What you allow, is what will continue.
—Unknown
There are many misconceptions about the term “accountability” in the corporate world. As I mentioned before, most employees define it in corrective or disciplinary terms, when it is not. The term has a much broader and useful meaning than the narrow definition many equate with it.
And as I stated earlier, accountability is about consequences, consequences for poor performance or behavior as well as for good performance or desired behaviors.
So for me, the question was whether or not Charles experienced the consequences of his behavior?
Now that Charles and I have agreed on a set of clear expectations and I’ve been providing him regular, honest, and constructive feedback, what do I do if he continues to fall back into his old patterns of nonperformance? His previous manager avoided dealing with Charles’s problems until they impacted other employees’ performance and could not be avoided. When forced to confront Charles, he threatened disciplinary action or shifted Charles’s responsibilities so he would have less impact on others. This left himself and Charles’s peers in the difficult position of having to pick up the slack for Charles. When Charles did respond well and perform, he received praise and was sometimes rewarded with a little time off.
In our discussion about his tardiness at meetings, Charles shared that his manager always complained about this but took no action. After many attempts to change this behavior, Charles was reprimanded. His manager complained how frustrating it was that Charles knew what was expected but continued his poor behavior.
When Charles showed up on time, his manager made a point of reinforcing this behavior by thanking him. Charles responded well for a short while, but after time slipped back into his old behavior of showing up late. His previous manager’s attempts to hold him accountable had little long-term effect on Charles’s behavior. Charles eventually did whatever he wanted and came to expect a reward for performing and became apathetic when faced with punishment. In despair his manager documented the behavior in Charles’s personnel file. Finally, Charles’s manager avoided dealing with the problem by transferring him to another department; mine.
Charles’s previous manager was frustrated mainly because Charles did not respond to attempts to hold him accountable through reward and punishment. Rewards and punishments are tools used by managers to control. This approach works in a system when the person in power is assumed to have the right answer; it demotivates when people have choices. Rewards and punishments are seen by employees as attempts to make them conform to the rules. Their reaction is often resistance or grudging compliance. Rarely is it motivation.
Accountability and Responsibility
Using a system of rewards and punishments does not necessarily make people more accountable; it can make them less. Managers who use reward and punishment systems mistakenly assume that by holding people accountable they can make them more responsible. No person can make another responsible. Responsibility is something that is accepted or rejected. Managers often try to give responsibility to people who don’t want to take responsibility. But there are many situations in which a person is given responsibility, but refuses to accept it.
The alternative to trying to make people responsible is to help people begin to hold themselves accountable for their own performance.
Let’s define some terms here. Responsibility is the degree to which a person or group is accountable for the consequences of their decisions. In fact, accountability is accepting the consequences for performance or behaviors. People can be held accountable, or they can hold themselves accountable, or both. Taking responsibility is an internal decision people make to hold themselves accountable for the consequences of their actions. Before people will take responsibility, they must have confidence in their ability to take a good course of action.
The logical connection managers make is that they can make people more responsible by holding them more accountable. That is control. People take responsibility when they choose to hold themselves accountable. That is self-management.
A person chooses to become more responsible by independently accepting the accountability. The degree to which a person holds himself or herself accountable defines the degree to which they feel responsible. Facilitative leaders create opportunities for people to accept responsibility; they teach them how to be accountable.
How does a manager facilitate accountability? People will accept accountability and take responsibility if they have some control over and confidence in the choices they make. When people have no input into what they will be held responsible for, they naturally avoid being held accountable, especially if the expectations are unreasonably high or unattainable. That is why it is so important to have a mutually agreed-upon set of objectives and a reasonable code of conduct.
I remember when a man named Paul Lopez took over as CEO of Ford Motor Company in the 1980s. He was a financial guy with a peculiar approach to managing his people. First, he insisted that his people wear their watch on the dominant arm, lefties on the left hand and righties on the right hand. He said that this was to keep people “hyper-vigilante” in cutting costs. He also insisted that everyone have only coffee and a banana for breakfast to stimulate morning work productivity.
Once in charge, he tore up all the existing vendor contracts and demanded that all suppliers lower their prices by 20 percent, to begin with. And despite very good support from the Board, his people sabotaged his efforts and nearly brought Ford to a standstill. Lopez’s eccentric and authoritarian leadership style almost bankrupted the company and resulted in a long-lasting drain of capital and human resources. For all his talk, it most likely never occurred to him that he couldn’t make his people responsible for unfair and unrealistic expectations.
