6 Steps to Effective Accountability

by Michael Allen

“Hold them accountable for their performance!” This is an often repeated and seldom understood mantra in today’s workplace. Accountability is a critical aspect of the very best organizations, but there is a significant distinction in the way the best approach it. First and foremost, the very best do not equate accountability with punishment. But if accountability is not just punishment, then what is it? 

Accountability can be viewed as a 6-step process which, if applied correctly, will create an environment where people will willingly receive feedback and see the process as constructive.

1.  Set clear expectations 

Never expect results that you haven’t clearly communicated to your employees. If you expect them to perform in a certain manner, you must first communicate that expectation to them. Keep in mind that almost every employee wants to please the boss and experience both organizational and personal success. They can’t do this if they don’t know what is expected of them.

2.  Compare results to expectations

When possible, quantitative metrics should be in place for every desired result. These metrics should assess the relationship between the actual result and the result that was expected. If the metric shows success then positive feedback is in order. If, however, the metric indicates a gap, or failure, then move to step #3 with intentional curiosity as to why the gap exists.

3.  Account for the “why” behind failure to meet expectations (Don’t assume poor motivation)

I once had a young engineer who was just starting his career ask for the best tip I could give him as a future manager. I told him that he must be curious and a great diagnostician. Human failure is seldom the cause of anything, rather it is almost always the result of something. If you have found a gap between expectations and performance, you should work with the employee to find out what caused it. The vast majority of the time we find out it is something within the work system that caused the gap to occur and not that “they just didn’t care or work hard enough”. Remember that humans work in incredibly complex and dynamic systems and often the consequence of that complexity is human failure. Examine the context (Self; Others; Surroundings; Systems) that the person was in and which aspects of that context impacted performance. Don’t start by assuming that personal motivation is the cause. If you do, you will most likely create defensiveness and fail to find the “real” cause behind the failure. Objectively evaluate all possibilities before finalizing your conclusion. Remember, accountability literally means to “take an account” of what caused the failure.

4.  Find a fix so that the person can be successful in the future

Once you have diagnosed the cause of the failure, put a fix into place to eliminate the cause. This could be training or mentoring if knowledge or skill is missing, new equipment if failure is the result of not having the correct resources for success, contractual changes with your clients if there is incentive to rush or take short cuts, or a multitude of other fixes. Just remember that the fix should affect the cause of the actual gap, not just punish the person who failed. If progressive discipline (punishment) is in order, move to step #5.

5.  Apply negative consequences appropriately

Yes, sometimes punishment (progressive discipline) is in order, but it should only be used when trying to impact motivation or to document repeated failure. Helping the person understand the consequences of continued failure or the impact that failure is having on how he is perceived by you and/or his team members can have a significant impact of motivation. Keep in mind that the primary objective of any progressive discipline program is performance improvement. So whether you are conducting an informal counseling session or discussing a written reprimand, care should be taken to communicate clearly and respectfully, with a focus on determining the real cause of failure. 

6.  Model by holding yourself accountable for your results

Employees are impacted more by what they see their supervisors do than by what their supervisors say should be done. If you want your employees to respond positively to being held accountable then you must be open to feedback from your employees and publicly admit and diagnose your own performance gaps. This shows that accountability is not something that should be feared and it also provides the opportunity to make bosses, employees, and the organization more successful.

While these steps are important, the way you communicate is also critical. Make sure you do so with respect and with the person’s best interest in mind. If you can minimize or eliminate defensiveness, you will be well on the road to helping others improve and get the results that you both want.

You Might Not Always Get What You Want

By Michael Allen

What does it mean to have a "Formal Culture" and an "Informal Culture"?

Have you ever instituted a new policy or procedure into your organization, spent countless hours and dollars trying to drive the initiative throughout the organization, only to see it fall flat?  Organizations large and small face a similar problem -- how to make their organization become what they envision it to be.  

When organizational experts refer to the overall performance of an organization, they often use the word “culture”.  While there is disagreement on the exact definition of organizational culture, most would agree that it includes the values and behaviors that the majority of participants engage in; what most of the people believe and do most of the time.  This is called the “informal culture” as compared to the “formal culture”, or what the leadership wants the culture to be.  It makes no difference if your organization is a large corporation, a small “mom and pop”, a non-profit, or an educational institution, each of you have a formal and informal culture.  One aspect of great organizations is that they close the gap between the two cultures so that “what’s going on  - out there” very much resembles the vision of leadership.  

