The $750,000 Accountability Story

Keith was in his mid-50s, and was a managing partner in a large CPA firm. He’d gotten to that level because he was very good at business development – specifically, bringing in brand new clients.

His partner group, on the other hand, were mainly in their 40s. They were all highly competent in their technical abilities, but not very good at bringing in new business. Up until then, they hadn’t needed to concern themselves with that – it was raining clients. And they also saw plenty of growth just from adding on new services to existing client accounts.

All of that changed with the economic landscape in 2008 when the firm began losing clients. And that’s when Keith hired me.

Keith had the skills – they were natural to him. He just couldn’t figure out how to transfer those skills to the people around him. “How do I get people to go to market (when they’ve never had to) and bring in new business??”

The first thing Keith had to understand to become a more accountable leader was that just because something came easily to him, doesn’t mean it came easily to others. “They’re not you,” I often reminded him in our early sessions.

Instead, Keith needed to apply all the components of my accountability system – recapping, meeting his people on a regular basis, asking open-ended questions, developing his people, etc.

Instead of riding the bike for them by micro-managing, managing all the new client meetings himself and exhausting his own network and database to make introductions, he began to use my three core skills of leveraging, collaborating and strategizing.

Leverage: When people told him excuses about how their databases weren’t big enough to bring in any new business, Keith showed them how to mine the gold from even the smallest database. For example, an old college fraternity chum whose brother-in-law happened to be the CFO at one of the firm’s target companies.

Collaboration: As I worked with Keith to show him these strategies, I was also modeling a collaborative approach to putting our heads together to come up with solutions. Keith learned that there was a lot of middle ground between doing everything himself and trying to get people to carry out tasks they weren’t yet equipped to handle.

Strategy: As I taught Keith the accountability system and he started putting it into place, he and his people discovered that those same practices can apply to meetings with new prospective clients. For example, they started slowing down the process and preparing a strategy long before they actually got in front of the potential new client. That way, they weren’t just reacting in the moment and then catching up to the conversation (an approach that certainly hadn’t been working).

Keith wanted to create a legacy at his firm, and his own talent for bringing in new business had brought him a lot of success and the title of managing partner. As a leader, though, I helped Keith see that the real legacy he was creating was empowering his people to land their own new business successes.

The accountability system that I helped Keith put into place resulted in $750,000 in absolutely new client business.

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Make a Date With Accountability

Each time I end a stretch of accountability work with a client, I ask what they’re taking away. For example, I ask about the most memorable things they learned, and where they saw the most growth.

I recently had a final session with a client who’s been with me for two years. He easily came up with 10+ things that he’d gained from our work. We went through the list and discussed the ways his life was better and easier.

We also talked about what he wanted to work on next. The art of acknowledging, he told me, is something he really sees the value and benefit of (plus it costs absolutely nothing). He’s better at it than he used to be, but not as good as he could be.

Knowing I was going to be out of the picture, we put our heads together about how he was going to keep this goal on his radar screen. I asked him about his administrative assistant – how is she doing? When we started working together, he’d rated her at a 3 or 4 out of 10 on the productivity scale.

Like many executives, his admin assistant was a gift he hadn’t unwrapped fully – definitely not making the best use of her time and skills. After addressing his own accountability and communication issues, he now rated her at an 8 out of 10 for productivity.

(Isn’t it funny how when we do work on ourselves, the people around us magically start to change?)

We decided that he would bring her into the conversation and tell her about his goal and why it was important to him. He explained that he wants to continue to acknowledge his people on an ongoing basis, and asked for her suggestions about how she could help.

Here’s the plan they put in place: Each week, she has it in her agenda to remind him about acknowledgment. She’ll send him funny emails, e.g., “Did you acknowledge someone today?” with smiley faces and other cute symbols.

She also tries to keep her ear to the ground about what people in the company are talking about. Instead of getting into gossip or negativity, she looks for opportunities where acknowledgment from the boss would turn someone’s day around and improve their work situation.

The real value of my final accountability session with this client wasn’t identifying his goal – he’d already come to that understanding himself. It was about how he was going to stay accountable for working on it.

Collaborating with his administrative assistant was a way he could help her to help him, improving her productivity and job satisfaction as well. A win for the people he will acknowledge, a win for the admin assistant and a win for him. Win-win-win – hooray!

If you want to improve your working relationships and help your people experience more productivity and job satisfaction, Alan M. Dobzinski offers both executive consultation and meeting facilitation services. Contact him today to get started.

