There are three kinds of employees. Saints are always
accountable. Sinners aren't. Most employees are
save-ables. Sometimes save-ables make good choices;
sometimes they don't. They'll consistently perform and do the right
things, but only under certain conditions. To create these
"conditions of accountability," you've got to understand and
address three hardwired human frailties.
1. Save-ables can't read minds. So when leaders
fail to consistently communicate clear and credible expectations
for performance, they've effectively equipped their save-ables with
excuses like these for not doing what's needed:
- "We do a lot of 'rock hunting.' My boss sends me to look for a
rock. When I come back, he says, 'No, that's not the rock I was
looking for.' So I go looking for another rock, hoping I get
luckier next time."
- "My leader wants us to get excited and engaged around our new
'strategic direction.' But it's just one of eight things in the
past year he's asked us to get excited and engaged about."
- "My boss always says 'Do the right thing," and we all believe
in it. Then we hit a situation where we need an expensive
replacement for a customer, but I need three layers of approval,
one of whom is out for two weeks. The field is yelling at me:
'We're going to lose this client!' Telling me to 'just do the right
thing' doesn't provide real guidance."
2. Save-ables are selfishor at least
self-interested. But that doesn't mean that they're bad
people. As the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, wrote in The
Wealth of Nations, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher,
the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their
regard to their own self-interest." The same principle applies to
your save-ables: They won't do the right things because they're
benevolent, but rather "in regard to their own self-interest."
Save-ables make incredulous excuses when what's expected and what's
incented are perceived to be out of whack. For example:
- "They reward and recognize average performers the same way they
reward high performers. So what's the point of killing myself and
taking time away from my family to be a high performer?"
- "The people who create the most drama get the most attention.
So now I know what to do if I want my boss to focus on me."
- "We say we care about customer service, but all they measure
and pay us for is productivity. So the people who are actually dumb
enough to really care about the customers are penalized for it."
To take away these excuses leaders must know how to create
compelling consequences - aligned with the performance and behavior
they want to see. As Steve Kerr famously put it, "It's folly to
reward A while hoping for B," because whatever leaders reward and
tolerate, their save-ables are going to do more of it.
3. Save-ables are prone to self-deception. But
it's not their fault. Really. Most humans simply are not hardwired
for honest self-assessment because it was not an evolutionary tool
helpful for our survival as a species. The quick-triggered
defensiveness that enabled our distant ancestors to fend off saber
tooth tigers predisposes us to excuse making.
And a little self-deception can go a long way toward helping
save-ables rationalize why they deserve credit for successes - or
merely for good intentions - whereas mistakes and failures are not
their fault. A dose of delusion also comes in handy when the goal
is to produce an alibi ("Don't look at me. I didn't know anything
about it."), justify a misstep ("I had no choice."), or minimize a
broken commitment ("It's only two days late.") or its outcome
("They were a pain-in-the-butt client anyway. Good riddance to
them.").
To take away those excuses, and others like them, it's essential to
lead conversations grounded in empirical reality. The big insight
here is that when save-ables see their leaders indulging in magical
thinking, it licenses them to do the same, which leads to excuses
like these:
- "We say we want openness and honesty. But that's just one of
the lies we tell ourselves. I've seen them shoot too many
messengers of bad news to believe it."
- "Apparently, there was a problem with my performance, but I was
the last one in the department to learn about it. No one gave me
the feedback until my year-end review."
- "They say they want more innovation. But if I come up with a
smarter way of doing things, I'll need to get seven people to
approve it first. I don't have that much energy."
- "Everyone secretly knows this initiative is going to fail. But
no one is willing to say it out loud."
- "As a group, we claim credit for our successes but blame our
failures on external factors."
In summary, the way to save the save-ables is to take away their
excuses. When leaders consistently and effectively create the three
conditions of accountability by
- communicating clear and credible expectations
- creating compelling consequences
- leading conversations grounded in empirical reality
their save-ables consistently deliver what's needed. In fact, they
often become nearly indistinguishable from the saints. And this
makes the sinners very conspicuous and therefore easy to spot and
"cast out."
But creating the three conditions of accountability isn't easy.
Most leaders need a lot of focused training and development before
they get good at it. Otherwise, they tend to make excuses why they
can't "take away excuses."
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This article is based on information from Grimshaw's and Gregg
Baron's book, Leadership Without Excuses: How to Create
Accountability and High Performance (Instead of Just Talking About
It), published by McGraw Hill.
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Jeff Grimshaw is a partner in the firm
MGStrategy and an expert in generating accountability and
alignment. Over the last two decades he's helped hundreds of
leaders apply powerful insights from behavioral economics to
improve performance and deliver impressive results. Clients include
State Farm Insurance, Kaiser Permanente, Yale University,
McDonald's, PetroVietnam, Goldman Sachs, Con Edison, Standard &
Poor's, KPMG, and dozens of other Fortune 1000 firms. He has
published articles in Strategy and Leadership, Strategic
Communication Management, and other journals. For more information,
visit www.mgstrat.com .