Be an Accountable Leader and Get to Lunch First!
by Lois Melbourne
There are so many traits that make up a good leader. One area that often is overlooked when you talk about good leadership, but seems to almost always be present when you discuss poor leadership is Accountability. A good leader welcomes accountability and takes responsibility for their own actions and their followers actions, when the followers are acting on behalf of the leader or under her instructions.
Leaders doing what they believe in will instill the passion and the need for results. They believe in the need to get something done and they want to assure that it does. That doesn’t mean they take credit for all of the team’s accomplishments, but they are accountable for the results, both the wins and the losses. Great leaders often study other great leaders. They want to find the lessons learned. If they are going to work hard, they want to be able to measure their results. They want measurements that allow them to prove their accountability.
A culture of accountability and visibility is very important within an organization. Let’s consider an occasion I recently discussed with an HR professional of a manufacturing firm. They were celebrating the drop in unplanned absences in the plant. This had been a goal set by the organization that they were going to target for 6 months to improve productivity and morale. During the little celebration of all the managers involved, the HR person noticed one of her star managers seemed very disengaged, and she was surprised. She approached him to ask how he was doing. He took her out into the hallway and poured out his frustrations.
He had taken the goal very seriously. He sat down with his entire staff, and they explained the cause and effect of unplanned absences, which brought up several rough confrontations between his people, but they talked through it and came out on the other side feeling much better about each other, about their productivity goals, and how skipping work impacted those goals. In other words, he engaged his employees, showed great leadership, soothed feelings, and really took a leadership role in the process of lowering unplanned absences. It took a lot of effort. His frustration lay in the fact that some groups in the break room celebrating had not reduced their unplanned absence at all, and one team’s had gone up slightly. Meanwhile, he had dropped his unplanned absences to less than .01% in the 6 months measured. His entire team was watching the number and were accountable to him for this decrease. He was very pleased with this team. The celebration did not take in consideration that some groups had worked really hard to improve the numbers, while other leaders had done nothing but were here celebrating.
This line manager was really getting concerned about what his team was going to say and feel when the news went out to the entire organization, yet the team knew that some groups had not made any effort to improve. How would he keep them motivated in the future if their numbers were not recognized and compared to other teams? How would the other teams ever get the benefit of improvement if they were not called out for missing the goal?
The HR leader jumped into action and asked the Plant Manager to wait 24 hours to release the numbers and news to the line workers. She stayed up all night pulling numbers leader by leader (we could have made that easier for her and hope to in the future) and ranked the managers on their unplanned absences for the 6 months measured. She drew a chart and drew a line between the manager that achieved the goals and those that didn’t. The next day when the Plant Manager made the announcement to the entire staff, the chart was shared. The crews above the line were rewarded with 30 days of being first to release to the cafeteria for lunch (a big deal at this plant, so you don’t get stuck in line waiting for food) Usually, this honor was rotated between crews. Morale jumped and more teams were looking at ways to improve their numbers. The first manager in the story then pressed the Plant Manager for the next goal they needed to conquer. He is leading in accountability and believes it has great results for the company.
Cheers,
Lois
You may also like...
Related Blog Post
Leadership and the Subtle Science of InfluenceRelated Blog Post
Leadership: It's All About Respect: Playing the Enemy
