 

Specific:

Both Goals and Expectations should be very clear, unambiguous and specific. There is no place for vagrancies when setting goals because a specific objective has a much greater chance of being accomplished. Specificity also facilitates measuring progress towards achievement. In the context of developing goals, Specific means that an observable and quantifiable action, behavior or result is described which is also linked to a measure of some type such as a rate, number, or percentage. Using the previous error rate goal as an example it is not enough to say our goal is to reduce errors. The goal should be quantified more specifically. To do so, you and the employee(s) need to answer and agree to six "W" questions:

Who: Who is involved?

What: What do we want to accomplish?

Where: Identify a location.

When: Establish a time frame.

Which: Identify requirements and constraints.

Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.

 

Measurable:

The old adage is that if you don't measure it, you can't control it. What good is a goal that you cannot tell if any progress is being made on it? So to be effective you must create a tracking system to measure progress on reaching the goal that provides feedback in a timely basis. Let's use a real life example that nearly all companies want to improve upon – Customer Satisfaction. Everyone wants to improve on customer satisfaction. But how do you measure customer satisfaction in a way that is measurable in real time so that feedback can be given to the people that are trying to improve? Typical measurements are surveys that can take weeks to get back therefore delaying feedback for periods much too long to effect any real change. When facing this challenge, break the overall goal down into more manageable buckets. What are the controllable components of customer satisfaction that your employees directly control that can be measured? If you in a call center environment it could be things like:

• Time to call resolution


• Number of call escalations


• Number customer calls per issue

One note of caution goes back to a previous post: select the right measurement or you may get the wrong result.

 

Attainable:

Both Goals and Expectations should be achievable. Since expectations are obligatory, they have to be doable. That does not mean that they have to be easy but you must put people in a position to be successful or you are dooming them, and you, to failure. Goals, on the other, should stretch people more than expectations. They still should be achievable, even if it takes what for the individual is a herculean effort. Beyond this, the goal becomes ridiculous and it actually becomes a demotivator and a source of dissension in your organization.

 

Relevant:

Goals and expectations should be relevant to both the individual and the organization. A goal for which an employee has no influence upon is again worse than irrelevant, it is a distraction and a demotivator. Setting a goal or expectation to increase sales on a production line worker is not only irrelevant it is not attainable.

 

Time Bound:

Both goals and expectations need to have distinct starting and ending points. If the goal has a significant duration (this will vary by what the goal is) then a series of milestones should be defined. This increases the sense of urgency for accomplishing the objectives. Human nature being what it is, most people wait until the last moment to get things done. By setting a series of short interval milestones, then you can help the employee be successful by ensuring that they are taking incremental steps in achieving the overall goal or expectation.

 

When Goals are not needed:

There are also many times when goals are not needed in order to set expectations. Would you really go through a goal setting exercise in order to set the expectation that someone is to come to work on time? No. Nor should you. Some things in the workplace are not or nor should they be negotiable. Honesty, integrity, reliability, loyalty are all attributes that should be simple expectations in any organization that are framed in goals. These are pure obligations that come with employment or membership in the organization. A job description is another example of expectations that are not necessarily tied to goals. A job description states the minimum expectation of someone filling a certain role.

In this article, we will be focusing on the initial steps to begin changing the behaviors that lead to a higher level of accountability. For this article, we will assume that you are the official leader of this group; i.e. you are the boss. Being the boss makes it much easier to drive behavior changes but that does not mean that you cannot do it if you are not the boss. It just takes longer and you must think more strategically. We will cover tips for the non-boss later on in this series. We will also assume that you have read Tips 1 & 2 and have begun implementing the suggestions from those articles. This piece builds squarely on those two steps so if you have not read those tips then I suggest you do so now.

At this point you should be personally demonstrating a higher level of accountability yourself and have built a consensus among your staff and employees that change is needed in their behavior. Now you need to take positive steps to create the beginnings of group wide change. First, tell them as a group what you are going to do and ask for their help in accomplishing it. What you are going to do is to do a better job of developing SMART Goals, setting clear expectations around those goals and following up on a regular, timely and proactive basis. What you need their help in is developing and agreeing to those SMART Goals, asking questions to ensure that expectations are clear, and be ready with real answers when you follow-up. You will need to explain in detail what each of those steps entails and how it will affect them personally. We will come back to each one of these items and address them separately so that you understand them yourself. As I have stated several times in the other tips, this is a lifestyle change. You and every member of your group will have to do things differently.

Next, you want to schedule a one-on-one meeting with each individual on your team. During this meeting, you will need to confirm their support. They will need to understand that you are going to be asking more of them and that you will be following up on a more frequent basis. This does not mean that you have lost faith in them or that they are doing anything wrong. What it means is that you are interested in their being successful in accomplishing their goals, that the only way you can help them is to ask questions, and for them to be forthcoming about their progress and the problems they are encountering in accomplishing those tasks. Once agreement and support has been achieved, then delve into the goals development and the setting of expectations. The individual meetings require planning. The more time spent on planning the meeting, the shorter and more productive the meeting will be. As a rule of thumb, meetings of this type should take an equal amount of time to plan as to execute. In other words planning for a half hour meeting should take about a half hour. A little longer for the first couple and a little less as you develop your theme and rhythm. While planning the meeting consider the individual and their strengths and weaknesses, how they are performing currently and what you want the outcome of the meeting to be. You should define in writing what goals do you want them to agree to, and how are you going to position them to reach those goals. Putting it in writing will help you clarify it in your mind and increase your resolve to get that outcome. You should also list out your expectations in writing so that you don't forget to cover a critical point. You cannot hold someone accountable to an expectation you never set. At the end of the meeting, you should summarize the goals and expectations and get verbal agreement as to what was agreed upon. Immediately following the meeting, those items should be documented in writing and a copy given to the employee for their records.

