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#Leadership : Great Leaders Replace Rules With Accountability…Is it Possible to Replace 90% of All Company Rules? So, What’s your Answer?

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Recently we explored “Why Good Companies Have So Many Bad Rules” and “Why Almost All Rules And Policies Have Bad Outcomes.”  So what is better than rules? How can we replace rules with something that still encourages the best behaviors? In a word: Accountability.

Free- Barbed Wire

Yves Morieux, a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, urges companies to manage growing complexity not by dictating behaviors and over-specifying processes, but rather by creating a culture and context where the ideal behaviors organically occur.

In his TED talk, As Work Gets More Complex, 6 Rules to Simplify, he shares the story of an automotive company that was suddenly forced to deal with the new financial realities that accompany longer warranties. What happens, for example, when an owner brings his car to the dealer to fix a light, and the mechanic must remove the engine to remove the light? If the car has to stay a week in the garage instead of a couple of hours, it causes the warranty budget to skyrocket. In essence, how could the company make cars as easy to repair as possible?

Initially, the automaker responded with a complicated new process, new job titles, new KPIs, and it all had zero impact on the problem. Then the company changed course. This time, they decided to allow their people to use their own judgment and decision-making but to hold their people accountable for those decisions. Specifically, they made their employees feel what game theorists call the “shadow of the future.” According to Morieux:

“They said to the design engineers: Now, in three years, when the new car is launched on the market, you will move to the after sales network, and become in charge of the warranty budget. And if the warranty budget explodes, it will explode in your face.”

With the decision to make the designers responsible for the warranty budget, the designers’ accountability increased. In effect, company leaders inspired what author Justin Bariso calls “self-empathy” or empathy for your future self. The designers were moved to invest extra effort now to promote easy repairability later, since they were the ones who would have to deal with negative consequences.

 

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I can remember my former partners and I trying very hard to increase “cross-selling” among our different divisions. Cross-selling is a common problem in large organizations and notoriously hard to accomplish. At first, we did all the usual stuff: held a “summit” to rally around it, trained each other on all of our solutions, mandated that every sales call include a secondary pitch of a cross-sell solution.

Of course, nothing changed. Then our CEO decided to make us truly accountable for cross-selling: 100% of our annual bonus was going to be tied to the amount of what we sold of other team’s solutions. One hundred percent! Literally I could have doubled the sales of my business unit, but if I didn’t sell anybody else’s solutions I would have gotten no bonus for that year. Suddenly, everyone was cross-selling everything. Problem solved!

Instead of using rules, look for opportunities to build accountability by assigning ownership and consequences to their decision-making.

I described previously how my old CFO and partner tried to control expenses mandating that nobody could buy sticky notes. And no alcohol could be ordered when having a company meal while traveling. It left everyone feeling micro-managed and bitter.

Wouldn’t it have been better to just set a quarterly office supply budget per person (by role), and trust people to buy whatever they needed? Or even better, set a per role budget and create some kind of contest or reward system for those who came in under budget?

What about travel expenses? What if there were no per meal or per day reimbursement rules for the sales team, but instead everyone’s per day meal expenses were posted on a public rack-and-stack board? Imagine the power of peer pressure when you see most people are spending $25 per day on travel meals and you’ve been averaging $50 per day. What if the top 25% lowest spenders were celebrated or given gift cards as thank you? Wouldn’t expenses organically drop while engagement went up?

How can you pair accountability with coaching? Instead of a hard and fast no-beer rule, what if the CFO just flagged someone’s manager when a meal reimbursement seemed out of line? Then a coaching conversation could take place. Maybe the high expense could be justified (e.g., “It was in Manhattan, I had worked all day and into the night skipping lunch and room service was the only option.”) Or maybe not (e.g., “What, four beers at dinner is too many?”), but it would become a conversation that reinforces the expectations around professional behavior and expenses.

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Kevin Kruse is the author of Employee Engagement 2.0 and a top leadership speaker. Join his newsletter at kevinkruse.com.

 

Forbes.com | August 22, 2016 | Kevin Kruse

#Leadership: 6 Words For Stopping Blame & Increasing Accountability… When people Mess up at #Work, they Dodge #Accountability & Shift the #Responsibility to Someone Else. This is Called Blame.

