To hear it, see it, feel it, use the power of it…ACCOUNTABILITY is an amazing tool for change in individuals and organizations. A powerful email from an accountability champion in one of my client organizations points out the power of example. Here is what he wrote:

To all,

It is very nice to see that some players in the NFL have Accountability.

This morning I was reading the Sports section in the NCTimes.  The article was about the SF 49ers football player who fumbled in OT to give the Giants the win.  Kyle Williams has been taking a beating from the press and fans.  Maybe you have heard about some of this.  What amazed me and got my attention was how Kyle is responding.  If you want the full article I have attached a copy.  However, here is the quote from the article that got my attention.

“It’s one of those things you have to take accountability for,” Williams said. “Everybody is responsible for what they do on the field. It’s something that I was responsible for and I made a mistake and it’s time to own up to it and move forward.”

You can see why this caught my eye and why I thought to share with all of you.  Accountability is all around us and it is refreshing when public figures actually step up and “own” their mistakes.

Rob Jordan | SKS Inc. | Human Resources

The concept of team accountability and how that works (or doesn’t) became magnificently clear when a coaching client told me this story.

“I took my young nieces out one afternoon and told them that we would all have ice cream if everyone behaved. That meant they had to watch each other and that they would be accountable for each other. No running off out of sight, and their behavior in the store was to be respectful and helpful as we did our errands together. We’d be accountable for getting our errands done with everyone cooperating and that would result in having ice cream at our favorite place together.”

To her surprise, one of the children pushed back. “Hey, that’s not fair! I can’t control Emily. If she runs off why will I get punished with no ice cream?” My client said she had a sudden flashback to her work environment and the “team” she is on.

She explained to her niece that they were all going to be accountable, not just for themselves, but for the whole group. They would get their errands done, she would be less stressed, and then they’d get treated to something they had earned.  “But YOU are the grown up!,” her niece declared, “we can’t control our sister.” “Your sister is standing right here and can hear me just as clearly as you can.” She looked right at the youngest and asked, “Do you understand, we are all accountable to get along, stay together and get our errands done and then there will be ice cream?” Without hesitation the youngest looked at her sister and said, “That means you are not the boss of me, we are all the boss of each other.” My friend thought about posting that at the top of the next “team” meeting agenda at work.

The hallmark of a true team is that the group of people involved does not need a “manager” to handle lateness, poor performers, or personality conflicts. Teams support a team leader (of their choosing is best) and hold each other accountable as they focus on results. A clear goal, a clear definition of success, clear roles and the need to inter-depend to get the job done while valuing everyone’s contribution as needed and necessary are the other optimal elements. It takes a high level of personal accountability individually and collectively, to experience an effective team. It’s rare, but done well, one’s work experience can be transformed.

Upon arriving home after a day of errands and ice cream, the youngest niece ran into the house announcing to her mother “Aunt Emily told us we were accountable, and no one was the boss of me, and we got ice cream!” Needless to say, the dinner conversation that night was a much longer and very interesting conversation explaining how that worked.

We all know intuitively that the problem of low personal accountability starts individually, but for leaders, consider that leadership is a bankrupt concept without personal accountability; we are fooling ourselves not to see it. Instead of saying “the company lost money this quarter” the leader would say “I posted a loss this quarter and here is how I am accountable for it.” No accountability, no trust. No trust, no confidence. And no confidence results in people keeping their money or hoping things will change.

It is only true leadership if you are accountable – answer for your results good or bad without fault, blame or guilt. If you are a leader, is it position power or leadership by accountability? You can only demonstrate accountability, not mandate it. The workforce and the public are starved for examples so we can choose to work for and buy from accountable companies.

Are you an accountable leader? If you are, what’s your story? And if you are not one, when will you start and what will you do? The most important thing to keep in mind if you want accountability in your world is that is starts at the top and you are the TOP.

Ready to jump off the corporate-go-round and do your own thing? Here are the two most common points of coaching I provide to new business owners:

1. Plan to address the need to “rescue, fix and save.” If you are coming from management to start up your own enterprise, keep in mind that managers are often rewarded for rescue, fix and save activity.  When there is under performance or poor performance managers grow used to rescue, fixing and saving and avoid skills training on effectively holding people accountable. The lack of skill in holding people accountable can be very costly behavior as an independent consultant or business owner. Then that pesky mindset of “it’s just easier to do it myself” also creeps in and that sets the pattern for never letting go of anything and working long hours without an ability to let go when the time comes and  (if you are good at what you do) that time will come!

   2. Focus on results not activity. Most organizations reward employees for activity not results. Thus the “I was so busy today” syndrome with little in the area of actual results to show for it. Whether you are an independent consultant or a business owner you are asking for problems if you do not Define Success, which is distinctly different from “setting goals”. (email me for the Defining Success exercise; Linda@lindagalindo.com) Using a calendar instead of a “to do” list demonstrates personal accountability for time use and if a business coach is engaged, time use tells the story. “Busy” professionals often lower their stress by being active and they often hide behind multi-tasking and allowing all manner of interruption on their focus when what they really need to do is go for a run! Best to put activity “in time” on the calendar and make sure each activity is tied to a specific result named in your success statements. Otherwise it’s easy to get on the wrong side of “busy” with no actual results to show for it.