In Tip #4, we will take a step back and review how to set SMART goals and clear expectations.

To recap, the first tip for raising accountability in the workplace was about you setting the example for your peers and employees. Before you can expect people to do what you ask of them, you have to show a willingness to do the same.

The next tip is about communication.

Today's workforce is much different from the workforce of past decades. Today's workforce will not blindly follow along just because the boss said to. Some say this is due to a higher education in general. While this is true, I also believe that a different reason has a greater impact. We as a society have decreased the level of discipline that we impose upon our children as they grow up. We ask less of them, and require a lower level of obedience. One of the results of this is that our children question our decisions on a greater level of frequency than ever before. There are many other results but I'll let Bill O'Rielly and the other talking heads to weigh in on those.

Whatever the reason, the result is the same - today's worker is less likely to do something just because you say so. They want to understand why they need to act differently. Remember, this is a lifestyle change just like losing weight or to quit smoking. You have to communicate the reasons why it is imperative that the group changes.

You will also have to have irrefutable proof that there is a problem with the level of accountability in your group. There will be finger pointing and deflection of responsibility on this issue just like any other and maybe even more.

So knowing that people will not blindly follow along until they understand and agree that there is a problem you have to plan a communication strategy to put the group in this position. Most people would say, "Okay lets hold a meeting to tell everyone this and show the proof." You could of course do this and with a meek and mild group it may work. However, one of the best pieces of management advice that I ever received is to never have a meeting until the outcome is already determined. This means that you will need to do a lot of one-on-one communication and politicking. In a one-on-one situation you can custom tailor your message to the one person you are talking to. Your arguments, your proofs, and your counters are all specifically tailored to that one person. Furthermore, if the outcome is different or unexpected, it is in private and you do not give the opposition a chance to build momentum as you would if this came out in front of the group.

You also need a plan beyond just positioning agreement that there is a problem. You need to know what direction you want to head. I'm not saying that at this point you need to have a detailed plan, such as bringing in consultants tomorrow, but you need the group to leave the meeting with some specific actions to go accomplish that will take the group closer to the answer.

Now you are ready to hold a group meeting. You know who your allies are and you know where the opposition is going to come from. You have a plan to deal with the opposition and you have a plan of action going forward. If you are really good at setting yourself up for success, you have several key people ready to lead the conversation without you having to say a word.

This is just the beginning of your communication plan. Now that you have put the issue on the table in the open you cannot let it drop. You have to keep talking about accountability and responsibility on a daily basis. You also have to start doing things differently with others. That is the focus of the next tip.

 

Tip #1 for Raising Accountability in the workplace

In most X step programs the first step is always the most difficult, until you get to the next step of course. All steps in correcting any major life issue are tough steps because they involve lifestyle changes. This is true whether you are trying to quit smoking, lose weight, or what ever. The same is true with raising accountability in your work place. It involves lifestyle changes. YOU have to think and act differently. That's right YOU. If YOU want to change the people around you, then YOU have to act differently. It all starts with YOU.

You have to act more accountable.
You have to act more responsible for your own actions.
You have to stop blaming others for your failures.
You have to stop accepting credit for other peoples accomplishments.
You have to stop making excuses.
You have to stop pointing fingers and placing blame.

You see its one of those leadership things - You can’t ask others to do something you yourself are not willing to do.

It is my experience that most corporate culture change initiatives fail because the leadership of the corporation expects for everyone else to change but see no reason for themselves to change. They fail to exhibit the leadership neccessary for the change to take place. The people below them see no change above and conclude, rather accurately I must say, that it cannot be that important to change because the compnay’s leaders are not changing.

Now from that statement you might conclude that the only way to change your organization’s culture and raise the level of accountability is for the CEO and all the top brass to change and beome more accountable. THat is not what I am saying at all. THe most effective culture change is one that starts with you, what ever your position in the company is. When you make a concious decsion to become more accountable for your actions you raise the bar for everyone around you. When you have become more accountable, it will be eveident to those around you. Then, you have the moral authority, to begin holding those around more accountable for their actions. Not just those that report to you, but your peers and your superiors as well. It does not take a huge corportate initiative, it takes one person determined to make changes, and willing to make those changes themselves, before they try to change others.

The mission of this blog is to get more people talking about accountability in the workplace and in our organizations in general. I am happy to report success, even if it is only one more person. Over the last few days Halogen Software’s Human Resources Adviser and official blogger - Dave has published a series of articles about accountability (even better, he mentioned me - Thanks Dave). To read the articles in full click here: article 1, article 2, article 3. Now of course the articles are advertisements for his company’s software but that is okay with me if there is no more than one salient point in the message. Dave makes several. My favorite is the following excerpt:

Where the real accountability comes in is around keeping everyone responsible for their actions on a day-to-day basis and creating a culture where everyone understands what they are to achieve, and is measured against that.

Ahhh, music to my ears. He nailed it on the head. This is exactly what performance management is about. Now the trick is achieving said culture. Sounds like a great blog topic to me.

Next time - Achieving a Culture of Accountability (part 1 of ??)