“Informal Culture is what 

most of the people believe and do 

most of the time.”

You may wonder if these great organizations close this culture gap by hiring the “right people”, or if they do something more intentional to close this gap.  The answer quite simply is both.  Great organizations start with great people, but they also understand and affect the other aspects of their culture.  

The Best Organizations

The best organizations don’t stop with simply creating rules and policies, they do much more to impact the everyday behavior of their employees.  If you’ll refer back to our August 2012 Post on the role of contextual factors in industrial safety incident prevention, the very best bosses and organizations understand that human performance is a result of complex systems.  Organizational factors such as rules, policies, and reward systems are only a portion of the complex system that drives human performance.  The best organizations understand that it is also people, both the individual and intact teams, plus surroundings that drive their overall performance.  If the employee base has failed to implement a new directive from leadership, there could be several reasons affecting this.  It could be that employees don’t understand the new initiative, operational pressures contradict the initiative, they don’t have the equipment necessary to make it happen, or a myriad of other factors.  The very best organizations are those that are able to gather field intelligence detailing actual performance and factors driving the performance, and then institute corrective measures that enable the workforce to align their own performance with the vision of leadership.

So what does that mean for you if you are in an organization with a gap between your formal and informal cultures?  We would first encourage you to perform a cultural analysis to get a better understanding of your informal culture.   With this knowledge you will be able to  understand what contextual factors are driving the performance of your employees.  This information will allow you to initiate corrective measures to close the gap between your formal and informal cultures.  The best organizations don’t make the mistake of simply focusing on changing people, they focus on the entire context to enable those on board to perform to a higher standard.

3 Considerations When Implementing New Policies & Procedures

by Michael Allen

Most organizations have policies and procedures that they expect employees to follow.  One difference between the best organizations and the rest is how those policies and procedures integrate with various components of the organization.  In this blog we will detail three key organizational components that the best take into consideration when evaluating and implementing new policies and procedures.  Let’s begin with an example of the impact of a new policy and its associated procedure in a normal organization.  

Company XYZ was having problems tracking expenses incurred by their employees when they were traveling on company business.  To deal with these issues, they decided to institute a policy that all employees must use a new web-based program to record all expenses, scan receipts, and track payment.  The procedure was straight forward and only required an employee to log into the system using their employee number, input requested information including the vendor name,  total amount spent, and scans of receipts.  When the information was completed the employee simply hit submit and the program took over from there.  The CFO was very excited about this new policy because it was going to make his life and his office staff’s job much easier.  Six month’s later they went back to their paper tracking system because they had continued complaints from employees and they terminated one employee who refused to use the system.  The CFO determined that it was a failure because employee’s were simply too irresponsible to use a new and simple procedure.

So how do the best avoid these types of problems?  Do they simply hire more responsible and competent employees or is there something else?  With the example above in mind, let’s examine how the best organizations look at three key factors to help develop and implement new initiatives, including policies and procedures.

1.  The Individual Employee (Self):


People are very complex and make decisions about things on the basis of a variety of factors which include knowledge and past experience.  People are also typically averse to change because it requires effort and many times is counter to the habits that they have developed over time.  The best organizations want to affect both the knowledge and habits of employees to ensure that they actually comply with new P&P.  In the case of the expense tracker, the best organizations might train employees on the proper use of the software and hardware (computer and scanner) and on the value associated with the new procedure, so that they had the necessary knowledge and skills and were therefore competent and motivated to use the new procedure.  They could also address old habits with email reminders, signage in the workplace, or other means to prompt a break in the old habits associated with the paper tracking system.

2.  Other People in the Organization and How They Affect the Individual Employee (Others):

The performance of individual employees is influenced by the people around them in significant and specific ways.  Two of the common factors exerting this influence are the “help” and “model” provided by others.  When an employee is experiencing difficulty with the execution of a new procedure because of knowledge, skill or resources, getting assistance from a coworker can provide the needed support to create success.  The best organizations create work environments where peer support and assistance is both encouraged and reinforced by management.  Modeling simply means that other people demonstrate that they are accepting change by utilizing and supporting the new policy or procedure.  When an employee sees others using the new procedure to input their expenses without complaint, they are more likely to want to comply with the policy.  If they see other employees, especially the boss, not doing so then they are more likely to see the new policy as a mere suggestion and resist or avoid the new procedure all together.

