6
Accountability and Response-Ability

The words in this chapter’s title can either strike fear in the heart or liberate the soul. I suggest that we work on liberation. All too often, accountability and responsibility equate to the general notion of blame or fault. “Who’s responsible for this?” is a question sure to instill fear in most people at any given time. Hearing the words “We’re holding you accountable” can be equally terrifying.

Can you conceive of someone asking, “Who’s responsible for this great success?” with the same vigor with which he or she may ask, “Who’s responsible for this great mess?” Not too readily, would be my guess. Same thing goes for “We’re holding you accountable for these great numbers” versus “We’re holding you accountable for these delays.”

Given that it’s apparently human nature to look to blame someone else when things go badly, or to assume credit when things go well, it’s not surprising that many people seem to duck responsibility and accountability. I am firmly of the mind that accountability and responsibility are absolute keys to power and the ability to create more of what you want in life. No matter the circumstance or situation in which you may be plopped, there will always be choices you can make that can help you move forward. When you’re confronting difficult work situations, whether in the form of broken processes, misaligned teams, uncooperative coworkers, or unclear communications, workarounds can be found, but only if you are first willing to seek them out and then willing to take the actions necessary.

While part of the strategy is influencing someone else to think or act differently, if we simply wait for someone else to figure it out and do the right thing, we may make little progress. Make no mistake: if the situation were going to improve because of someone else’s acting independently, it would already have happened. So, if you’re the one who notices, then you’re the one who is going to have to take the first steps to get something going. This is where response-ability and accountability enter the picture.

As you will see, accountability can function as a kind of North Star, an internal guidepost that keeps you on track by dint of one simple internal choice: the willingness to own the outcome and everything it takes to get there. If you commit to owning the outcome, you will then be able to exercise your response-ability through the control and influence choices we have been discussing all along. Asking yourself those two questions about what you can do that would make a difference is nothing more than making an assessment of the situation and figuring out ways in which you can act on it.

As noted in the first chapter, any workaround recipe requires the same three basic ingredients before anything can change or improve:

1. Intention: your focus and commitment to making a needed change

2. Accountability: your willingness to own the outcome

3. Response-ability: your choice to control and influence what you can

Combine a clear intention with a rational assessment of your ability to respond, and you may well be on your way to some very successful outcomes.

OWN IT ALL

It’s easy for most of us to own the good stuff—our accomplishments and successes—even if we are suitably modest in our willingness to claim credit. However, owning it all, including what works, what doesn’t work, and even what completely falls flat, could be the most powerful of all intentions. Whether it’s getting to Louisville when there are no flights or overcoming incredible adversity as Mitchell has done, there is limitless power in not only clarifying your intention but also then owning everything it will take to get there. If you were to read Mitchell’s life story, you would notice his constant focus on his response-ability for dealing with his circumstances. He doesn’t spend time blaming himself or anyone else. Instead, he is intent on owning the kind of life he would like to create and doing what he can despite the many physical challenges.

That old saw from Chapter 1 bears repeating: 99 percent is a bitch, 100 percent is a breeze. What this is really saying is that you need to commit to your outcomes completely. Even a hint of hesitation or doubt, if allowed to persist, will sink your ship. Without 100 percent commitment, David might still be in LAX or Mitchell might have remained languishing in a hospital rehab unit for months on end.

The world is full of people who are willing to do “just so much.” These are the 99 percent people. Then there are the 100 percent folks, those who are focused and committed to the outcome, the “whatever it takes” people. It’s kind of like being 99 percent committed to jumping across the chasm—99 percent of the way is still going to set you up for a long fall.

The willingness to own it all—the outcome, the choices you will have to make, and the experience you will have to go through—empowers you to make life work well, to overcome hurdles and roadblocks, and to create workarounds that work. At the center of any situation you face, whether it is going smoothly or running aground, you will inevitably have a choice about how you respond. If nothing else, you always have some control over your responses. You may not have as many choices as you would like, but however limited the field of options may seem, you do get to choose. That’s good as far as it goes, but what happens when the rest of the team is singing from a different song sheet? In particular, what if the entire culture is one of fear and blame?

