Why Your Team Keeps Falling Short

Episode #365 Why Your Team Keeps Falling Short

IS THIS THE BEST-KEPT PERFORMANCE SECRET?

We’ve just finished another global open enrolment cohort of our Leadership Beyond the Theory program. Emma and I were running our last live Q&A webinar and I had just finished explaining (probably for the eighth time), that the key to improving team performance, above everything else, is to embed a culture of single-point accountability.

One of the leaders asked me a question that took me a little aback. Paraphrasing, it went something like this: “Marty, I have an MBA… I’ve been on many leadership courses over the years… I’ve read all the top leadership books that we’re told to read. If accountability is so important, then why haven’t I come across it before?“

What a great question. My instinctive answer was, “I don’t really know… except to say that the hard things are often avoided in corporate cultures.”

And make no mistake: strong accountability can only be found on the road less traveled.

So, in the last week or two, I’ve taken a really deep dive into answering this question. If single-point accountability is so powerful, then why isn’t it held up as the truest, most powerful arrow in every leader’s quiver?

I begin by refreshing the concepts of accountability and empowerment; I look at the three key reasons why leaders may instinctively choose not to implement a strong accountability culture; and I give you five practical steps you can take to build a strong, single-point accountability culture – No blame, no excuses!

SIMPLE? OR JUST OVERSIMPLIFIED?

I find it fascinating that no one really focuses on accountability as the key to execution excellence.

I’m a simple man and I like simple solutions but, to be clear, oversimplification really sh!ts me. In my keynotes, I often take the p!ss out of the bumper sticker slogan advice that seems to pass for leadership guidance these days.

One of my favorites is an old Monty Python sketch; a parody of a children’s show called How to Do It. In this parody, the Monty Python troupe breeze through advice on all sorts of complex matters designed to educate the average five-year-old.

They teach the kids how to split the atom, and how to build a box girder bridge.

But my favourite, by far, is how to play the flute. What do you reckon their advice is for that? “Well, kids, you blow in one end, and you move your fingers up and down the outside.”

Now, that is absolutely true. But it’s completely useless.

And even though there’s undoubtedly a body of deep, insightful leadership wisdom out there, 99% of the content we come across is rehashed drivel that resembles Monty Python’s guidance for five-year-olds.

For any leadership tool to be applied effectively, you’ve got to understand the principles profoundly. You need to be aware of the subtleties and nuances of your context, so that you can apply a set of simple techniques.

When I think about the No Bullsh!t Leadership framework — and, if you’ve read the book or been through Leadership Beyond the Theory, you’ll be very familiar with this – there are just a few key non-negotiable elements that drive performance:

• The focus on value takes primacy over everything else. If you’re not working on the right things, you’ve got very little chance of achieving extraordinary results. Before you start to work on the efficiency of your team, you’ve got to make sure the effort is effective. Your resources have to be surgically applied to high-value work, and all extraneous low-value activity just has to be eliminated.
  As I like to say, lose the weight first then buy the new suit.
• Once you’re confident that you’re working on the right things, you’ve got to be able to efficiently capture that value, and single-point accountability is the key to execution excellence. But if you can’t let go of control and be disciplined enough to work at the right level, you’ll never be able to truly implement single-point accountability: you’ll be unintentionally sharing your people’s accountability.
• And if you aren’t entirely comfortable in conflict, you’ll never be able to have the conversations that challenge your people and make it crystal clear what you expect of them.

This is an incredibly simple principle but it’s extraordinarily difficult to instill this in a business that has multiple layers of leaders.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND EMPOWERMENT

I’m going to quickly recap the principles of single-point accountability so that you’re really clear on why I think it’s such a powerful performance lever. I covered this in more detail in one of our earliest podcasts, Ep.19: Execution for Results.

Shared accountability is no accountability. The minute you spread accountability across more than one person, you’re inevitably going to get gaps and overlaps: it’s absolutely unavoidable. This is why you need one head to pat and one ass to kick… and they both have to belong to the same person.

Single-point accountability brings a completely different energy. People have to behave like adults; they can’t just shirk their responsibilities and say “I hope someone else fixes it”. They have to own it. And when any issues arise, they’re in your office straight away, “I don’t know what’s going on, but this is putting my deliverable at risk. Please help me sort out this problem.”

They are proactive… they are driven… and they are high-energy… all because they know that there’s no one else coming to the rescue. It’s their problem to solve.

And with this comes extreme clarity of expectations. You’re able to get buy-in right at the start, so that you both agree on what’s going to be delivered.