Only when people feel they have some control and are confident in their ability to make good decisions will they accept responsibility. This makes sense for anyone who has worked for an autocratic leader. Only when people feel empowered will they choose to hold themselves accountable and self-manage. People become more responsible as they begin to hold themselves accountable for the consequences of their decisions.
My first step in helping Charles begin to take responsibility was by reaching agreement on a set of clearly defined expectations. The list of goals and behavioral expectations we co-developed and negotiated established a foundation of accountability. But it didn’t stop there. Then, using honest and constructive feedback, over time he developed confidence in his ability to achieve the objectives and to live within the behavioral standards of the company. The key point was that I had to do this with him, not to him.
Holding people accountable builds management-dependent behavior because the locus of control is outside the individual. For example, a parent who tries to control will put a glass of juice in front of a child and tell him or her, “Don’t spill it.” When the child spills the juice the parent yells at the child telling him or her, “If you do that again I’m going to send you to bed without dinner.” This is an example of using reward and punishment to hold the child accountable. The child quickly learns to depend on the parent to determine what a good choice is and what a bad choice is. The behaviors become parent dependent. The locus of control is outside of or extrinsic to the child. The child doesn’t learn to hold himself or herself accountable.
On the other hand, another parent might clarify the expectation by telling the child that if the juice is spilt, then he or she must clean it up and refill the glass. When the child spills the juice, he or she experiences the direct consequences of the actions. The child makes the decision based upon the consequences of the behavior, not the consequences delivered by the parent. The child will learn to monitor and manage his or her own behavior. The parent who is holding his or her child “accountable” spends more time “parenting” or controlling short-term behavior.
(Let me say at this point that managing people’s performance is not the same as parenting; it’s more like babysitting☺. That’s a joke.)
Managers who use reward and punishment as consequences, like parents who try to control, inhibit the ability of an employee to take responsibility. Trying to get an employee to make better decisions through accountability makes him or her dependent on the manager to define what is or is not a good decision. Good managers facilitate the opportunities for employees to experience the direct consequences of their decisions. They facilitate opportunities to learn.
Positive Accountability: Intrinsic or Extrinsic Motivation
I work with many managers who feel that their job is to get their people “pumped up.” Especially in sales, managers get quickly frustrated with an employee who doesn’t share the same enthusiasm as he or she does. There are a couple of statements managers make that point directly to this issue. “She doesn’t have a sense of urgency” or “He gets too far into the weeds and slows us down.” These statements are unfair and usually said by a manager who believes that everyone should have the same sense of devotion and excitement about the job.
To debunk just these two specific examples, a person who takes his or her time to make decision does not necessarily lack a sense of urgency; perhaps some situations require more caution than others. And as for getting “too far into the weeds,” there are some people who desire more information before making decisions than you do. If you provide more detail than is your style, you might see quicker decision making.
The point here is that human motivation is much more complex than something that might positively respond to cheerleading.
From a higher and perhaps more informed position, a manger should understand that, in fact, there are two different types of motivations that influence behavior: intrinsic and extrinsic.
Some people are more heavily influenced by internal, more personal, and more deeply rooted motivating factors. Again, you can look at Marlow’s Hierarchy of Need pyramid, but when it comes down to individuals, things like being part of a team, doing interesting work, and nonbusiness interests like charity and family, all impact a person’s desire and ability to do a job. Both Eddie Bauer and R.E.I. pay employees for charity work and helping to clean up the outdoors. And so these companies attract people with those same values.
On the other side are more people driven by extrinsic factors, those that come from outside the person.
The main extrinsic motivators used in the American business culture are rewards and punishments. Extrinsic rewards can take many forms, such as money, recognition, and praise. Examples of punishments are criticism, withholding rewards, and reprimand. At a company like Oracle, one of the main incentives is to be promoted and earn higher and higher incomes. And the culture reflects that. From my work at Oracle, it is clear that conflict is encouraged, business performance is rewarded, and those who deliver results get to the next level. Is that wrong? No, just different. But I rarely run into an ex-R.E.I. or ex–Eddie Bauer person working at Oracle.
