Leadership Competency 5: Require accountability for expected outcomes
Leadership guru Stephen Covey said, “accountability breeds response-ability”. With accountability comes action towards reaching a desired goal. George Washington Carver said “ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses”. That sounds about right. With accountability comes actions that lead to achievement of your desired outcomes. Without it, come excuses, inaction and failure to reach those outcomes.
Accountability can only be reached when there are clear desired outcomes, sound metrics measuring drivers that lead to the outcomes, and then linking those actions to team and individual effort and behaviors.
Clear expectations of desired outcomes: Clear desired outcomes should flow from your mission. If your mission is some high level of “client satisfaction” from your product or service, the outcome measured should be the client’s level of satisfaction compared to peers or some key threshold. If instead the mission is to be the “high value provider” of a product or service, the metrics should be measuring both the price and quality offered compared to peers or some high threshold.
Sound metrics measuring drivers and outcomes: from those high level desired outcomes, you would want to come up with sub-outcome categories. If it’s “high value” you may choose cost related sub-outcomes of cost/unit, efficiency measures, error rates, etc. For the quality aspects you may choose outcomes such as product returns, service cancellation rates, on-line rating measures of quality, client net promoter scores (NPS), or other surveys of client satisfaction with the product. Once you have those sub-outcomes, you will want to map action drivers that you expect will lead to those outcomes. Use green, yellow and red lights to capture the thresholds of “on track”, “concerning”, and “off track” for the divers and outcomes. A good dashboard will generally have green outcomes when the drivers are green. Use this outcome v driver light evaluation to calibrate your process metric thresholds.
Team ownership of the dashboard: your team should own keeping the lights green on the driver side and calibrating the process to map to green outcomes. To develop that ownership, schedule regular team dashboard reviews and assign ownership by individuals on your team to correct the process so the driver lights move back to green leading to green outcomes. With team ownership of the dashboard should also come team rewards to keeping the outcomes green leading to the accomplishment of your mission. Everybody on the team should be “eating the cooking” of the team in their compensation to some degree to reward teamwork, with the balance of their compensation based on their individual contribution.
Personal accountability through feedback: Part of assuring accountability is also respectfully providing tough feedback when needed. Below are a number of tips on doing this well:
Provide direct and clear feedback to correct performance problems and to spur personal growth. Make the feedback as timely as possible so the learning is relevant and correction is prompt.
Create a culture of learning from mistakes so that your team knows that it’s okay to make some mistakes provided you learn from them and adjust your work to limit mistakes as much as possible going forward.
Deliver feedback with composure and anticipate possible emotional responses. Know your trigger points in advance so you don’t react emotionally based on their response. Have data so you’re not defensive and so you can maintain your objectivity. Focus on the work issues or the behavior harming the team, not attacking the person.
Work together on an optimistic improvement plan. Have your suggestions mapped out for an improvement plan and ask for their ideas as well. If they have good suggestions, incorporate them if you can. It provides them with ownership of their development plan which is more likely to lead to success.
Set realistic timeframes for improvement. Sometimes it takes some training or enough opportunities to prove growth in an area before it becomes a habit. Set a mutually agreeable time frame for the habits to be formed, practiced, and mastered.
Document the direct and clear feedback detail in the files. If things turn south, you will want to have clear documentation that you provided clear feedback and a game plan for them to improve before you were forced to take serious action. Many firms have suffered legal issues with departing employees because the feedback was not direct, clear and documented.
If it’s not working out, you should evaluate if the job is the right fit for the employee’s talents, passions, and temperament. If it’s not the right fit but the person fits the company culture, see if you can find another position within the firm that might be a better fit for their talent and passion.
If at the end, the position is not right and other opportunities are not a fit, meet with the employee together with human resources to graciously part ways, providing whatever support you can to help them transition to another opportunity.
Clear desired outcomes, mapped to driver metrics that will accomplish the outcomes, with a robust dashboard that is owned by the team, and a manager that holds the team and individuals accountable will lead to organizational success.
