The Costs of Unaccountability - How Much and Where?

Let’s consider what Shannon Howard shared right off the bat in Holding People Accountable: Where Most Leaders Fail once more:

When accountability is lacking, performance, company culture, and morale suffer. When employees are not held accountable for missed deadlines, bad behavior, or poor performance, a leader’s credibility is damaged and loyalty from their team wavers. This ultimately impacts the leader’s ability to inspire high-performing, winning teams.

To get a solid handle on the profitability that’s killed when no one is held accountable, we need to have an extremely clear understanding of just how many areas of our business are impacted by it! Once we’ve come to terms with it’s reach, we should have far less difficulty in developing and maintaining the accountability necessary to produce great results.

One of the most common reasons I’ve heard for not holding a team member accountable has shown up in the form of making an excuse for the poor performance or the bad behavior. I know that’s never meant to be an excuse, but that’s really what it is… It usually comes in the form of “I know they’re dealing with some things in their personal life right now so I’ll wait until that’s smoothed out to see if this is still an issue” or “they’ve done such a good job for so long, I hate to jump on them this one time.”

I’m guessing you can relate; as an employee watching one of those play out, as the manager who’s said something at least similar, or as both… Here’s where I’m going to challenge you to put your employee hat on  If you’re an employee, working just as hard as you possibly can to exceed the expectations we talked about before, how does it set with you when see your manager walk by your coworker who clearly isn’t doing what they should be doing without addressing it? Since you’re working through this process with me, I have to believe that you’d be a bit frustrated - just like I would! But make no mistake, our manager’s choice not to address a situation like that sends many of our other coworkers a completely different message; one that actually approves of the bad behavior or poor performance! At a minimum, the bar for the type of performance that will be accepted just got a little lower. Unfortunately though, that manager’s influence to lead the team just slipped as well. Here’s one more question for you before we move on: how much discretionary effort are you willing to give a manager you just watched walk by someone else who’s clearly not even meeting expectations? I can’t imagine it would be anywhere close to the 57% additional discretionary effort we looked at before that leads to the 20% improvement in individual productivity…

Howard also mentioned how the team’s loyalty to that leader drops. I’ve mentioned my friend Terry a few times as we’ve worked through these profitability killers. Let me be as clear as I possibly can on this, he’s certainly been a great mentor for close to 25 years but he’s also been very willing to call me out when I’ve done something stupid! (I’ve given him plenty of opportunities for that…) While he and I only talk by phone a few times each year at this point and we see one another in person far less often than that, there aren’t many people on the planet that I’m more loyal to. By always having high expectations for me and holding me very accountable to live up to those expectations, I believe he’s earned it. Think about it from the other side now… How loyal are you to someone who isn’t holding others accountable? And what if they’ve allowed you to do as you please? I expect not much loyalty has been earned like that…

If we miss out on just 10% of that improved productivity from the additional discretionary effort that’s lost when we don’t hold our teams accountable, especially when that’s from the 20% who’s actually actively engaged, that can be a huge loss in profit on an annual basis! And with less loyalty, can we really expect our best performers to stick around? I sure wouldn’t stay in a role where I’m working as hard as I can (and I’m going to regardless of what’s accepted as OK) but others around me are allowed to do whatever they want - and I’m betting that you wouldn’t either. Since any turnover we see from our top performers is likely to cost us closer to 5 times their salary to replace them than half their salary, that total will quickly reach hundreds of thousands - if not millions!

With all that in mind, you’d think not holding a team accountable would be really uncommon. It’s not! Before we can address the issue, we need to understand why it happens so often - and that’s exactly what we’ll do next time!