Extrinsic motivators come from someone or some organization extrinsic to or outside of the person. Because they are things “done to” the person, extrinsic motivators are used to control people’s behavior. The underlying premise is that if you do what the manager or company wants, then you get rewarded; if you don’t, you don’t.
Extrinsic motivators have an upside and a downside. In an industry like enterprise software, with rapidly changing market conditions, intense competition, and a more Darwinian environment, perhaps a company that emphasizes extrinsic reward systems has the right idea. For other industries, and I must say other personality types, an overemphasis on rewards and discipline might be too much.
But the downside of the overemphasis in extrinsic motivating factors like money, promotion, recognition, and so on is an environment that has ever-escalating demands on people’s time, energy, and life.
They do motivate people to do what others want them to do. But they are self-reinforcing, unlike intrinsic motivators. Like Alfie Cohen said in his breakthrough book Punished By Rewards, “[T]he problem with the overuse of extrinsic reward systems is that they do motivate . . . but they mostly motivate people to strive for more rewards.”
They build dependent behavior because the person being “motivated” depends on the person delivering the extrinsic motivator to determine whether he or she has behaved in the desired way. Managers who rely too heavily on extrinsic motivators build management-dependent behavior.
Intrinsic motivators are internally defined by a person. They self-motivate. Intrinsic motivators are things a person finds interesting and likes to do. They are done for their own sake, not for someone else’s. They can be an individual’s sense of achievement and improvement or the desire to learn or be part of a group.
Intrinsic motivators are not controlled by outside forces; people motivate themselves. Intrinsic motivators become stronger in environments in which people have more control over their choices. They weaken when people feel controlled. Extrinsic motivators become stronger the more they are used because people come to expect them.
The overreliance on extrinsic motivators is a symptom of an autocratic-behaviorist management approach. Managers who rely on extrinsic motivators to control behavior usually end up with people who rely on managers to provide extrinsic motivators. By focusing on the result, managers create an environment in which their people focus on the end result: the reward. Thus, managers create management-dependent behavior and an ever-higher spiraling demand for extrinsic rewards.
I often see this difference manifested when comparing American and European companies. Employee tenure is, in general, much longer in European companies than it is in American companies. You can think of this in terms of loyalty or independence or as a function of the two different reward systems. In many American companies, money and title define success. This is not as much the case in Europe. European employees are more driven by intrinsic rewards like being part of an organization, having significant time off to spend with family, and a less-competitive quality of life. And I think it is fair to say that the individualistic and competitive culture in the States is less attractive to European workers, in general.
The Responsibility Continuum
Many managers make quick judgments that their people are either responsible or irresponsible. For some reason, people get pigeon-holed into being accountable for their actions or not. This is not very fair and is another effect of our “just do it” culture. To let go of control, it is important to realize that people are more complex than a single “modifier.” I have many people in my life, including my children (and myself, I must admit), that are responsible and accountable in many areas but who struggle to be responsible in others.
More Responsible |
|
Given responsibility |
Take responsibility |
Make poor decisions |
Make good decisions |
Held accountable |
Hold themselves accountable |
Management dependent |
Self-management behavior |
Narrow guidelines |
Broad guidelines |
The key to moving past this type of thinking is to realize that all employees are works-in-progress.
The facilitative leader sees people as works-in-progress along the responsibility continuum.
Using Accountability to Correct Behavior
The goal of a facilitative leader is to help a person move from less responsible to more responsible, to help employees hold themselves accountable. When a person is in the process of developing a sense of responsibility, it is necessary for a manager to define narrower guidelines for making choices to ensure business progress. People who are more responsible can make more choices because they and their managers have more faith in their ability to make good decisions. A person who is further along on the Responsibility Continuum can have broader guidelines within which he or she can make decisions.
The three tools facilitative leaders have at their disposal to help people become more responsible are feedback, strategic nonintervention, and choice of consequences. The underlying groundwork that supports these tools is clear expectations and honest and constructive feedback. These tools, along with clear expectations, help employees to move along the responsibility continuum.
Feedback Revisited
Feedback in the form of encouragement helps people move along the Responsibility Continuum. Praise and criticism focus on achievement and non-achievement after the fact. Encouragement focuses on progress and future improvement. By design, encouragement helps people become more confident in their ability to make choices and take responsibility.
The purpose of encouragement is to build courage. When managers use encouragement, they are automatically helping people to make better choices. A manager using praise and criticism may be preventing people from learning how to make their own decisions.
