How to Bring Accountability Back
Last week, a Regional Manager (let’s call him RM) working for a construction company was working through a strategy to instil and uplift ownership into his team and frontline workers in one of my workshops. RM needed to figure this out as the costs were hurting the business he is responsible for - wasted time, people passing the buck, and far too many day-to-day issues landing on his own desk. All this while, truth be told, the local teams had the competence to solve all but a few of these issues. A problem I have seen many others experience where, to be blunt, grown adults simply avoid responsibility in a fast paced, busy, and fatiguing world.
The Cost of Responsibility Avoidance
When these daily dysfunctions occur across an entire business there is meaningful impact;
Delays – work moves slowly
Stagnation – while work stops entire projects slump for the days/weeks/months
Pile Up – the leader is swamped with transactional operational problems
Friction – irritation is felt, often leading to blame causing relationship erosion
The Bad Apple Impact
At the core are behavioural norms some may refer to as cultural. Dr Will Felps (UNSW) ran the famous Bad Apple Experiment in 2006. In groups of 40 people, the researchers planted an actor (playing the role of ‘Nick’.) His role was to adopt one of three personas:
The Jerk – defiant and aggressive
The Slacker – withholds effort towards tasks
The Downer – being depressive and generally disengaged
The researchers found whenever ‘a Nick’ was inserted the trust, connection, and sense of safety immediately plummeted. The measurable decline was astounding, with the group’s performance dropping by 30-40% when Nick’s antics were present.
This is what RM was seeing, but not because his team was full of jerks, slackers, and downers. He saw there was a lack of accountability breeding this sort of behaviour, and was suffering the 30-40% loss in productivity. The business was being hurt - he knew intervention was required.
Some Call It Basics
When we look at cultural accountability there are many ways to approach this, and context is often going to define the angle of attack. However, what I have learnt is we can create momentum with seemingly basic solutions (as they are low-to-no cost and easy to understand - but tend to be difficult to execute and habitualise).
RM discovered this for himself as after two days of nutting through his strategy, he decided the first steps were to ‘get back to basics’.
Solutions included having well defined and more frequent handover meetings across his team’s projects. This needed to be matched with ‘huddle’ style daily meetings. We used to do this in retail decades ago, before the Agile movement termed them Stand-Up Meetings and are often referred to as Toolbox Meetings in construction and manufacturing. RM also wanted to introduce more frequent one-to-one check-ins for every level of the hierarchy.
Recruitment? Performance? Culture...?
As a start, I felt this would make a significant difference for RM’s team within a short period of time. Other areas he looked at were training/development, system updates for better communication flow/usability, and to empower Supervisors to take more control and ownership of their projects and teams.
You could argue that bad apples need to be stopped from entering teams (i.e. It is a recruitment issue). You could argue they need to be squeezed out as quickly as possible (i.e. it is a performance management issue). Or the culture itself creates these bad apples (i.e. the conditions turned good apples into rotten ones). I have found all tend to contribute and are worth observing for. This will guide the areas of investment.
Easy ‘What’ But Difficult ‘How’
All of those solutions mentioned above are either being used or have been used in your business/team. But are they being done well? Are they being done consistently? And are they being done by everyone in leadership positions?
I believe recruitment, performance management, and culture are all in play. With a few small tweaks leaders can make significant gains. And, like RM the solution is often ‘what we know’ but are either not willing or able to do.
Whenever you add people into the mix it is rarely easy or straight forward. And technique as well as experience is critical. Like a musician, there is no substitute for playing live on stage again and again and again. Lots of practice with good technique ultimately becomes the difference maker. When it comes to accountability, I feel many of us can make ground like RM intends to – by strategising, meeting with intention, executing them with consistency, and putting real effort into the structure and content of these touch points.
Those able to put purposeful effort into them are the ones ultimately able to make them look easy. The basics are anything but.
