The Oz Principle Blog

Recently, we facilitated a group of thirty middle managers from a large consumer products company who came together to discuss the organization’s key results. The division president began the meeting with a presentation on the company’s four major goals, which dealt with revenue, profitability, customer satisfaction, and new product development. An hour into the meeting, three things became very apparent: 1) these middle managers were not accustomed to discussing the organization’s key results, 2) they rarely used the four key results as a framework for prioritizing their daily work, and 3) there was a genuine hunger manifest among the managers for more conversation about how their jobs, responsibilities, teams, projects, and priorities could be better aligned with the organization’s key results.

Would you be surprised if we told you that the foregoing represents a fairly common experience for most organizations? Too many leaders in today’s organizations fail to clearly define, fully disseminate, and adequately discuss the top three or four key results that will ensure their organization’s sustainability. Has your organization defined the key results it must deliver to ensure its sustainability? Do the people in your organization clearly understand these key results? If not, begin changing things today. Your organization’s key results should be meaningful, measureable, and memorable for everyone in the organization. By meaningful, we mean results that can ensure the organization’s sustainability and be readily tied to every employee’s individual role and responsibilities. By measureable, we mean results that can be effectively quantified and frequently checked. By memorable, we mean results that can be easily remembered and regularly used to guide daily actions.

When leaders neglect to define their organization’s key results in a meaningful, measureable, and memorable way for everyone in the organization, accountability suffers—because people don’t have the benefit of knowing exactly what they are accountable to deliver. People who have a crystal clear understanding of their organization’s key results consistently demonstrate higher levels of accountability for achieving those results than do people who have a less clear understanding of their organization’s key results. In our experience, people in organizations hunger for more clarity around key results, because they want to be successful—and they want to take greater accountability for what matters most to their organizations. To learn more about how to create a Culture of Accountability® that focuses on achieving key results, go to www.ozprinciple.com.

Unmet expectations are a reality of life—whether they surprise you because you failed to thoroughly inves­tigate a situation, shock you because someone made a huge mistake, or ruin your chances of success despite everyone’s best efforts to deliver results. So, why is it that even the most able and willing people can sometimes fall short of expectations? How is it that organizations with talented people who are anxious to succeed and want to be a part of an enterprise that makes a difference in the world, sometimes fail to deliver results? In our experience, when willing and able people fall short of expectations, it’s usually because they lack accountability or are working in a culture (“the way we do things around here”) that hinders their chances of succeeding.

A perfect example of this occurred when we were building a family cabin in the mountains. We expected the general contractor to finish a large room with pine tongue-and-groove wall panels to match the other rooms in the cabin. It seemed like a simple task, yet when we stopped by to inspect the work, we discovered that the installers were placing the right material rough side out. Not only would the walls’ rough texture expose splinters to the unwary child’s (or adult’s) hand, they didn’t match the cabin’s other interior walls. When we asked the lead installer why he’d chosen to place the rough side out, he told us that most of his customers preferred it that way. After all, these were the mountains. The thought of finishing the room with a surface similar to every other wall in the house had not even occurred to him. When we talked to the general contractor about the problem, he seemed quite surprised and confused that his lead installer made such a mistake. This installer was a superb carpenter and a real pro (Able), he was work­ing long days to get the job done (Willing), and he had done a great job mak­ing the joints tight and the surface well-patterned. But it was wrong.

Closer inspection revealed that the contractor was not following up as much as he should have, and the installer was making decisions with­out checking in with the contractor, because the contractor was often hard to reach. Appar­ently, the subcontractors had learned to compensate for their lack of access to the general con­tractor by making their own decisions based on what they thought would look best. And, of course, each subcontractor passed along information about “how things work around here” to new subcontractors on the job, transferring the general contractor’s organizational culture and its likelihood for mistakes such as rough side out. Accountability and Culture were the explanations for why expectations went unmet in this case. The cost? Three additional days of wall sanding to match the rest of the cabin, along with the time and hassle on our part to clean up the mess that additional sanding created throughout the rest of the cabin. The final outcome? Our unmet expectations were addressed and the problem led to a better accountability process on the part of the general contractor and a change in his organization’s culture to improve ongoing contractor-subcontractor-customer communications.