LIVING IN A CULTURE OF FEAR AND BLAME

When problems occur in Japanese companies and American companies, conventional wisdom suggests you can differentiate between the two cultures quickly. The American company will spend valuable time and resources finding out how to affix blame. The Japanese company will spend time and resources trying to figure out how to fix the problem. At this writing, we have an immediate opportunity to see if this adage proves true regarding the Toyota fiasco over braking and acceleration problems. The American press is all over the situation with story after story pointing fingers at those to blame.

In one sense, figuring out where blame lies seems like a natural thing to do. After all, the problem didn’t create itself now, did it? Surely someone created it. So, let’s find that someone and . . . and what? Fix that person’s wagon? Fix the problem? Or simply administer punishment? Over the past few years, corporations have increasingly adopted accountability as the new mantra to redress problems. If you work in an environment where people are more accustomed to the blame side of accountability and responsibility, though, you probably won’t see many people rushing to the front of the line when problems crop up, at least not to accept responsibility.

In fact, in the more toxic blame-oriented cultures, people may tend to rush to the front of the line to point fingers. Or, perhaps equally destructively, they may retreat further into the woodwork, ducking visibility, while quietly assembling documentation to show that the problem lies elsewhere. So, if you’ve got a problem to overcome, something that is impeding your ability to get something done, do you need more people blaming one another? Do you need more people you can blame? Do you need more people blaming you?

But the Other Guy Did It. No, Really.

Imagine you are part of a team working on a complex, highly technical project that requires significant contributions from and interactions with several other teams in order to produce the intended outcome. What do you do when your part of the project is impacted by work that another person or team performs? What if you can’t start until that other piece is done? What if the person or team is late, and you get blasted by senior management because you’re late and you’re the one who is visible? Or what if you’re working on a joint project with another company, and the late deliverable is coming from that company?

Sound familiar? I have seen this kind of situation play out time and time again in a wide range of industries, including technology, health care, power generation, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications, to name but a few. So, what do you do when the other guy is late? One response is to start waving the red flag and sending out CYA memos to those who will notice, making certain that it is clear where the blame lies. That may strike you as a reasonable path, but stop and think: what kind of impact do you expect that to have long term? How would you expect the other person, team, or company to respond downstream?

Of course, you could always go to these individuals, teams, or companies and start reading them the riot act. Better yet, you could escalate to someone higher up the food chain, being sure to emphasize the other guy’s faults and how they are making life difficult for you. Once again, neither approach figures to produce surefire success or increased cooperation in the future.

Returning to our imaginary technical project, what can you do now? Rather than firing up the blame machine and going on the offensive, how about going to members of the other team and asking a couple of questions? The first step would be to ask if there is something you and your team could contribute to help them produce what you need. A companion question would be to ask if there is anything you or your team may be doing that makes it difficult for them to execute. Third, and even more powerful, would be to invite the other team to envision scenarios in which the whole situation were to improve and ask, “What would you suggest that we do differently or more creatively?” You may be impressed by how much you can learn, and correct, just by posing these three questions. Being asked for their help is a heck of a lot more appealing to people than being asked to accept blame for the problem you are experiencing. Yes, they may be contributing to the challenge, but giving them an opportunity to contribute is way more attractive than giving them the opportunity to be blamed.

Example: Satco

Here’s an instructive example of how a company discovered that it had become its own worst enemy. The managers started out thinking they had to devise a workaround strategy for a difficult supplier. What they learned instead was that they had to work around their own internal processes, which were making it difficult for the supplier to perform. As you will see, they crafted a creative but simple influence strategy to solve a complex, challenging problem.

Relayco had been supplying a critical part to Satco for use in satellites the company was building for the U.S. government. A long string of contentious technical and quality issues coupled with delivery delays led Relayco to announce that it would exit the business altogether. This put Satco in a dire situation as it tried to get the remaining parts needed to complete the satellite.

Satco first went on the attack, threatening litigation and the involvement of the government to force the supplier into compliance. Relayco remained resolute in its decision to close this unprofitable line. Recognizing that they could neither control the situation nor intimidate Relayco into performing, the managers at Satco made a switch in tactics. Employing some of what they had learned from me on workaround strategies, they decided to take the response-able approach and seek ways to influence the other side.