This might sound a little bit harsh, so we have to realise that the flip side of accountability is empowerment. They are two sides of the same coin and you can’t have one without the other. Accountability without empowerment is just cruelty.

When we talk about empowerment, you may think that empowerment is simply the old adage of hiring good people and getting out of their way. But it’s actually quite a bit more than this. To empower people properly:

• You have to give them extreme clarity;
• They have to have the autonomy to make decisions and take actions that are relevant to getting the outcome that they’re accountable for;
• You have to be available to support them and make sure that they know that there’s no problem if they come in and say, “I need to run something past you“;
• You have to provide air cover for them so they’re protected from the vagaries of the people above you;
• They’ve got to have realistic resourcing and agreed deadlines;
• And, more than anything else, you have to preserve their decision rights. They have to be able to make decisions without you interfering or intervening.

If you don’t have clear decision rights, it all just falls apart. This is why many organisations choose to adopt a culture of decision-making by consensus, and management by committee. It’s the precursor to mediocrity.

This gives us some clues as to why the power of accountability and execution performance is such a well-kept secret.

WHY DOESN’T SINGLE-POINT ACCOUNTABILITY GET MORE FOCUS?

If single point accountability is so important, why doesn’t it dominate academic research? Why isn’t this a core element of every MBA program? Why isn’t it central to everything we are taught as leaders? And why don’t more leaders embrace it?

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and I think it comes down to three basic issues.

1. Single-point accountability is hard.

To make it work properly, you have to be able to let go of critical tasks and not interfere with the people who are accountable for delivering them. That means not second-guessing or overriding their decisions.

You have to get over that initial fear that your people won’t like you, or that they’ll become demotivated as you demand more from them.

You have to have many difficult conversations that set, maintain, and reinforce your expectations for individual performance.

And, a really tough but vital part of this is that you have to be prepared to replace people who persistently choose not to deliver on their accountabilities.

2. Single-point accountability is inconsistent with the virtuous leader narrative.

In the developed world, we’ve bought into the people over profits narrative. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating for hard-nosed commercial outcomes at the expense of everything else.

I’m a huge believer in doing the best thing for all your stakeholders. This includes your people, of course. But it also includes your customers, your shareholders, your suppliers, the communities you operate within.

This requires leaders to balance these competing interests. But we tend to focus on the most immediate stakeholder, our employees, and we bend over backwards to please them. We try to satisfy their needs above other stakeholders’ needs.

We try to make every individual feel valued and needed and, in doing so, we overemphasise a few things:

• People’s right to be heard;
• The need to keep everyone in alignment; and
• The desire for everyone to be happy.

In the world of single-point accountability, everyone gets their say but not everyone gets their way; and leaders are really comfortable in the knowledge that not everyone is going to be happy about that.

3. Single-point accountability isn’t always politically correct.

I mean this purely in the business context of course. We instinctively know that some conversations are okay to have in a group setting and others aren’t.

We don’t want to embarrass anyone, or make them look bad in public, so we remain silent. Because of this, we turn a blind eye to glaring mistakes, lack of analytical rigor, and even gross stupidity… because no one wants to risk offending anyone else.

I’m not suggesting for a minute that you should ever belittle or criticise someone in a public forum: that’s not on either. What I am saying is that you have to be comfortable enough to challenge their perspectives, respectfully and thoughtfully.

The politically correct approach is much more insidious. People observe the pantomime of business politeness, they nod and smile in the meeting. But, once they leave the room, they spend their time bitching and moaning around the water cooler. This is unhealthy, counterproductive, and toxic.

There’s also an element of quid pro quo in this. If I don’t criticise you, then you won’t criticise me. It’s an unwritten rule of mutual tolerance, and it leads to awful decisions and substandard performance.

It’s even worse when CEOs and executives aren’t challenged. Everyone tells them how smart and wonderful they are, and they start to believe their own bullsh!t. This is just The Emperor’s New Clothes. Even though everyone’s telling you how beautiful your new outfit looks, you still know deep down that you are stark naked.

FIVE TIPS FOR IMPLEMENTING SINGLE-POINT ACCOUNTABILITY

We’ve looked at why leaders avoid single-point accountability. Now, let’s talk about you.

Here’s the choice you face: how your team performs is almost entirely dependent upon how willing you are to hold each individual to account. It may sound tough, but it’s actually liberating for you and your people.

The right people love the empowerment that a no blame, no excuses culture brings; they love the feeling of achievement; they love being on a winning team… and their self-esteem skyrockets.

