We are working our way through the 4 critical keys to successful leadership. We started with acknowledging all of your employees no matter what. We then proceeded to discuss the importance of listening and engaging and now… we have to hold our teams accountable.
An organization without accountability is an organization in chaos. Accountability has to exist at all levels of an organization—from the Chairman of the Board to the direct laborer on the front lines. Let’s first define what accountability is and then we can discuss why it’s one of our 4 keys to leadership.
Accountability as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary is: “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions.” Being a leader means you are obligated and have to be willing to accept responsibility. In other words you have to address issues within your team (and yourself) for the sake of your team and organization. What type of issues do you have to hold your team accountable for and what happens if you don’t?
You have to hold your team accountable for their behavior. This can come in many shapes and sizes but to give you some examples—your team has to operate with respect towards each other and you. Respecting each other means honoring deadlines, being on time to meetings, acting professional towards each other at all times, and being committed to your and the teams goals and objectives.
If this level of professionalism and respect is not present it is your obligation to address it. If you allow it to happen you are intentionally creating a negative environment for the rest of your team. Your team is looking to you to be a leader and create an environment conducive to positive morale, innovation, cohesiveness, and an overall enjoyable place to work. If the environment is poor because of lack of accountability your department or organization will self destruct.
If you are unable to hold your team accountable to behave properly and produce their share of work, you will impact other team member’s morale which in turn impacts staff turnover, which then leads to reduced productivity, resulting in higher costs and lower profit margins. And before you know it, either you’re fired or you go out of business.
I’m sure a lot of you know how to hold employees accountable and you just needed a reminder to do so. For others that are wondering how do you hold employees accountable—here are some principles to follow.
First, address the concerns immediately. A number of things happen when you address the issue as quickly as possible. For starters you set the tone that this type of behavior is unacceptable. Not only does the employee who needs correction realize this but so do your other team members. This lets them know that you will not accept negative behavior and you support the employees who do act accordingly. The other side of addressing concerns immediately is that it makes the process easier for you. By addressing the issue immediately, there is less to address and less to correct. If you wait until three or four issues have taken place before addressing them, the bucket of bad things is bigger and there is considerably more that you will have to work your way through.
Second, never be upset and always be respectful. Why would you as a leader attempt to correct inappropriate behavior with inappropriate behavior? When holding an employee accountable your objective is to correct the misbehavior—whatever it may be; not turning in a report, abusing absences, or being verbally disrespectful to you or another employee. You will be successful in correcting their behavior only if the employee sincerely feels you are trying to help them by identifying their inappropriate behavior and showing them how to correct it, because you ultimately want them to be successful. There is never a reason to get upset because if they receive your correction it becomes a joyous occasion and you move on. If they are not responding to your correction you politely let them know what the consequences are if they don’t adjust and that it will ultimately lead to termination.
Third, follow through on your corrective action plan. This means two things. First, if the employee corrects their behavior you agree to not refer to this incident ever again. You assure them that you want nothing more than for this to never happen again and if doesn’t, this will truly be behind you both. Second, if the employee continues to misbehave, you have to follow through on the next step of the corrective plan. Depending on the severity, it may be a written warning, a final written warning, or termination. If you don’t, you will automatically lose credibility with that employee and your team as a leader. They will see you as weak and ineffective.
To sum up the importance of holding your team accountable I’m going to refer to Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. Jim has identified that the second step good organizations must take to become great organizations is to identify First Who…Then What. In other words, hold the poor performers accountable.
Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.
By holding your team accountable you meet your obligation as a leader and ensure that you not only have the right people on the bus, but that you also have them in the right seat. The reality is that no system or process will ever help you be successful as long as you don’t have the right people with the right attitudes on your team, because ultimtely, it's the people who make you successful!
Last article discussed the importance of acknowledging all of your employees no matter what. In this article we are moving to listening and engaging with your employees. All four keys are integrated in the sense that you must do all four to be a successful leader, but they’re also integrated in the sense that when you do one, it causes you to have to do the next.
What I have found is that when leaders begin to acknowledge their employees and they are sincere about wanting to say hello or ask how they are doing, employees will begin to feel more comfortable around their leadership which leads them to open up when engaged. Some of you right about now are saying I don’t have time to say hello to everyone, yet alone find myself embarking on a conversation. My advice to you is that you can’t afford to not take the time.
The only way you, your department, or the organization will be successful is through open lines of communication. You as a leader have to know exactly what the pulse of the team is and there is only one way to get that pulse – talking to them. More specifically, by listening and engaging.
Let’s take a look at how a lot of managers listen (notice I didn’t say leader). The manager is walking into her office and sees an employee walk by so she musters up the ability to say hello. The employee responds back and the manger can tell they’re distant as if something was wrong. The manger feels compelled to ask if everything is okay hoping it’s something very simple that she can quickly handle and move on with her busy schedule. Unfortunately the employee begins to talk about their workload, which leads into processes and systems. She decides at this moment that her day is too busy and she begins to focus on her tasks and how this conversation is taking her away from them. She seeks the first opportunity to say she understands and that she’ll work on it when she has the time.
The employee leaves her office dejected because he felt the manager never truly understood what he was trying to tell her. As a result, he becomes demoralized, begins to disengage, and ultimately his productivity plummets until he either leaves, or the manger fires him. It’s very unfortunate what Stephen Covey points out in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
Why would you as a leader want to take this risk? Why as a leader would you not put your employees ahead of all tasks, projects, or anything else that’s not a true emergency? Your objective is to understand what is happening and if the organization is going in the right direction. Having a true understanding of what your employees are encountering can only happen by listening to them and engaging with them on the potential solutions.