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So when #Employees Blame Each Other, it’s Up to #Leaders to Turn that Blame into #Accountability. How? By using 6 simple words: “Let’s discuss what we CAN control.” Let me explain…

Mannequin Blaming Another

Sometimes when people mess up at work, they dodge accountability and shift the responsibility to someone else. This is called blame.

Far too many of us have experienced an employee missing a deadline and trying to throw a colleague under the bus for their mistake, like:

“I couldn’t get this report done on time because of that jerk Pat in accounting. Pat’s the one that never gives me the data on time, and that’s the reason my report was late. How can I be expected to get the report done on time when Pat is always holding up my data?”

Everyone is going to mess up at some point, but blaming others for mistakes is not a healthy or responsible coping mechanism.

One reason that blame is so unhealthy is that it’s aggressive and attacking. It’s one thing to make an excuse like “the internet crashed,” which points fingers at an inanimate object, but it’s quite another to cast aspersions about another person (or group of people). Those ‘other people’ will learn of the blame, hurt feelings will abound, the blame may be reciprocated, and on it goes. In other words, blame is highly contagious.

So when employees blame each other, it’s up to leaders to turn that blame into accountability. How? By using 6 simple words: “Let’s discuss what we CAN control.” Let me explain…

When someone blames, they’re basically trying to shift attention away from themselves. They’re saying ‘don’t look at me, look at that other person.’ And they’re doing it because they don’t want you to pin them down for whatever mistake they made. It’s similar to a magician distracting the audience while they’re pulling off the real trick somewhere else.

 

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Blamers are typically quite good at derailing conversations and sending them in another direction. Let’s imagine your employee Pat is late with a report. You call Pat into your office and have this brief dialogue:

• Boss: “Pat, the report I needed from you is past deadline.”
• Pat: “Well I can’t possibly control that because Bob in Accounting didn’t give me the numbers I needed to finish the report.”

If Pat says their line with enough intensity, many bosses will get sucked into a conversation about Bob and how Bob didn’t get the numbers, or the Accounting Department, or whatever. And this allows Pat to sidestep any real accountability. Pat may escape a conversation about why they didn’t inform the boss of this problem sooner, or why they didn’t work more effectively with Bob, or why they didn’t submit the other parts of the report, etc. And all of those topics are more actionable than griping about Bob and the Accounting Department.

So instead, let’s redo that conversation using the 6 words I mentioned above: “Let’s discuss what we CAN control.”

• Boss: “Pat, the report I needed from you is past deadline.”
• Pat: “Well I can’t possibly control that because Bob in Accounting didn’t give me the numbers I needed to finish the report.”
• Boss: “OK, I hear that, but I don’t want to talk about Bob. Let’s discuss what we CAN control.
• Pat: “I told you, I don’t control anything. It’s Bob’s fault, not mine.”
• Boss: “Listen, I don’t want to talk about Bob. Let’s discuss what we CAN control. I don’t want to talk about anybody else. I don’t want to talk about anything outside of our control. And right now, there are things we control. We control our reactions, we control certain parts of the reports, etc.”

In this scenario, you’re directing (and redirecting) the conversation back to the central issue: what you CAN control. This approach doesn’t allow the employee to dodge accountability, but neither is it a vicious reprimand. It’s a simple statement that says ‘we’re not changing topics, we’re not discussing other people, we’re only talking about what we CAN control.’

By not allowing the conversation to veer off track into an emotional blame game, the employee will be forced to start taking ownership. It moves the conversation away from fixing blame and onto fixing the issue.

Talking about issues we don’t control is, by definition, an exercise in futility. If we don’t control something, what’s the point of spending the next 30 minutes griping about it? We may as well gripe about the weather; it’s a waste of time and has absolutely no bearing on the weather.

But when we keep redirecting the conversation back to issues we actually DO control, we teach our employees that there is something controllable in every situation. And that, in turn, improves their accountability.

Mark Murphy is the author of Hundred Percenters, Hiring for Attitude, founder ofLeadership IQ, NY Times bestselling author, a sought-after speaker, and he also teaches a weekly series of leadership training webinars.

 

Forbes.com | June 12, 2015 | Mark Murphy