Strategic Nonintervention
Another tool managers have for facilitating learning is the concept I call “strategic nonintervention,” defined as letting people experience the direct consequences of their decisions, good or bad, within reasonable limits. People learn best when they experience direct consequences. When a person touches a hot stove, he or she experiences the burning sensation and makes the decision never to do that again. When a child spills milk and has to clean it up and refill the glass, this is the use of direct consequences. Sending them to bed has no logical connection to the spilt milk, so the child does not learn to take responsibility for his or her actions.
Strategic nonintervention lets people experience the direct consequences of their choices.
But strategic nonintervention is just that: strategic. Returning to the analogy of a parent trying to teach a child to ride a bike, the parent may let the child practice in a school yard but not in the street. This is a strategic decision based on the possible consequences. Once the child learns to ride safely in the school yard, then he or she can move to the street. For Charles, since he had a poor history of decision making, I gave him a short leash, so to speak. But as he developed better and better judgment, I slowly allowed him more room and opportunities to use his own judgment.
But I had to take into consideration a couple of things before stepping out of his way and letting his “failure” become a learning process for him.
In order to ensure that the opportunity to learn occurs in a manner that is in the best interest of the employee and the company, the facilitative leader has to evaluate three different criteria before using strategic nonintervention, as I did with Charles.
The criteria that a manager must use to determine whether to let employees experience the direct consequences of their decisions are as follows:
Ability: What are the chances of the employee making a poor decision?
It is the manager’s responsibility to match tasks with ability. If the employee has little experience with the task, strategic nonintervention may be inappropriate in this situation. While there is something to be said about getting out of the way of learning, it is important for a manager to realize that another one of his or her responsibilities is to protect employees from their own poor choices.
I recently worked with a manager who thought it was his responsibility to get his people promoted. And to some extent it is and can be a measure of a manager’s leadership abilities, developing people into leadership positions. But in this manager’s case, he was not considering the needs and abilities of his people in the equation. He has a history of recommending his people for promotions when they were not nearly ready for the responsibility. This put some of his people into situations that were not in their best career interests. A manager’s role is to develop people but also manage their expectations regarding advancement and development.
Impact on employee: Will the failure in this situation significantly impact the employee’s confidence?
Another important consideration is how damaging a poor decision would be to the confidence and willingness to act on their own of the employee. If the employee makes a poor decision, will the direct consequences of that decision inhibit his or her willingness to make future decisions? It is the manager’s responsibility to evaluate the impact on the employee. A manager must evaluate whether the consequences of making a poor decision will negatively impact the willingness of the employee to make future decisions and inhibit his or her growth. Creating an environment that is safe for people to take chances and self-manage takes a bit of thought and reflection. Keeping in mind that your people are works-in-progress and making mistakes is part of learning puts managers into a developmental mindset when guiding his or her people’s career.
Impact on the business: Will failure seriously threaten the success of the organization?
Coming back to the ocean liner analogy, if a poor decision will sink the ship, perhaps this is not a good situation to put your organization in. I work with United Healthcare hospital contractors, who are able to negotiate reimbursement contracts that are in the tens of millions of dollars. They often complain that their management puts them in uncomfortable positions because they do not have the authority to walk away from a hospital or hospital group if the contract does not meet their objectives. This is a decision that is reserved for upper levels of management to make alone. I always ask them if they would want to be in that position, especially with the impact not only on United’s revenue growth goals, let alone the future career of the contractor who makes the wrong decision.
So, the question is, will the learning that occurs from that decision outweigh the short-term loss in productivity?
It is the manager’s responsibility to weigh the organizational impact of a poor decision against the learning that might occur for the employee. If the employee learns a valuable lesson but the department misses a crucial deadline, then the learning point might be lost.
Let’s use a simple example of Charles’s tardiness at meetings. In this situation, his previous manager got frustrated with him and threatened punishment. Although he rarely followed through, it appears making idle threats were one of his main managing tools (or I should say weapons).
Evaluating these three criteria to determine whether it is a good idea for Charles to experience the direct consequences of his behavior might go like this:
Ability
Since Charles has consistently been late to meetings, odds are he will repeat the behavior. But certainly, he can manage his schedule in a way that allows him to be prompt, especially since everyone else at the meeting has managed to that. So ability, at least in this case, is not an issue.