Ground Rules for Productive Meetings

Meetings get a bad rap in the workplace these days, and rightfully so. Too often, meetings are unproductive, boring and a general waste of time.

What’s the problem?

The biggest issue is time. With executives and managers being so overbooked, meetings get cut short when they rush in from the last thing they were trying to get done. As a result, people have all these great ideas but there’s no accountability for follow-up and no carry-over from one meeting to the next.

Ground rules for meetings

I’ve trained hundreds of leaders and team members to use upfront agreements to keep both parties on the same page. And you can do the same thing for your workplace meetings.

Here are my suggested ground rules for communication and accountability that will help to ensure a positive outcome for your meetings. You can adopt these as they are, change them to suit you and your team, or come up with your own. The important thing is that everyone agrees to follow them. And the buck starts here with you – the leader.

Communication Ground Rules

1. Don’t interrupt when others are speaking

2. Give everyone equal “air time”; don’t monopolize the discussion

3. No outside interruptions (cell phones, etc.)

4. Be respectful of other people’s opinions

5. Address the issue, don’t attack the person

6. Listen carefully for the meaning in what others say

7. Don’t generalize; be specific when you state an idea or criticism

8. Express your acceptance and support of others, even if you disagree with an idea

9. Ask questions if you don’t understand something

10. Keep your comments on point

( Click here to download the full list of 25 communication ground rules.)

Accountability Ground Rules

1. Have an agenda and a set of ground rules. Review both of these at the beginning of each meeting, and uphold them.

2. Clearly designate a meeting facilitator; someone must take ownership and don’t assume that everyone knows who it is.

3. Institute a clear process for setting and confirming meeting dates, times and locations.

4. Assign someone to take minutes, and that person must commit to when he or she will deliver the minutes to the rest of the group. Rotate this position through the group.

5. Have a mechanism in place for addressing long-winded storytelling and getting back on track (e.g., who has permission to interrupt that person?).

6. Have a mechanism in place for decision making (e.g., by consensus). Who will be the tie breaker? What is the time limit for coming to a group decision?

7. Once you’ve made a group decision, stick to it. Write up corporate policies and display them with actionable items in bold, larger colors and fonts that stand out.

8. Begin each meeting by closing the loop on (being accountable for) what was discussed/committed to from the last meeting.

9. During the meeting, when a person or group is assigned to accomplish a task, have them immediately schedule time in their calendar to work on that task.

10. Close each meeting with a recap of what was discussed and what commitments were made. Clearly state the action steps, who is responsible for them, and the timeline.

Do meetings have a bad rap in your company? Then they probably deserve it. Are you ready to turn that around?

Alan M. Dobzinski is a masterful meeting facilitator who can make magic out of mayhem and turn stalemates into results. Contact him today to learn more about what he can do for you and your company.

The Consequences of Being Overbooked

From the minute you come in the door, your workday calendar is filled – there are internal meetings, client meetings, project lists and other commitments. One leads right into the next, with no break in between.

Sound familiar? You’re overbooked!

In today’s culture, if you’re not doing something at all times, you’re perceived – by others as well as yourself – as being unproductive. So you schedule back-to-back-to-back meetings that have you doing, running, running, running, doing, doing, doing, from one activity to the next.

Here are three major consequences of being overbooked:

1) You’re not available to people. The people at work (let alone your spouse or kids!) will have trouble getting time with you. They’re missing out on the coaching and development they need, and you’re missing out on having an engaged workforce of people who are working to their full potential.

2) You’ve got no time to think. When you’re running, rushing, acting and doing, there’s no value placed on contemplation or planning – the first things that fall off the calendar when leaders are rushing to meetings or putting out fires.

I always teach my clients the importance of “think, plan, act.” Thinking and planning aren’t leftover activities that you do when (or if) you have time. They’re essential business practices that will make or break your success. But if you’re running around all day, you’ll be too worn out for the real strategic type of thinking you need to be doing.

3) You’re missing things. One meeting goes overtime, so you’re rushing to the next one. Your work time gets bumped, and you’re not able to live up to all of your commitments. Then someone catches you in the hallway with an urgent issue, and throws your schedule further out of whack.

If you’re overbooked with no room in between, you can’t do the problem solving that’s required in the course of a business day. You’ll either have to ignore the fire that’s just cropped up, or tend to it and drop one of your other commitments. It’s one or the other.

