Think Positive: Transforming Accountability

Think Positive: Transforming Accountability

By: - Roger Connors and Tom Smith

Usually, the question "How did that happen?" is accompanied by a fair amount of hand-wringing, fist-shaking and sometimes even brow-beating because something fell through the cracks, an expectation was not fulfilled, results went undelivered, assignments were ignored and opportunities were lost.

Regardless of who failed to deliver, unmet expectations can result in negative consequences, including accountability interactions. In fact, accountability in organizations today has mostly become something that happens to people when things go wrong.

To implement positive accountability in an organization, negative accountability - the sort that happens to people when things go wrong - should be reversed and shifted so people proactively take ownership for organizational results and overcome obstacles to make things happen.

Steps to Accountability

There are four essential steps to acknowledge and appreciate the transformative power of accountability: See it, own it, solve it and do it.

To see it, employees must obtain and listen to others' perspectives, whether they agree with them or not, preparing them to more readily acknowledge reality. To own it, they need to make connections between the circumstances they face and the actions they have already taken. To solve it means constantly asking, "What else can I do to obtain the desired results?" To do it requires employees to follow through on their commitments without blaming others for failure, take action to change the situation, make progress and ultimately achieve the necessary results.

Individuals, teams or entire organizations that attempt to deny or deflect accountability - often because they feel victimized by circumstances they perceive to be outside of their control - can become trapped below the line that separates accountable and unaccountable behavior. If they remain below the line, things almost always get worse.

Rather than face reality, they ignore or pretend not to know about their accountability, deny their responsibility and blame others for their predicament, citing confusion as a reason for inaction. These individuals may ask others to tell them what to do, claim they can't do it or just wait to see if things will miraculously improve.

Embracing the four steps can build an organizational culture of accountability where people consistently assume personal accountability and regularly overcome obstacles by replacing the question "How did that happen?" with a more positive and proactive one: "What else can I do to achieve the desired results?" This simple question puts those who ask it in the right mindset to resolve issues, become more resourceful and diligent in searching for new ways to move forward and achieve desired results.

It's a question people at Ford Motor Co. have been asking in recent months. Evidence of the company's emerging turnaround includes refusing government bailout money, improving management, cutting costs, reducing debt, raising new equity funds, building greener cars and solving structural problems that had taken it to the edge of bankruptcy. The company has posted profits in recent quarters, charting a new course toward sustained annual profitability by the year 2011. Ford's budding turnaround illustrates the power of accountability and the question "What else can I do to achieve the desired results?"

A renewed focus on accountability is also unfolding at General Motors. Ed Whitacre Jr., appointed chairman by the White House on June 1, 2009, the same day GM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is concerned with accountability and culture change. In his first round of communications, former AT&T boss Whitacre told employees that he expected to see visible, positive changes in the company within 12 weeks, and he told managers they would be held accountable for making real progress toward immediately fixing GM's deficiencies and inadequacies.

Whitacre was serious. After only eight months on the job, GM's president and CEO Fritz Henderson resigned - exactly 12 weeks after Whitacre's initial round of discussions with GM employees about accountability and results. The board moved quickly to install Whitacre as CEO. In his first statement as GM's chairman and CEO, Whitacre reemphasized GM's need for every employee to become accountable for his or her actions and for delivering profits to GM's shareholders: "We now need to accelerate our progress toward the goal of returning to profitability and repaying the U.S. and Canadian governments."

The Accountability Sequence

To help people assume greater accountability, the question "How did that happen?" becomes "How did I let that happen?" Leaders at every level in an organization must remain accountable if they expect their people do likewise.

On a daily basis, we encounter companies that are profoundly affected because someone failed to hold someone else accountable for meeting specific expectations. Almost without fail, we can explain what happened by looking at the situation through the accountability sequence, composed of four fundamental activities for establishing expectations. Taken in sequence - forming, communicating, aligning and inspecting - these expectations lay the foundation for leaders to effectively hold other people accountable.

Steeping out of this sequence can produce a negative accountability connection between leaders and the people they work with, making employees feel as if they've been dealt with unfairly. For example, when a leader inspects performance without properly communicating expectations, people feel ambushed. When a leader communicates without taking the time to completely form an expectation, people become confused. And when leaders attempt to create alignment without communicating expectations clearly and completely, people feel coerced.

Following the accountability sequence helps leaders establish and maintain a positive accountability connection with their people, which is key to get things done. It also helps to establish expectations, minimize the number of key expectations that go unmet and engage in more positive accountability conversations when needed.

The Accountability Conversation

Managing expectations is a dynamic, ever-changing process. Leaders who have established clear, complete expectations in the past should never become complacent or negligent, because even the most admired organizations can falter. Motorola, the company that launched the cell phone industry and stood among the world's most admired companies for decades, is now struggling to survive.

How did that happen? Apparently the company missed, underestimated or ignored an industry shift away from feature-rich cell phones, such as the Razr, Motorola's last new product hit in 2004, toward more sophisticated smart phones, such as the iPhone. Now the company is preparing to spin off its handset business to better focus on businesses in the home networking, mobility and enterprise markets.

When leaders' efforts to instill accountability fail, they can choose one of three courses of action: lower expectations to accommodate people who are not delivering; replace the people who are not meeting expectations; or engage those people in an accountability conversation to help them produce results through the expectations chain, a series or string of expectations, including all the people involved, that must be met to deliver desired results.

No one likes to lower their expectations, but it happens, usually by default, when leaders don't know what to do to improve performance. Lowered expectations may seem like the right decision at the time, at least in the short term and in light of resource constraints, but when leaders lower their sights, everyone usually loses in the long term.

Finding a better course of action may mean replacing people. It's a hard choice because doing so bears a significant cost: not just the turnover cost of bringing on new people - estimated by some to be 300 percent of the salary of the replaced person - but the time and cost associated with bringing a new person up to speed. Realistically, there are times when this is the only thing a leader can do. The third option involves the accountability conversation, which aims to improve the performance of those in the expectations chain. It involves three simple initiatives.

First, ensure the problem is not something the leader has missed while establishing expectations. Expectations that are not carefully established can contribute to a failure to deliver. Dialogue that ensures a leader has carefully formed, communicated, aligned and inspected expectations can help determine where the problem resides.

Second, determine whether the problem is related to how the leader established expectations. If it is, the leader must re-establish expectations by going through the forming, communicating, aligning and inspecting activities.

If not, assess the four main causes of missed delivery: poor motivation, inadequate training, too little personal accountability and an ineffective culture. Solving these problems with effective solutions - greater motivation, targeted training, a keener sense of personal accountability and the right culture - can reverse the course of any unmet expectation. Work from the easiest to the most difficult problem to bring efficiency to problem solving and accelerate the process of fulfilling expectations.

Third, once the leader has decided on a solution, he or she can form, communicate, align and inspect expectations to implement the solution. The accountability conversation can help leaders and their people meet and exceed expectations, while giving them the tools and understanding to do it again in the future.

People can only be held accountable for one thing: the expectations leaders have of them. Whatever the expectation is, the process of managing expectations becomes the act of holding others accountable. Performing this act in a positive, principled way will not only deliver results, it will simultaneously raise both individual and organizational morale. And there will be no more shaking heads wondering "How did that happen?"

[About the Authors: Roger Connors and Tom Smith are co-presidents of Partners In Leadership Inc. and authors of several books, including How Did That Happen? Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way.]