Going out on your own? That’s so awesome! Been on your own for awhile and it’s just not getting traction? I completely understand. These two points are what I find myself coaching over and over again. See if either fits and keep going!

All the best,

Linda

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 58 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

What is accountability?

Accountability is up front ownership for the results you produce. Even if you don’t get the best outcome, you still say, “I own the results of what happened here.” When you have a work environment that values and demonstrates personal accountability, you will not have finger-pointing and blaming when things don’t work out. Instead, you’re going to hear responsibility for fixing the problem. You want an employee to say, “Here’s how I’ll be accountable.” Believe it or not, that’s something that has to be reminded, taught, demonstrated and reinforced at the leadership level of organizations.

Why is accountability important to a company’s success?

Accountability is the key foundation concept for a company’s success. Companies all over the world are trying all kinds of programs and tools – often referred to as “program of the month” – to get productivity, job satisfaction, high-performance worker retention, and to attract the best and the brightest to their organizations. But there is no personal ownership for producing results with those programs. It’s someone from outside the company coming in to fix employees. It is very temporary in its usefulness. Companies don’t need to train employees to be accountable. That’s a fool’s errand.  The leader who models personal accountability is simultaneously teaching followers to be accountable.  Once an organization experiences accountability, top down, accountability is recognized as the missing ingredient when results are not as planned, especially at the leadership level. When the ingredient of personal accountability is added, learning and forward progress ensue.

What can business leaders do to ensure accountability in others?

First and foremost leaders have to be accountable themselves. This concept has proven to be one that can be taught by example over and over again. It takes a great deal of courage on the leader’s part to internalize personal accountability because if something goes wrong, the leader is standing in the exact same place as when something goes right. In today’s business headlines, we see one example after another of the CEO saying he cannot be responsible for the outcomes of the executives who work for them. That kind of thinking does not work. It’s corrupt. Accountability absolutely produces the results you are looking for, but it starts with you. You can’t make excuses and blame. You can’t break agreements with your work force. And you have to make clear agreements to begin with.

How do organizations benefit when they develop and live consistently in an accountable work environment?

Desirable retention rates go up. People love an environment of accountability because it’s creative, it’s problem solving, and often it’s lean in the positive sense where people are focused on results and not activity.  There’s lots of communication. It’s almost counterintuitive. It feels like the more accountability in a culture, the more restrictive it would be. But it’s the exact opposite. An accountable environment attracts and retains the best people. The good kind of turnover continues: less-accountable employees weed themselves out. A culture where personal accountability, top down is real and palpable is vibrant, energized and motivated. Customer-service training, team building – you name it – won’t get a company where it wants to be. Accountability, personal accountability, is the foundation that everything else works from.

It could be in these instances of outrage, we care about the wrong thing and are asking the wrong question. Even if a leader, whether it be Penn State’s Joe Paterno, Enron’s Ken Lay or News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch said, “Yes, I knew and I made a note right here in my calendar about the day I was told.”

What’s next? Well, after the viewing audience picks themselves up off the floor and finishes sending the video clip off to viral land on the internet, “what’s next” is exactly what happens now, it just takes much longer and costs a lot of money. The “story” is given life, lawyers are well paid and the news media has something to nosh on for months while issues of great societal import are out of sight. You do realize we all feed that monster right?

OK, enough admiring the problem, let’s move on to what to do about it.

All reporters, congressional committees and members of the public who join the national conversation are to ask – Are you personally accountable for what has happened on your watch?  (By the way, this is a great interview question when hiring new VP’s and Managers.)

1. The answer to the above question dictates what’s next. A “Yes” results in “and here is what I will do every day, from now on, to restore the company, my employee’s and the public’s trust in me as the leader, and this is why I deserve to keep this job while I go through any needed legal process.  A “No” means fire up the legal fund and that the employees can hunker down for a loss of business or eventually their job, and the public can turn off the news on the subject for what will like be months.

Do we really need other than a yes or no on whether leadership takes ownership of what is not working in their organization? Whether its illegal activity or record profits? Do we really need to personally examine how we answer for our results as individuals? I think the way things come out in the media there is no question that the answer is yes. Consider how much more effective it will make us as learners and improvers, instead of gossipers and watchers.

It boils down to leadership learning to demonstrate accountability and owning their results good or bad and eliminating the need for the spin doctors that feed the monster of memos and media that really say nothing but “I need a lawyer.

Let’s arm ourselves with the knowledge accountability questions and the ability to answer them:

•               This is what I did.

•               This is what I learned.

•               This is what I will do differently in the future.

•               This is how I am and will be accountable going forward.

Thus, end of story and beginning of accountability; personal accountability. Believe me, the personal accountability story without fault, blame and guilt is much tougher to tell and by far, more interesting and useful. We need a generation of monster slayers and accountability builders. You have to be one to see one.