The opposite from the scenario above would be to ask the employee to come into your office and wholeheartedly listen and engage to what the employee has to say. Since employees typically know you are busy, try to comfort them for taking up your time by letting them know there is nothing more important than learning what is on their mind. You can even designate a block of time and communicate to them that if for any reason you are still not in full understanding at the end of the agreed upon time you will schedule a meeting with no distractions to ensure their voice is heard. By wanting to understand what is on their mind will give you opportunity to build a stronger team than you could ever imagine. In Steven Covey’s book that I mentioned earlier he states, “If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” which happens to be Habit #5.
By simply listening and engaging you will have the opportunity to learn about broken processes, inefficiencies, new innovative ideas, and many more benefits. By listening and engaging you may learn of issues your team is struggling with that you may not be able to help with, but the fact that you take the time to listen will create a caring environment that your team as well as employees outside of your area of responsibility will want to be a part of. Your department or organization will be engaged allowing for consistent process improvements which lead to increased employee morale, increased productivity, increased profits, and ultimately, a successful leader.
As promised, the four keys to successful leadership are very simple. Starting with the first key—acknowledge all of your employees no matter what! Take a moment and think back on ALL of your interactions with your staff. Has there been a time where you knew one of your employees has walked past you in the hallway, or entered the same room you were in, and you didn’t acknowledge them? Has that ever happened to you with your boss? How did you feel? Did you enjoy the moment of not being acknowledged?
The simple fact is all of us appreciate being acknowledged. It’s an internal mechanism that is consistently monitoring the environment to determine if we provide value. When someone acknowledges us we tend to feel valued, cared for, and ultimately that we provide value. When the opposite occurs we tend to feel unappreciated and when we experience this feeling it usually stays with us throughout the day. For the strong individuals, we have the ability to justify why our boss did not acknowledge us so we can feel better about the situation—and we typically do. We understand that our boss can’t always say hello, or ask how we’re doing. And we go about our day.
But how would we feel whether confident or not in who we are if our boss acknowledged us each and every time? Not by chance, but deliberately went out of their way to say hello and possibly even thank you. What would it be like if our boss broke away from a conversation with their boss, or an investor, or even just a colleague to look you in the eye, shake your hand, and say thank you? You have to admit, it would feel great!
The bottom line is that each and every one of us wants to be cared for at work. We desire to be valued and know that we mean something to our department or organization. We want to know that our boss knows who we are and there is nothing more important than us—his team members in the overall objective of getting things done.
I assure you, if you commit to acknowledging each and every one of your employee every time you come into contact with them, even with a simple hello—you will make tremendous strides in your success. Your team will respond differently to you. They will become more productive. Employee morale will increase. The entire environment will change simply because you take the time to let them know they exist and that you appreciate them. They will become motivated to support you and follow you in whatever you do or wherever you go…and isn’t that what leadership is? In his book The Leadership Wisdom of Solomon Pat Williams quotes John Baldoni, a leadership consultant who said, “Motivation is purely and simply a leadership behavior. It stems from wanting to do what is right for people as well as for the organization.” So my final question to leave you with is—is acknowledging each of your employees each time you see them not the right thing to do?
We are about to embark on a new journey. I will be starting a new 4 part series on the 4 must be followed principles IF you want to be a successful leader. These principles are extremely basic yet very few leaders apply all 4 and do them consistently. These critical principles can be applied by anyone with a little bit of effort. More importantly, these 4 principles are the only principles you will ever need to implement to be a successful leader. Not 7 principles, not 18, not 29, just 4 key principles to leadership. I guarantee it! I also look forward to starting dialogue with anyone who feels that other key principles apply that do not fall within these four. I'm excited and I hope you are too! Make sure you bookmark this site and visit often to make sure you don't miss any of our discussion over the coming weeks. For convenience, you can also sign up for email updates which will be sent to you automatically with each new article.
Being a leader means you will be held accountable to a higher standard. This makes your world a little more complicated, but unfortunately that’s the price of leadership. To some of you, being held to a higher standard may come easy to you, for others, it may be a challenge. The objective is to realize that you will be held to a higher standard and rightfully so.
This means that everyone around you—your employees, vendors, bosses, potential candidates, etc. are evaluating your every move. This is normal and understandable. Why shouldn’t others evaluate you? If you happen to be on the forefront of your department or organization than that’s the responsibility you take on. The point being, you have to be aware that this takes place so you understand that you have to hold yourself to a higher standard first. By holding yourself accountable to the leadership principles that you believe in and know are critical to being a successful leader, then when others evaluate you, there is a higher probability that you are doing right and your critics will be few.
The other side is that as a leader, you know you live in a world of higher standards so you cannot be soft skinned. There will be those people who will attempt to find holes and they will point them out whether right or wrong. It will happen and it is never enjoyable. However, how you respond to these types of criticisms will have a bigger determining factor on what type of a leader you are versus the mistakes you make. John Maxwell in his book Today Matters quoted Walt Emerson who said, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
Reality is that as leaders we are not perfect. We have to learn and make mistakes like everyone else. We also have to have the ability to admit when we make mistakes and do our best to apologize, learn from them, and move forward. Because the bottom line is—in one way or another, you were put in the position of leadership. So accept your role and lead to a higher standard!
