We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know…

In seeing how much profitability we can miss out on when we lose credibility and our team becomes less loyal, and those certainly aren’t the only issues we’ll see if we aren’t holding our team members accountable, one may ask why a leader would even consider allowing this to go on… I believe the answer is very simple and it ties back to the old adage about not seeing the forest for the trees… Sometimes we just don’t know what we don’t know!

I’ve emphasized it repeatedly as we’ve looked at each of the profitability killers leading up to this point; I’ve never seen someone with any significant amount of leadership responsibility who has an abundance of free time. To that end, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a leader with ANY free time. One thing that makes a leader effective is how they use their time, and that time is rarely used looking for things to do; the things to do tend to find the leader… And a heavy load of responsibilities to juggle can be those trees that keep us from seeing the forest.

I can’t point to a single time where I’ve heard a leader say, “I just don’t think it matters if I don’t hold my team accountable, credibility and loyalty aren’t that important anyway…” But I have seen countless situations where supervisors or managers have had multiple fires burning their backsides and they’ve had to choose which one gets their immediate attention. In many cases, an employee’s behavior isn’t terrible or their performance is only a little bit below what’s expected so the manager focuses their attention on something more urgent in that moment. (I remember getting some advice a long time ago suggesting that I be very cautious about allowing the urgent to take priority of the important…)

Since the behavior isn’t really that bad or the performance isn’t completely unacceptable, the show goes on - and so does the downward spiral. Whether it’s through that particular employee perceiving it as approval or through others watching it unfold taking this as permission to follow suit, conditions begin to drift. Unfortunately, all the busy-ness often keeps that manager from noticing all the little shifts until it smacks them in the face - typically in the form of a monthly productivity report… By that time, all the little behaviors or small daily misses in performance have compounded AND the folks involved have assumed everything was just fine.

I can’t count the number of times where supervisors or managers have come to me about an employee they wanted to fire but have ZERO documentation that addressed any poor performance leading up to that point. They had clearly reached their boiling point but no single situation was a big enough issue to pull them away from the urgent before this. The key to changing this and building a culture of accountability, one where we have a solid chance of capturing the profitability we lose when no one is held accountable, lies in recognizing where and when accountability is beginning to drop off so we’ll work through that before outlining the specific steps we can take to build the culture of accountability that we need!