3.  The “Stuff” Around Us That Impacts Our Performance (Surroundings):

The best policies and procedures are merely good ideas without the surroundings to support their use.  Our employees work in environments that not only include other people, but also physical surroundings such as climate, equipment and the layout of that equipment.  These physical surroundings impact the ease with which people can implement new policies and procedures.  Let’s return to our expense report example.  The operations of the XYZ company are often conducted at remote sites that don’t have  the tools of a modern office.  Employees have laptops but wifi and scanners are only located at central field offices.  Employees rarely spend any significant time in these offices, rather they perform their work out in the field.  The equipment they need to use the new procedure is a resource that they would have to travel great distances, after hours to use.  For these employees, in these surroundings it was just easier to turn in paper receipts and reports hoping somebody else would log it for them.

Managers in the best organizations understand that the knowledge and habits of individual employees, the help and model provided by others, and the surroundings in which employees find themselves are significant factors in determining the successful utilization of organizational policies and procedures.  They understand that without deliberately addressing each of these contextual factors they are likely to fail in the implementation of new initiatives.

Can you work incident free without the use of punishment?

by Michael Allen

I was speaking recently to a group of mid-level safety professionals about redirecting unwanted behaviors and making change within individual and systemic safety systems.  I had one participant who was particularly passionate about his views on changing the behaviors of workers.  According to him, one cannot be expected to change behavior or work incident free without at least threatening the use of punitive actions.  In his own words, “you cannot expect them to work safely if you can’t punish them for not working safely.”  He was also quite vocal in his assertion that it is of little use to determine which contextual factors are driving an unsafe behavior.  Again quoting him, “why do I need to know why they did it unsafely?  If they can’t get it done, find somebody that can.”  

What an Idiot!

I meet managers like this from time-to-time and I’m immediately driven to wonder what it must be like to work for such a person.  How could a person like this have risen in the ranks of his corporate structure?  How could such an idiot...oh,wait.  Am I not making the same mistakes that I now, silently scold him for?  You see, when people do things that we see as evil, stupid, or just plain wrong, there are two incredibly common and powerful principles at play.  The first principle is called the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) and, if allowed to take over one’s thought process, it will make a tyrant out of the most pleasant of us.  The FAE says that when we see people do things that we believe to be undesirable, we attribute it to them as being flawed in some way or to them having bad intentions.  They are stupid, evil, heartless, or just plain incompetent.  If we assume these traits to be the driving factor of an unsafe act and we have organizational power, we will likely move to punish this bad actor for their evil doings.  After all, somebody so (insert evil adjective here) deserves to be punished.  The truth is that most people are good and decent people who just want to do a good job.  

Context Matters

This leads us to our second important principle, Local Rationality.  Local Rationality says that when good and decent people do things that are unsafe or break policies or rules, they usually do it without any ill-intent.  In fact, because of their own personal context, they do it because it makes sense to them to do it that way; hence the term “local rationality”.  As a matter of fact, had you or I been in their situation, given the exact same context, chances are we would have done the same thing.  It isn’t motive that normally needs to be changed, it’s context.  

With this knowledge, let’s look back at the two questions from our Safety Manager.  

1. “How can I be expected to change behavior or work incident free, without threatening to to punish the wrong-doers?” and 
2. “Why do I need to know why they did it unsafely?  If they can’t get it done, find somebody that can.”  

Once we understand that, in general, people don’t knowingly and blatantly do unsafe things or break rules, rather that they do it because of a possibly flawed work system, e.g. improper equipment, pressure from others, lack of training, etc., then we have the ability to calmly have a conversation to determine why they did what they did.  In other words, we determine the context that drove the person to rush, cut corners, use improper tools, etc.  Once we know why they did it, we then have a chance of creating lasting change by changing the contextual factors that led to the unsafe act.  

Your key take-aways: 

1. When you see what you think is a pile of stupidity, be curious as to where it came from.  Otherwise, you may find yourself stepping in it yourself.
2. Maybe it wasn’t stupidity at all.  Maybe it was just the by-product of the context in which they work.  Find a fix together and you may both come out smelling like roses.