The Costs When No One is Held Accountable
OK leaders, I’m counting on you to have done the work to address the last profitability killer we looked at, The Cost of Confusion, by taking the steps to set clear expectations for your teams. Even with the most detailed explanation though, we’re not likely to see our team members meet or exceed those expectations - at least not over the long haul - if we don’t have a culture of accountability. With that in mind the next profitability killer we need to work through will address the costs our businesses have to eat when no one is held accountable!
Accountability covers a fairly broad range; we each hold ourselves to a certain standard, we’re all accountable to the rule of law within the society we’re a part of, and there’s inevitably a level of accountability for performance in the organizations where we make our living. For our purposes here, I’m going to skip the personal accountability. If you’ve hung with me through each of the other profitability killers we’ve looked at so far, I expect you’ve got that well in hand. And as much as I’d like to jump on a soapbox about the importance of accountability for our actions in society, and how the lack thereof is a direct contributor to the decay we’re experiencing in the rule of law, that’s a fight for another day. What we will be digging into with both hands is how we can recognize when more accountability is needed within the teams we lead, what it costs us when we haven’t maintained accountability, and steps we can take to ensure accountability is a vital part of our culture. First though, let’s make sure we’re singing from the same sheet of music with regards to why this even matters…
In an article called Holding People Accountable: Where Most Leaders Fail, Shannon Howard shared this from the CEO Benchmarking Report done by The Predictive Index:
Holding people accountable is difficult—even for leaders who head up companies. Eighteen percent of the CEOs we surveyed cited “holding people accountable” as their biggest weakness. Additionally, 15 percent struggle with “letting go of underperformers.”
If we consider either of those groups by themselves, I believe we could easily brush over them as not being that big of a deal. But if we add the two together (for one-third of all the CEOs they surveyed) and we keep in mind that these CEOs should be the most developed leaders in their respective organizations, isn’t it likely that there’s an even higher percentage of folks in other supervisory or management roles within their companies who struggle even more to hold their teams accountable? Since that’s one of those rhetorical questions, let’s push on with why this is a problem!
Howard went on to share this as to how this impacts a business:
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.
One of the most common things I’ve heard a supervisor or manager say, once they finally had all they could stand and decided to address unacceptable behavior, has been along the lines of “You’ve done this for the last time and I’m not going to stand for it anymore!” While it is indeed a manager’s responsibility to address poor behavior, the most common response I’ve heard from the employee goes something like this, “If what I’ve been doing has been so bad, why didn’t you say anything before now? I thought you didn’t mind…”
Let’s be honest, most of us have heard a dialog like that between parents and their children just as often as we’ve heard it in the workplace - and the results aren’t all that different when there’s no consistency in accountability. All those times we (as parents or leaders) choose to look the other way when expectations aren’t being met, we’ve in fact endorsed that behavior as acceptable. This certainly damages our credibility and it will be a source of frustration to anyone around who is holding themselves to a higher level of accountability, but it also comes with a price tag so let’s detail some of the specific costs an organization faces when no one is held accountable!
The Costs of Unaccountability - How Much and Where?
Let’s consider some of what Shannon Howard shared 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 businesses are impacted by it! Once we’ve come to terms with its 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 sounds something like this, “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 part of a team, 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 so much as 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!
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!