Mark J Cundiff

ACCOUNTABILITY: DOES YOUR TEAM HAVE AN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH REALITY?

Leadercast Live is the world’s largest one-day leadership event, with more than 100,000 attendees at 500+ locations across 20 different countries around the world. This simulcast event is targeted at those who desire to learn and grow in their leadership aptitudes.

I am posting my notes from the May 5th Leadercast event I attended with thousands of others in the Atlanta, GA area. Today’s post is my notes from Dr. Henry Cloud’s talk.

Dr. Cloud spoke about accountability. He discussed what works when it comes to accountability, what does not, and why it does not.

Finding Your Purpose Requires These Five Elements:

1. Vision: a desired future state

When you have a vision, new pathways begin to sprout in your brain. But the brain can’t get itself there.

2. Engaged Talent

You need to engage the right talent to take the next step beyond vision

3. Strategy: a plan on how to get to your desired future state.

We often get distracted at this point. It is the leader’s role to keep us on track.
This is where leadership shows up.
Many times we are distracted by things that are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but they become a roadblock that keeps us from getting from here to there. It is a leader’s role to help us eliminate and overcome the distractions so that we can effectively move from her to there.

4. Measurements and Accountability: this is the stage where the brain measures things and holds you accountable to do the right things.

5. Adaptability: This is fixing or adapting to what is discovered in the process

The brain fixes things it finds that are not right along the path to the vision. This is leadership.
You need to have a healthy disregard for the impossible. Larry Page, founder of Google, got rid of the impossible voices in his head in order to create something extraordinary. He had to make space in his brain for the possible by eliminating all the thoughts of the impossible floating around in his head. This allowed him to ask the question:”What would happen if we downloaded the whole internet and kept all the links?”

Everyone is probably a 10 in effectiveness in one of these five areas. As a leader, if you are not careful, you will build an organization or team in your own image. If you are not intentional you will surround yourself with a group of people just like yourself. Many leaders have built a company in their own image.

All of us have strengths, but we also all have our issues. The truth is that we are not all “10’s” as leaders in all of these things, and unless we have team members who are strong in all five of these areas and hold them accountable, our organizations tend to look like the leader. This will result in a team who has the same strengths and weaknesses as the leader has. In order to have a strong and effective team we need to have contributors in all five of these critical areas.

You want to hold your people accountable in a culture where the leader steps us first. A culture of accountability puts the weight of everybody’s boss right in front of your face. Everybody has a boss. We all need an intimate relationship with our boss. Our boss’s name is reality.

How do you get your people to have an intimate relationship with reality?

Accountability is not a spanking. Accountability literally means to answer to a trust.

Make accountability a positive thing. Ask the question: “How do we want to look?” or “What does success look like?”

Dr. Cloud defined the characteristics of accountability in an organization:

1. Expectations: The foundation is clear agreed upon expectations

2. Deadline: When those expectations must be met by, the timing.

How will it look at the end?

3. Inspection: We need to determine how living up to the expectations will be inspected.

Inspection needs to have a cadence to it. It needs to a regularly scheduled event that communicates current status and issues. This will provide accountability in and of itself.
Example: Monday morning call each week with your team to check in on progress of their activities and responsibilities.

4. Communication: How are we going to communicate throughout the process so their are no surprises.

This is a process that shifts the responsibility to the actual person who can change the outcome and provide the needed results. The leader’s job during this process is to feel the reality in a positive and motivating way other wise things can go bad. Many times when things are not going well it is because people are operating under bad types of fear. Bad fear is when you make people feel bad. People don’t operate well when they are feeling bad.

You need to take your team on a reality visit. You have to create a culture of accountability where there are real and clearly understood consequences.

Along the journey to accomplishing your vision you’re going to run into three types of people: 1)Wise People 2) Foolish People 3) Evil People.

1. Wise: These are people who adjust themselves to the feedback the are given. They learn and grow from the feedback and become even wiser.

You hold wise people accountable for the work

2. Fools: These are people who do not adjust themselves to the truth. Fools only adjust the truth to fit their own narrative. When dealing with the fool, the problem is never in the room.

You hold fools accountable to the consequences.

3. Evil: These are people who are how to hurt you, damage you or inflict some kind of pain on you. When dealing with evil people you go into protection mode because they will hurt you eventually if you don’t protect yourself. When dealing with these types of people you need to have lawyers, guns and money at your disposal in order to effectively mitigate their actions.