What Accountability is All About

People often ask me why regularly scheduled accountability meetings are so important. They struggle with the thought of adding one more thing to their crowded schedules. Although the meetings do take time, it’s clear that skipping them costs even more because of the extra time needed to hire, train and retrain new staff, or to do projects yourself because your people are not accountable.

“Can’t we just chat for a few minutes in the hallway?” is something else I hear quite a bit. And these hallway meetings are a big part of the culture in many organizations. But they don’t always work.

Accountability is more than a quick stop in a hallway. It’s a process that takes place over time. The old Chinese proverb comes to mind: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Accountability is about teaching people to fish; offering them tools they can use for the rest of their lives, in and beyond the workplace.

While a template of questions and tasks can help you navigate an accountability meeting, the real magic happens beneath the surface. Accountability is really about:

• Creating a supportive environment in which people are challenged and encouraged to reach their full potential.
• Using observation and effective listening skills to help people clearly understand their current situation.
• Helping people tap into their own creativity and resourcefulness to uncover strategies that will help them achieve their goals.
• Providing focus, clarity and awareness of possibilities that will lead to effective choices.
• Empowering people to achieve tangible, sustainable results in productivity, relationships, satisfaction with life and work and the achievement of personal and professional goals.
• Getting a holistic, well-rounded, 360-degree view of each person; on the job and off the job.

The accountability process inevitably includes supporting, listening, helping, clarifying, empowering and seeing your people. But essentially, an accountable leader is a guide. Exactly how much progress is made as a result of the accountability process is largely up to the person receiving the guidance.

How much time do you spend developing your people? Are you catching them in the hallway or sitting down with them on a regular basis? How much could they be accomplishing if they had more support? How would having a team full of effective, empowered, productive, creative and fulfilled people improve your bottom line?

And the most important question: How will you approach your next meeting differently?

If you want to supercharge your next meeting, Alan M. Dobzinski is available for executive meeting facilitation. He’ll get right to the bottom of whatever is stopping or blocking your productivity. Guaranteed. Contact him today to get started.

Accountable Leaders Show That They Care

Hospitals and funerals are two places we rarely want to go. Even when we feel genuine love and concern for the person involved or his/her family, we’re distracted by how going to those places makes us feel – awkward, afraid for our own health or mortality, guilty, sad or a whole host of other emotions that may arise.

This situation has come up for two of my clients – both leaders in their organization. In Jim’s case, a former employee died and Jim was the only one at the company who didn’t attend the funeral.

When I asked why, he said he has a hard time going to funerals. The man who died had a huge family and so the funeral would be chaotic. “It was just too much.”

Jim then went on to tell me how he was going to do something much more meaningful; he was going to the grave site to have a personal visit with the deceased.

That reminded me of my other client who ran into this situation, and so I told Jim the story:

My client Bob was running a department of 40+ people when one of his staff got sick and was hospitalized. Everyone in the department went to visit this person in the hospital. Except for Bob. He just couldn’t, he said, because going to hospitals made him sick. And then the worst happened; his employee died.

Months later, Bob had hired me as an executive consultant, and we did a 360-degree assessment to find out what his staff thought of him. One of the questions rated how much Bob cared for his people. On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the greatest, Bob rated himself at a 4.5. The average rating from his people? 1.8.

When I dug a little deeper and finally heard the story about the sick employee, I was able to show Bob that by not visiting the sick employee in the hospital, he was sending a message to his staff that he didn’t care. They couldn’t see the love in his heart, and it really didn’t matter to them how hard it may have been for him to visit that hospital.

After I finished telling Jim this story, I commented that his former staff’s family wouldn’t see him at the grave site. They wouldn’t hear, see or feel his support and comfort. I encouraged him to go ahead with his personal visit at the grave site, but to also find a way to reach out to this man’s family.

In The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything, Stephen Covey writes, “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.”

What’s in your heart is real to you, but that may not be what the other person is seeing or believing. If your intention is to show your people that you care, your actions have to back that up.

What would your team members say about how much you care about them? Do you think you’d have the same answer? If you want to bring the two ratings closer together, Alan M. Dobzinski is a masterful meeting facilitator who can bring everyone together. Contact him today to get started.

Where’s your drawer money?

My client Joe is in the real estate business. During one of our meetings, he mentioned that he had some unsold properties “in the drawer,” as he called it.

“How many unsold properties are you sitting on?” I asked.