The impact on Charles will probably not severely curtail his willingness to make future decisions. After all, even though he may need to get better at time management, if he cannot even respond positively to this simple act, more difficult challenges might be too much for him. Because this is a minor offense, the upside will have more effect than the downside.
Impact on the Business
This is the most critical point. A manager must be aware of the impact of Charles missing vital information and weigh it against the productivity lost by starting meetings late.
I made sure my entire team was aware that all meetings were to start on time and anyone who is late will have to catch up. In my next meeting, we started on time and I signaled to the team my intention of making this work by closing the door to the meeting room and beginning. As expected, Charles was two minutes late, and I didn’t break my stride to bring him up to speed. Charles asked if he missed anything, to which I replied in the positive but did not add anything to that statement. I reminded him that our meeting must progress so as not to waste other people’s time. I did that matter-of-factly and without emotion.
After the meeting Charles came into my office to get caught up, but I made no special provisions to help him. I gave him my notes and asked that he return them when he was up to speed. If he needed more clarification I let him know that I could help him when it was convenient for me, not Charles.
At first this might seem a waste of time and unproductive; it was necessary, however. One of the greatest challenges a manager faces is letting an employee struggle with the negative consequences of his or her decisions. Because managers want people to succeed, they often try to minimize the direct impact of the consequences to the employee. When they do that, it may enable the behavior. This is indirectly harmful to the employee. The psychological definition of enabling is “a harmful form of helping.” When managers prevent employees from experiencing the pain or pleasure of the consequences of their choices, they take away an opportunity for their employees to learn.
In this example of strategic nonintervention, Charles experiences the direct consequences of his actions. And he quickly learned how unproductive his behaviors were and adapted appropriately. I had faith in his ability to meet my expectations; he just needed a little guidance.
His previous manager’s dependence on rewards and punishment to motivate Charles actually had the opposite effect. Managers so often create their own problems by reinforcing nonperformance and attempting to control him. They also contribute to Charles’s nonperformance.
Henry Kissinger tells a story about an incident that happened when he was advising President Nixon. Kissinger and Nixon were in the Oval Office discussing Middle East negotiations, but could make no progress because Nixon’s dog was chewing and barking at the rug. In frustration, Nixon reached into his desk and threw a bone to the dog. Upon seeing this, Kissinger said to Mr. Nixon, “Mr. President, you have just taught your dog to chew rugs.”
By intervening and not letting Charles experience the direct consequences of his tardiness, his manager is teaching him to “chew rugs.” Many managers teach their people to chew rugs when they don’t allow them to experience the direct consequences of their decisions. They are trying to control the amount of discomfort an employee might feel.
Another example of this occurs when managers complain that they cannot get any work done because their people always come into their office to discuss problems. These managers might be reinforcing this behavior by volunteering the answer to the employees’ problems.
One thing I always tell my people is that one of my expectations is for them to become good at their job without my help, for them to self-manage. This is, after all, my ultimate goal, to reduce my workload by developing my people. Managers who control take responsibility for problems that are not theirs and in which employees would benefit from making their own judgments. Managers who try to solve personality conflicts between employees are taking responsibility for problems outside of their control. A manager using strategic nonintervention would clarify the expectation that people are to respect each other’s right to different opinions but find a way to resolve conflict without violence or yelling. Then let the employees work it out.
I once worked with a terrible manager in a medical device firm whose people were very much out of control: insubordinate, abusive, and downright nasty. When one of his people went off the rails screaming and making threats against another employee, I asked him how he could let this person continue to do this. To which he replied, “I don’t know what his problem is. I’ve threatened to fire him a hundred times but it just never seems to have an impact.”
Using the parenting analogy, when two kids are fighting and a parent steps in to try and stop the arguing, the children learn to come back to the parent to mediate any disputes. “Johnny said he won’t be my friend if I don’t do what he wants.” A better suggestion is for the parent to say, “If you two want to continue to play together you will have to find a way to get along,” and leave it at that. The kids will find a way to get along or suffer the consequences. The parent has clarified the expectation and used strategic nonintervention to let the children decide whether they want to experience the consequences or try to get along on their own. Because strategic nonintervention is strategic, a manager must make the critical judgment whether the individual employee is at an appropriate point on the responsibility continuum. If employees are not ready to hold themselves accountable and are not taking responsibility for their choices, a manager may have to communicate choices that the employee needs to make.