Abandoning the clearly useless approach of blame and intimidation, Satco managers started asking questions about what it would take to get the needed parts. They asked Relayco to identify any issues or roadblocks that were preventing it from performing. This request opened the floodgates of useful information. The first thing Satco managers learned was that someone on their own contracting team had taken the unprecedented step of demanding a number of test cycles that was three times the industry standard. That level of vigorous testing was bound to result in a lower yield of parts that could pass muster. Satco immediately offered to reduce the test cycles back to the industry standard.

Even lowering the testing cycles would improve yield by only 10 percent, though. So, Satco pressed on, asking what else was in the way, and learned of an onerous term that had been slipped into the agreement by someone in procurement. This term allowed Relayco to rework any defective part discovered at the Relayco site but required scrapping a defective part if it was discovered at the Satco facility. Recognizing the insanity of that term, Satco immediately rescinded it. Relayco’s attitude began to change noticeably, and 22 additional parts were back on the line.

They then discovered one more incomprehensible term that procurement had inserted, increasing the tolerance requirements to double that of the industry standard. Given that the industry was about satellite performance and this was a satellite being built, no one could understand the need for that increased tolerance demand, and it, too, was retired. If the performance standard is double the norm, and testing cycles are triple, it’s not hard to compute why Relayco was having so much difficulty.

Having changed its influence strategy from that of blame and issuing threats to one of shared response-ability, Satco was able to fulfill the contract and also create a friend where before it had an unhappy supplier. With these changes in hand, Relayco did not close its doors as it had intended and had committed to its investors. Satco also used the lessons learned with Relayco to assess other contracts under which performance was suboptimal. In many of them, Satco discovered that rather than needing to work around difficult suppliers, it really needed to work around its own contracting processes.

I hope you can see that by dropping the blame and fear game, it is possible to reach powerful and effective outcomes. Once again, the workaround is a combination of intention (getting useful parts) and control (fixing what you can on your own) and then seeking to influence the other to collaborate on the solution.

In this particular instance, the Satco manager chose to circumvent his company’s norm of issuing threats through a combination of the legal department and senior vice presidents and went directly to the management of the supplier. He focused on fixing the problem, not affixing blame; his attitude was one of partnering and shared response-ability.

Take note that while some workarounds can appear to slow down the process, they can actually speed things up. In this case, the outcome speaks for itself.

Even if your company runs on the fear and blame version of accountability, you don’t have to play along. By forthrightly adopting a mind-set of owning the outcome (accountability) and seeking creative choices (response-ability), you can begin to make big differences in how problems are resolved and results produced. Approaching people and situations that require workarounds can be done from the fear and blame perspective, but those workarounds are usually not sustainable. Few people are going to be interested in finding yet another opportunity to be blamed.

If, instead, you start with the perspective that there are solutions available and that the other guy would like to share in the improvement, you will soon unveil powerful influence choices. As odd and perhaps risky as it may seem, owning the outcome and asking the other person for input on what you could do differently creates two distinct improvement opportunities: you may learn something that you can do that you had not previously seen, and you also model the premise that finding solutions beats the heck out of finding people to blame. This simple shift has the effect of producing partners where previously you might have had adversaries.

WORKAROUND QUESTIONS

While there are endless situations that you can improve by adopting this “own the outcome” mind-set, you can loosely group most workarounds into two basic categories: those in which you will need to do something different and those in which someone else will need to do something different. One of the hardest things to determine right up front is which category is going to be in play.

Once you have asked yourself the basic starting question— “What can I do that will make a difference?”—and asked the other party if there’s anything else you can do, you can then turn the question toward what the other party could conceive of doing to make the situation even better. The questions that follow may be helpful in enlisting the other party’s support in coming up with creative solutions:

1. Are there improvements you could imagine to this process or outcome?

2. What could we do together that would make a difference?

3. Is there any support you need from me?

4. Are there improvements you could imagine from another group or department?

5. Who would have to be on board to make these changes?

6. How could we influence them?