“Three,” he said.

“And how much are they worth to you?” I asked. Meaning his profit.

“You mean, how much money would I make if I sold them?”

“I guess I’d make about $220,000 altogether,” he said. “I just need to make a few repairs and get them on the market. Even in this market, I think they’d sell pretty quickly.”

My eyebrows jumped. “So what you’re saying is that you’ve got $220,000 sitting in your desk drawer (there’s the recap), and you’re not doing anything about it?”

“Well, uh, I guess you could look at it that way.”

I did. So I paused, waiting for Joe to see what I saw.

He didn’t comment, and didn’t seem motivated to take any particular action.

“Let me send you my address,” I said. “Since you’re not very interested in that $220,000, go ahead and send it to me. I can think of a few things to do with it.”

Finally, Joe laughed. Together, we devised an action plan that would help him take the steps necessary to convert that “drawer money” into real money.

The sales didn’t happen overnight. We met in regularly scheduled accountability sessions to review his plans, assess the factors that continued to block his progress, remove the barriers and achieve results. Because we had a clear understanding about our relationship and expectations, I was able to continue gently challenging Joe until he sold all three properties.

I can’t take any credit for these profitable deals. This is an accountability success story, and I share it as a way to remind you of what your people could be achieving, once you learn how to hold them accountable.

They, too, have “drawer money” that they’re not converting to cash, new customers, new ideas, or whatever their responsibilities entail. But they haven’t done it yet because they’re distracted, stuck, don’t know what to do, or are otherwise unable to achieve certain things without some accountability structure.

That’s okay. That’s where you come in as the leader. They need you. With your willingness, their willingness, plus a few accountability tools, you can cash in together. It all begins with stepping up to the plate and saying “yes” to becoming an accountable leader.

What’s in your drawer? Cash? New clients? New ideas?

What are you willing to do today to create the time to meet with your people and develop them for a sustainable future.

This article was adapted from my book, The Accountability Factor: The Buck Starts Here.

If you want to cash in your drawer money and help your people do the same, Alan M. Dobzinski is a master meeting facilitator who can get to the bottom of what’s stopping or blocking your profitability and success. Contact him today to get started.

The REAL Time Cost of Skipping Regular Accountability Meetings

Instead of focusing only on a task — “When will the ABC project be completed?” — an accountable leader also focuses on the person: “How are you doing with the ABC project? What sort of resources do you need? How can I support you?”

Do you see the difference?

Can you imagine how it feels to hear a question about a project, versus a question about you?

This is a big change for many leaders, who protest: “I don’t have time to ask how people are doing, I just need them to get things done!”

I understand. Regularly scheduled accountability meetings do take time. But so does:

1. Complaining about poor performance
2. Taking on tasks yourself because your people aren’t following through
3. Getting done your strategic tasks that you weren’t doing while you were taking over those tactical tasks
4. Firing people
5. Recruiting new people
6. Hiring new people
7. Training new people
8. Retaining people
9. Re-building the team with new people
10. Restoring confidence of the team

Let’s address your lack of time for a moment, because this is something I hear all the time from leaders who are resisting implementing my proven accountability strategies.

Yet whenever I drill down to what’s really going on, the issue is never really about time.

The actual fact is that lack of time is only a perception. The only resource we all receive equally is time. Each one of us has the same 24 hours to work with. So how is it that some people get so much more done than others?

Here’s what I’ve noticed: when something is truly important, we find the time to do it, whether it’s finding time to exercise, or read a good book or improve our golf game.

So “I don’t have time” is not a very good reason. What it really means is, “I don’t really want to, because I don’t see the value and therefore, it hasn’t yet become important to me.”

Ultimately, accountability meetings will save you time. And this time that you invest in your people will pay off exponentially. Here’s what one client had to say about this:

“Because of accountability coaching, I’ve actually created more time in my work life. I’ve learned how to use the resources and people I have more effectively than in the past. I’ve been able to let go, delegate more and be less controlling.”

When you don’t develop your people for the long-run, your success will not be sustainable. You’ll always be playing catch-up or starting from scratch. And this just compounds the feeling of not having enough time.

Once your people see that you care about them, they will become more autonomous, productive and yes, more accountable. Isn’t that worth a few minutes of your time?

Some of this material was adapted from my book, The Accountability Factor: The Buck Starts Here. You can get your own copy at: http://accountabilityexperts.com/resources/alans-book-accountability-factor/