I need to parse this out. Is this The Straight Truth or False?

1)  The economic failure(s) RESULTED in private profit and socialized debt because betting was made synonymous with investing. Except betting in financial markets with investors money is not subject to the regulation that investing is.

2)  The “regulators” were supposed to regulate the “raters” (Moody’s and S&P, etc.) but the “raters” were busy being “raiders” themselves because they did not understand the synthetic predatory products, until they sorta did and knew the “new ‘market making’ synthetic products” were not regulated (and still are not).

3) “Regulation” and “government” are vilified for those who will stop at nothing to avoid personal accountability for the losses that occurred at their hands.

4)  The less personal accountability in a society (by law, corporations are not people) the more laws and regulations you must put in place to target the lowest common denominator. Such regulations take years to put in place while the predator’s victims laugh all the way to the bank.

There are solutions, but they require personal accountability on everyone’s part. Could it happen? Yes!, especially if the uber-unregulated wealthy market makers could live with just being rich and self-regulate with personal accountability. But I fear, that is not the American way…anymore. See #1-4 on my previous blog post  http://lindagalindo.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/wanted-accountability-alche…

The national conversation seems to be like a dog chasing its tail until utter exhaustion ensues in order to stop and take stock of our choices. Each of us makes a difference in the conscious, accountable choices we make.  WAKE UP! The true reality is the one we create.

Leaders seem only to understand accountability when something works, “My team,” “Our school,” “My leadership.”  “I get the pay, the bonuses, the accolades, and as the top person I am accountable.” But then accountability goes out the window when trouble brews. Step one appears to be lawyer up and then let the blame, fault and finger-pointing take up hours and hours of media saying and playing the same thing, over and over and over.  (Not that I watch, but since I’ve left news announcing things have probably not changed.)

I am amazed by the confusion on who did what and when. At the same time, I am fascinated that memory is long when it comes to remembering the day, time, and players exact moves to score a “win” in 1971.

If leaders started with personal accountability, before the fact – I own this, all of it – everything on my watch without fault or blame, going in, there is no way this kind of mess will be the outcome. Of course, you probably would not be able to get anyone to take a leadership job at this level of personal accountability, thus the utter lack of leadership in this country.

Leadership is a bankrupt concept without personal accountability defined as ownership for results (up front) and answering for results (good or bad) on-going and after the fact, without fault or blame. We have no idea what this looks likes. Just story after story of finger-pointing, blame, nonsense and excuses. Here is the panel I want to see. All the “leaders” involved saying “This is what I did, this is what I learned, here is what I will do differently in the future, this is what I am accountable for.” Then off they all go to process through the legal system to be judged by a jury of their peers if they have broken the law.

In the media, it could be 20 minutes total and story over. Occupy Wall Street seems to have the right idea to get personal accountability to emerge at the top level but the corporate cloak will forever prevent personal accountability; corporations are not people. Let’s see if the same holds for “institutions of higher learning.” This is the perfect time to read “Why Leaders Can’t Lead” by Warren Bennis.

I thought about you today and what you would think about what’s happening at Penn State and Joe Paterno and the President of the University, and all that.  There’s no accountability, it is so sad.

I can’t wait until an email like this, that comes up almost every single day turns into

Dear Linda,

I thought about my own personal accountability level today and what I think about what’s happening regarding Joe Paterno and Penn State. It reminds me to be personally accountable in my own life so I can teach by example.

I’m glad that what I do provokes people to seek me out to find out what I think on accountability-related matters and whether I think accountability matters. I often start my keynotes with “I am an accountability expert…and what you will find out as a result of this presentation is that you are too!” Everyone wants everyone else to be more personally accountable. That’s nice, but useless.

Today’s events provide a target rich environment for examining what you think about your personal accountability and then apply it to what you hear, watch and experience. If you think “they should” be more personally accountable and “they” are the bankers, the media, your children, the leaders at Penn State, your boss, your spouse, etc. Then it is a life of “shoulding” on people; maybe fun, but not productive. On top of that, it contributes to the stench of “should” that continues to pile up everywhere on this planet. And we are worried about global warming? The source of global warming is all the heat rising from all the “should.”

Every single one of us is capable of accountable, personal action. The numbers are out on how much money is being moved from banks to credit unions in protest. The number of people who dropped NetFlix when their new plan was announced caused a change.  Remember the “new Coke” campaign? Did you protest that? The Penn State events affected defenseless children! So does hunger in America, every single day! Every single one of us is capable of accountable, personal action. Where are we putting our accountable personal action? That depends on what our personal accountability level is.

So here’s my suggestion when you wonder what I think about a lack of accountability when the target is something like the Penn State events or corporate greed. Once you have a fix on “the story” – turn off the news, the commentary, the salacious junk, and look inward. Ask yourself, what do I think about this? What is my personal accountability meter telling me?… and then get back to your Definition of Success and spend your time, energy and effort focused on that target showing yourself and others that you are willing to shovel “should” out of your way to be accountable for your results.; because you are. That’s the straight truth.