The Great American Accountability Breakdown of 2008

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.

Breakdowns in the Organizational Accountability Cycle

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?

Accountability in the Workplace Tip #3

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.

Accountabilty in the Workplace – Tip #2

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 of the problem. 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.

Raising Awareness of Accountability in the Workplace

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 ??)

Personal Accountability

A few weeks ago I was having a discussion with several clients about accountability, expectations and follow-up. The clients were Rick, the site manager, and his top two department managers, Lucy and Ethel (all fictitious names of course). Both Lucy and Ethel were lamenting on the fact that even though they told people what they wanted done, much of it never seemed to get done without constant follow-up and reminders. They both felt that they should not have to follow-up as often. Ethel made the comment, “When I was a supervisor no one had to hound me to get these things done! Why should I have to constantly stay on them?” At this point Rick interjected a very profound statement:

“Why do you think I promoted you and not them?”

Is Accountability a Performance Management Issue – part 2

In the first post on this issue I ended with the fact that very few of the experts writing about Performance Management or the vendors hawking consulting advice or software talk about accountability in the open. They talk about Goals, and other non-threatening aspects of Performance Management. This also applies to the words associated with accountability – expectations, responsibility, consequences, and confrontation. I think this is a mistake and a missed opportunity for both groups.

For the experts, nothing could be more important for improving organizational performance than addressing the lack of accountability, the unwillingness to set clear expectations, the failure to clearly communicate the consequences of failure (to: the organization, the department, and the individual) , and the importance of accepting responsibility for ones own actions.

For vendors selling services and solutions: having a platform that enables managers to be more effective at doing all those things is a terrific selling point. Most senior managers are not dumb people so don’t sugar coat your product when selling to that level. Let them know that you understand that holding people accountable is hard stuff. Let them know that your products make it easier for their managers to hold people accountable AND that it makes it harder for those managers to avoid holding people accountable.

The more we use these words, the less afraid we become of them.

Is Accountability a Performance Management issue?

I was recently asked by Kellye Whitney, Managing Editor for Talent Management Magazine, if I thought that Accountability was a Performance Management issue. This was in response to an unabashedly unsolicited pitch for a series of articles in her wonderful magazine. While most of my pitches were dismissed the one about the loss of accountability being American businesses’ greatest threat did intrigue her.

My initial response to this question was “ARE YOU KIDDING ME??” How can accountability not be an essential part of any Performance Management program. Then I got to thinking, Kellye is obviously a very, very bright person to get to the position that she is in, so maybe I am missing the point. That got me to start looking at (and actually reading this time) all the literature and white papers produced by the Performance Management experts and software vendors. What I found astounded me. Nary a mention of the word accountability. Lots of lofty talk about Goals and Metrics and Job Satisfaction but none of the basic blocking and tackling stuff people on the front line have to do – setting expectations, removing barriers and holding folks accountable to getting their daily jobs done.

More on this later…

In the mean time I invite you to go look for yourself. Visit some of the big names such as Success Factors and Halogen Software. They have some really cool tools, but see how many times you can find the word accountability.

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