To do something really right takes time, and if you’re overbooked, you don’t have that time. That means you’re only doing things half right. Doing things half right means you’re going to have to go back and fix them, and that’s just going to take more time.

If you take a look underneath the hood, I suspect that the reason you’re overbooked is because you’re doing other people’s work for them, you’re making their decisions for them, and you’re picking up the slack instead of holding them accountable to do what they said they would do.

You need to be spending your time doing the strategic thinking, and developing your people to do the doing jobs. Yes, that will take time. And no, you can’t afford to skip this step.

The more responsibility you take on, the busier your day will become, and the less time you’ll have for your most important high-level tasks. It’s a real Catch-22, and one that will only stop when you stop it.

Start by looking at tomorrow’s appointments. Where can you add in some gaps? If you’re looking for something to take out or move, consider which tasks really belong to someone else – and give them back.

Need help wrangling your schedule and making your people accountable for doing their own work? Alan M. Dobzinski is a masterful meeting facilitator who can pull your team together and get you back on top. Contact him online or call 1-800-489-6980.

Move Your Desk

Let’s say you’re a big baseball fan (I know I am), but you spend every game way up in the bleachers because that’s all you can get. You try to follow the games, but eventually you lose interest because it’s just too far away.

Then one day, you get a chance at amazing seats, right over home plate. Sitting there, so close to the action, all of a sudden you’re aware of all these nuances of the game that you never noticed before. You really understand what’s going on, following everything that happens. In fact, the time flies by so quickly that you barely notice the hours pass. At the end of it all, you felt like you were literally IN the game.

In your business, the action is going on down on the field – but where are you? In academia they call it the ivory tower; in business they call it the executive suite, C-suite or penthouse. The point is that when you’re up there, you’re not part of the game. You have completely lost touch with your players. You can’t see the subtleties, the nuances and the details that win or lose a game and you have lost your power to do anything about it.

When it was raining clients, you could get away with that; in today’s economy, you can’t – you need to be in touch and know what’s happening on a daily basis. Otherwise, no one is accountable for their actions. It’s only when you’re on the field or in the front row that you are part of the game; only from there can you see what’s winning or losing the game. And then you’re in a position to influence it.

Sound radical? This is not a new way of doing business; it’s actually a return to an old way that works.

Are you ready for this? It’s time to move your desk.

Executives and managers have to get out of their offices and back onto the floor, back out into the meetings with their clients, back into the rooms with their team, back into their sales force and back onto the production line. It’s time to close the gap between “us” and “them.” If you’re going to keep people accountable, you need to see exactly what they’re doing.

Here’s how this worked for one of my Coaching4Accountability™ clients. When he came to see me, he was stuck and perplexed about an underperforming and inexperienced sales department and didn’t know what to do.

I asked him several open-ended questions that led to an action step of moving his desk from his “throne” upstairs right to the sales department.

Here’s what that move led to:

• Within a few days the owner realized his Sales Manager was not managing at all, but rather managing his kid’s sports teams on the owner’s nickel to the tune of $125,000!!!
• The Sales Manager happens to be his best salesperson, so he put him back on the road immediately; within 10 days, it led to re-capturing a key account that was previously lost due to lack of follow up and accountability; this led to an immediate return of $200,000.
• Within one week, my client identified a salesperson that was clearly not performing, not really even needed; letting him go was a savings of $85,000.
• My client decided to reestablish relationships and personally call on his largest customers. This, along with other actions, led to more than $600,000 in only six weeks!

When we stay in the penthouse, as leaders we’re distancing ourselves from our people. When we’re “up there,” we can never fully understand what’s going on that is destroying our business day by day. Only by getting out of his executive suite and moving his desk could my client identify the under performers on his team.

When people are taking up a disproportionate part of our budget and not contributing proportionately in return, they need to be let go (like the salesperson above) or reassigned (like the Sales Manager). From the front row, you’ll see all the bottlenecks that are blocking productivity and performance, as well as the daily practices that are actually profitable.

What’s really going on in your business, and how do you know? A good leader must check in and check up on a regular basis. Get down there and ask people straight out, “What are you doing? How many people did you call on today? What did they say? What’s your next step to follow up?”

This is NOT micro-managing; this is taking a leadership role – and a coaching role – in ensuring that people meet their expectations. You’re the coach and it’s your job to keep your players accountable. The buck starts with you.