Adding Accountability and Culture to Willing and Able pro­vides a complete model for managing unmet expectations and provides guidance to those who want to hold others accountable in a positive, principled way. These four variables—Motivation (Willing), Training (Able), Accountability, and Culture—are fundamental to what we call the Accountability Conversation®, a process that allows you to deal effectively with people who are falling short on expectations, regardless of whether or not they report to you. To learn more about managing unmet expectations and creating the kind of accountability that produces ever-improving results, go to www.ozprinciple.com.

Where do you fall on the Accountability Style continuum? Most of us lean to one extreme or the other, making the classic mistakes of either forcing things to happen (Coerce & Compel) or taking too little action to follow up (Wait & See). Consider the strengths and weakness of each extreme:

“Coerce & Compel” strengths are: Takes action and steps in when things go wrong, exercises persistence in follow-up, doesn’t give up easily, ensures frequent and regular reporting, communicates high expectations, and stays focused on the task at hand. Weakness associated with this extreme include: Intimidates others, overreacts to bad news, tends to force things to happen, willingly sacrifices relationships, resists a people-oriented approach, and lacks sufficient trust in others.

“Wait & See” strengths are: Strongly supports people, emphasizes giving people freedom to succeed or fail, places a lot of trust in others, steps in with great caution, builds strong loyalty and support in others, and thoroughly thinks through intervention before acting. The weaknesses of this extreme are: Avoids a proactive approach, strikes people as disengaged, makes false assumptions that things are happening, does not follow up often enough, tends to err on the side of not intervening, and sets low expectations.

Now consider the following two examples. First, a successful entrepreneur, we’ll refer to him as “John,” demonstrated all the qualities of the Wait & See style: a strong people orientation, lots of trust, and a preference to allow freedom, plus a hesitancy to step in too quickly. However, people in the organization did not think John was holding his international marketing VP, “Robert,” accountable. People in the organization believed Robert was independent, self-interested, difficult to work with, and aloof. They saw John as letting Robert run wild. Eventually, Rob­ert was allowed to move his international marketing team to Brazil, where he maintained his independent, self-interested approach to getting things done while John continued to let things happen. It later came to light that Robert was using company resources to conduct third-party manufacturing and marketing with his buddies in Brazil for their own personal gain. Of course, John felt personally violated. The trust he’d placed in Robert had been destroyed.

The second example is also an entrepreneur, we’ll call her “Joan,” who launched a start-up in the software development industry. Joan built her success on a belief that she was usually the smartest, most committed member of the team, engaging in whatever work needed doing. She never hesitated to ignore the chain of command, marching into anyone’s office at anytime to make sure projects were on schedule and problems were being solved. She was famous for questioning anyone on any topic in an effort to get results. That approach seemed to work flawlessly, until, in the wake of a merger, she inherited a larger organization from a successful but slower-moving company. Ever forceful and impatient, Joan acted precipitously to move people out of the way and force the organization into a faster operational mode. People in the acquired organization saw Joan as a “Tornado” that always left a trail of dead or mangled bodies in its wake. Not surprisingly, Joan quickly replaced the old culture with an environment of fear, where people hesitated to try anything new. With all decision-making firmly under her control, people’s motivation and loyalty sank to an all-time low. The company made some progress toward its objectives, but only at a snail’s pace.

Both entrepreneurs, each with a different style reflecting two extremes on the continuum, were hindered by style weaknesses that affected their abilities to hold others accountable. Acknowledging and understanding your Accountability Style can help place you at a more optimal point on the continuum. We call this point the “Positive, Principled Way” and consider it to be a per­fect blend of strengths from both accountability styles, which, of course, mitigates the weaknesses of each extreme. Visit our Web site at http://www.ozprinciple.com to assess your current Accountability Style more accurately.