The Oz Principle Blog

One memorable consulting project was a manufacturing plant that was struggling to achieve the safety goal of “zero accidents.” We began the meeting with the extended management team with a discussion of the plant’s safety goals. We asked the question: “who is accountable for safety?” In answer, almost every hand in the room went up, but not in an effort to take personal responsibility. Instead, the hands were all raised to point to the finger to one particular manager, Brad, who was sitting quietly in the corner of the room. Brad forced a smile and then sheepishly raised his hand. “I am accountable for safety,” he said. Of course, that was the problem—no one, other than Brad, the Safety Manager, was taking accountability for creating and maintaining a safe work environment. To be successful, the Safety Manager was expected to be everywhere, all the time, ensuring that proper protocols were implemented, procedures were followed, and people were smart about their work; of course, that would be impossible.

Not long ago, Chevron acknowledged that it is impossible to create accountability for safety without getting everyone to make it a part of their job. And that’s exactly why Chevron now gives every employee, not just those at the top, “stop-work” authority. Anyone in the plant—front-line workers, contractors, and even onsite vendors—can take accountability for stopping unsafe work or identifying an unsafe working condition. The impact? Safety has improved dramatically within the Chevron organization.

Creating a safe work environment, like any other enterprise-wide initiative, can only be assured when everyone, in every job, takes ownership and accountability for making the workplace safe. Creating a Culture of Accountability^® for safety was the focus of the work with the manufacturing plant we spoke about in our opening example. Several months after beginning the project, we asked the plant management team the question again, “who’s accountable for safety?” Every hand went up again, but this time as an acknowledgment of their personal accountability for safety. No one was pointing to Brad; they were all pointing to themselves. Daily safety meetings were held each morning to discuss how teams throughout the plant could ensure workplace safety during the day’s planned activities and events and became the nerve-center of the effort. These daily meetings were also used to gather suggestions on what else could be done to ensure safety. The result was a deluge of ideas on how to solve safety issues and problems that had gone unnoticed or ignored for years. Creating a Culture of Accountability for safety requires engaging everyone, in every job, to “Own It^®” as though they were the safety manager and is achieved when you help people take the Steps To Accountability^® and operate Above The Line^® with regard to safety in the work environment.

To learn more about how to create greater accountability for enterprise-wide initiatives such as safety, customer satisfaction, taking costs out of the process, quality, change initiatives, hitting sales objectives, and any other process that optimizes organizational performance, visit our website at www.ozprinciple.com.

Organizations and their people pay a huge price, whether they know it or not, for non-accountability. Unmet milestones, missed opportunities, and undelivered results often stem from a lack of accountability. The price of non-accountability that people and organizations pay in terms of lost revenue, diminished profits, compromised growth, customer dissatisfaction, and unsuccessful value creation is enormous. And that doesn’t include the personal pain inflicted on others when things go wrong.

A lot has been written about BP and the gulf disaster in the past several weeks. Sadly, BP’s apparent lack of accountability for contingency plans if “worse case” accidents occur seems to be blatantly obvious. And look at the consequences—an environmental and wildlife nightmare, destroyed livelihoods up and down the Gulf Coast, and another blow to a beleaguered petroleum industry.  BP’s stock was the bedrock for pension funds in Britain—millions in market value has been lost.

The price of non-accountability is endless—missed results, tarnished reputations, lost opportunities, innocent victims, emotional turmoil, personal tragedy, unfulfilled expectations, waste, destruction, and untold burdens placed upon future generations. Sounds bleak? That’s because it is. Disasters like BP, in all their various forms, occur more often than we care to admit. And every one of them takes an enormous toll on all of us, individually and collectively.

What is the price you’re paying today for a lack of personal accountability? What about the price your organization is paying for a lack of accountability? What’s the cost, quantitative and qualitative? Think about it. In fact, fret about it until you decide to do something about it. The only way we’re going to create a better future for ourselves, our children, and their children is to become more accountable, one person at a time. And that means starting with you. What can you do right now, to become even  more accountable?

Greater accountability always leads to better results across the board for you, your family, your friends and neighbors, your community, your company, your country, and the world in general. Go to our website, www.ozprinciple.com, if you’d like to assess your own level of accountability—compare yourself to the average score of the general population. We all need to get better.

Most people define the various facets of their circumstances as either within or outside their control. In fact, many people feel victimized when they are held accountable for things they perceive as outside their control—i.e., things they cannot change. However, in our experience, people who demonstrate high levels of accountability tend to define more of their circumstantial facets as “within” rather than “outside” their control. Would it surprise you if we said, “There are very few things that are entirely outside your control, especially if you think in terms of “influence” rather than “control?”

The process of taking greater accountability includes transferring the elements of our circumstances from “outside our control” to “within our ability to influence.” This is the very same process whereby companies create competitive advantage and people create opportunity—by beginning to influence the things they previously viewed as entirely outside their control. Nestle Purina illustrates this process nicely. A few years ago, the company began planning the systematic introduction of an easy-to-open dog food can, until preliminary market tests convinced the marketing department to attempt a dramatic acceleration of the new product’s introduction. So the Alpo EZ-Open Can team went to work, continually asking, “What else can we do to get the results we want?” They coordinated the activities at three different plant locations and assembled people from across several functions to accomplish the impossible. They cut market introduction by more than a year, something that had, at first, seemed impossible.

The way people take greater accountability for their circumstances and exert more influence is by asking the question, “What else can I do?” The repeated asking of this question makes it possible for people to formulate new and creative solutions that make progress possible. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.” And stay engaged. When pesky problems persist, don’t give up and stop trying—or wait and see if things will get better on their own. You will never make progress by focusing on what can’t be done. Think differently, as Albert Einstein advised, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” Always solicit and strive to understand perspectives other than your own.

Yes, taking greater accountability to redefine the “uncontrollables” and exercise more influence upon the factors that affect your ability to succeed requires personal stretching and a willingness to see reality. But the benefits are more than worth it. To assess your own level of personal accountability, go to http://www.ozprinciple.com/ and click on “Individual and Team Assessments.”