There’s nothing like the energy of a high-performing team, where every person is driven to succeed. This starts when you make the choice as a leader to stretch your people, and demand more from them.

Here are five practical tips for shifting to a single point accountability culture.

1. Start with empowerment.

If people don’t feel as though they’re empowered to achieve outcomes, then single-point accountability will be counterproductive. It will generate fear, not performance.

The place to start is to give your people more autonomy and control and, to do this effectively, you have to be expert at working at your own level.

You’ve got to know how to step back and let people make their own decisions (within appropriate guardrails, of course). They have to feel as though they have influence over the outcomes they’re being asked to deliver.

Once they sense that the outcomes are within their control, it’s so much easier for them to accept the accountability that comes with delivery.

Empowerment first. Accountability second.

If you say it fast enough, it sounds easy. But building a culture where people feel enabled and empowered is extremely difficult. It has to be built on trust and you may be starting behind the eight ball already.

My message to you is… don’t give up; this is your path to victory.

2. Be disciplined in task allocation.

Every task has to have one and only one name next to it. Your job is to root out shared accountabilities and fix them.

I can’t count the number of times in a week I would ask the question, “Who’s accountable for this?” And if I didn’t get a single name fired back immediately, I knew there was a problem: a lack of clarity; poor role definition; inefficiency.

Of course, organisations are complex, and little is achieved these days by a single person or team in isolation. Almost everything requires collaboration across the silos.

In Leadership Beyond the Theory, we go into very specific detail about how to set a single point of accountability for cross-team deliverables, to ensure that the accountable person is supported and, at the same time, make sure they get sufficient expert input to optimise the outcomes.

3. Collaboration is subordinate to single-point accountability.

For the last decade or more, collaboration has been touted as the key ingredient to better company performance. It’s true that collaboration is essential for achieving great outcomes (and it’s one reason why working together in teams is going to be superior to working in isolation in almost every case).

Still, collaboration has to be subordinate to accountability.

If you push collaboration, and then try to impose stronger accountabilities later on, I guarantee you will fail.

It’s much more effective to come from the other direction. Once you’ve got a rhythm of single-point accountability, it’s so much easier to superimpose better collaboration processes on top of that strong foundation.

If you want to go a little deeper on this, have a listen to Ep.53: Don’t Overdo Collaboration.

4. Break the facade of ‘niceness’.

You’ve got to start by being prepared to call out the things that don’t make sense; the things that are obviously driven by self-interest; and the things that come from people blindly following conventional wisdom or the path of least resistance.

We are conditioned to be nice to people, but this isn’t good for them or for us. Instead, we need to be kind to people. Being kind is very different from being nice.

If you are kind to your people, you care about them enough to tell them the truth. You won’t let them labour under false assumptions. And you definitely won’t hesitate to risk your own comfort and security in order to get the best results for the business.

So, yes, you need to always be polite, courteous, and respectful… but don’t be afraid to challenge. A culture of robust challenge and debate is one of the surest indicators of high performance.

5. Make sure the leaders below you care as much about performance as you do.

If I had my time in corporate again, I would go 10 times harder on this one. This is the one thing that’s really hard to replicate through the line.

I speak about the dilution effect from time to time, and we understand how it works. Every message, every direction, every objective becomes a little less clear and a little less compelling as it goes down through the organisational layers.

This is especially the case when we talk about driving a culture of single-point accountability. Just think about the three reasons I identified as to why most leaders tend to avoid the challenge of implementing a single-point accountability culture:

a) It’s hard work;

b) It’s inconsistent with the virtuous leader narrative; and

c) It isn’t politically correct.

You can understand why many leaders shy away from it. But they won’t tell you that they aren’t doing it, for precisely the same three reasons. They’ll nod and they’ll smile… and then they’ll go away and do whatever the hell they were going to do anyway.

This is why you have to be diligent in rooting out the pretenders, and remain firm in your expectation that every leader throughout the line buys into this journey.

THE BIGGEST PERFORMANCE LEVER YOU HAVE

In my mind, creating a strong accountability culture is the number one performance improvement lever that you can pull, without a shadow of a doubt.

There’s no substitute for putting together a critical mass of leaders below you who are prepared to do this hard work to build a true no blame, no excuses culture.

But there are lots of ways to get this wrong, particularly if you are living in a long-standing culture of all care, no responsibility – and I know that many of you are.

So, to every leader who wonders why accountability isn’t taught in MBAs, here’s the bottom line: it’s tough. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s the biggest performance lever you will ever pull.

And now, you know how to do it.