Developing Resilient Employees During Economic Uncertainty

 

“It’s the not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”   --Charles Darwin

Adversity comes in many forms. It may be the current economic precarity, many constant changes, or dozens of small pressures. Genuine leaders and their people do more than cope with such adversities—they gain strength from them; they bounce back; they are resilient.

In comments about psychologically healthy people, Abraham Maslow referred to the continental divide principle. He said, “I use this principle to describe the fact that stress will either break people altogether if they are in the beginning too weak to stand distress, or else, if they are already strong enough to take the stress in the first place, that same stress, if they come through it, will strengthen them, temper them, and make them stronger.” 

How do some people thrive, gain strength while others in the same circumstances get weaker? What makes the difference?

Resilient people follow a similar pattern of actions after being knocked off track by disruptive change. They:

• Regain emotional balance.
• Cope during the transition.
• Adapt to the new reality.
• Recover to a stable condition.
• Thrive by learning to be better and stronger than before

In the Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck says, “Wise people learn not to dread but actually welcome problems.” The school of life arranges for great learning opportunities for people who react to difficulties by learning new skills."

Tough challenges may call on your ability to use both logical reasoning and your intuition. Although these qualities may seem contradictory, being able to use both can be a tremendous help in doing the right thing at the right time.

Many authors write about people as being optimists or pessimists, as type A or type B personalities. Yet many resilient people are both optimistic and pessimistic, impatient as well as calm. How can a person be both one way and the opposite? What is the relationship between being resilient and having paradoxical personality traits?

Resiliency studies arrive at one inescapable conclusion: The one trait that contributes most to being resilient is flexibility or adaptability. 

Why does being flexible increase your chances of responding to tough circumstances? Having a variety of available responses is crucial when handling variable, unpredictable, chaotic, or changing conditions. Successful people in any profession know that it is better to have many possible responses than to be limited to a few. Adaptation is crucial to survival in nature as well as among people.

If you look at someone who does not handle life well, it is often because he always thinks, feels, or acts in only one way and would never consider the opposite. Many people are so taken with the idea of being self-starting, for example they lose sight of the need for the counterbalancing skill of being self-stopping.

Many college students act as if they have only two choices about studying. At one extreme is the bookworm and at the other extreme is the party animal. Students who get the most out of college (or work for that matter) are able to both study and play. They study effectively, stop, and then have time for other important activities.

Resiliency can’t be taught but it can be learned. You can create a plan for developing qualities and skills that will improve your  and your team's ability to handle any adversity. In the plan, you may want to consider some of the following.

• Ask questions. Respond to change, new developments, threats, confusion, trouble or criticism by asking, What is happening? Develop a curiosity reflex. In this way you can practice reading new situations more rapidly.
• Increase your mental and emotional flexibility. Tell yourself, “It’s all right to feel and think in both one way and the opposite. Develop many response choices for yourself.
• Assume that change and having to work with uncertainty and ambiguity are a way of life from now on. Learn to handle change with self-confidence. Experiment with different approaches and note consequences.
• Learn how to learn from all experiences. Learning is the antidote to feeling victimized. When you learn to see difficult people and events as your teachers in the school of life, you can examine your vulnerabilities and blind spots and learn how to handle yourself better. The more you take from these encounters, the more capable and effective you become.
• Develop empathy. Put yourself in the other person’s place. Ask, what does she feel and think? What are their views, assumptions, explanations, and values? How does he or she benefit from acting the way they do?
• Resist putting labels on others. In every encounter you should observe and describe what others say and do to give you insight into what they currently think and feel. Resist the urge to label the person because once you’ve put a label on someone, you unconsciously look for ways to reinforce you perception and could be blinded to or dismissive of subtle changes the person makes.
• Take time to observe and reflect. Take several deep breaths. Scan you feelings. Be alert to fleeting impressions and the early cues about what might be happening around you.
• Make yourself useful in all situations. Ask yourself, “What can I do so that things work well for everyone?” Your ability to find ways to be useful makes you valuable—and valued.
• Take time to appreciate yourself. Appreciate your accomplishments. Feelings of positive self regard help blunt the sting of hurtful criticism.

Adversity can lead to discovery of strengths you and your team did not know you all had.  An experience seen as emotionally toxic for others can be made emotionally nutritious for you and your team. 

A difficulty that almost breaks a person's spirit can be turned into one of the best thing that ever happened to them. It is all up to you and your team--your/their attitude and your/their willingness to expand the repertoire of available reactions will determine how well you and your team respond today's economic uncertainty and other challenges in the future.

Be well and find joy and laughter whenever you can,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

 

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, third-party maintenance providers, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Four Things that Keep Managers Up At Night (And how you can sleep better)

 

The Inevitable Challenges Every Manager Must Face with Surprising Regularity

The research shows that the overwhelming majority of the seemingly inevitable problems that vex managers almost always flow from these factors:

• Staff discontinuity. People come and go. That’s always been true. But employment relationships today are far more short-term and fluid than they have been before in the modern economy. So you are always losing good people. And you are always trying to get new people on board and up to speed. On top of that, one great employee is worth more than 2-3 mediocre employees. Sometimes you have to go to great lengths to effectively reward, retain and develop the very best employees.

• Constant change coming at you from every direction. Technology. The markets. The weather. Geopolitics. Micropolitics. Customer requirements; vendor requirements; employee requirements. Change regularly forces rework, often involving lots of moving parts, and therefore lots of counterparts here, there, and every where.

• Inter-dependency. Again, more and more of our work involves lots of moving parts and therefore lots of counterparts here, there and everywhere. Most people must rely on many others within and outside of their immediate work group in order to do their own work.

• Employees being human. Human beings have strengths as well as weaknesses. Humans are not always great a self-management. They have habits, and not always good ones. Not only that, but everybody has bad days. Some people have bad weeks, months, and years. Productivity and quality of work are highly variable, sometimes due to employee performance. On top of that, humans have attitudes, and not always good ones.

How Managers Spend Much of Their Time

Many managers spend too much of their time on four insidious time drains.

1. Attending Too Many Mediocre Meetings

Group meetings, team meetings, cross-functional, special projects, committees. Meetings are a big time suck for managers. Ask any manager.

Most of us work in highly interdependent workplaces where we all must rely on each other on complex projects with lots of moving pieces. With more and more people working interdependently, there are more and more meetings.

A well-run meeting can be good for:

• Communicating in-person information that everybody needs to know.

• When multiple people need to discuss and solve a problem together.

• Shared experiences to build cohesion, commitment and motivation.

But so many meetings are not very good. Too many people attend too many meetings in which they neither add value nor take anything valuable away. Five people in a room for an hour—that's five hours of productive capacity in the room. You better make those meetings good.

Meetings (Unless intentionally designed for it) are also not very good for creating real accountability. It’s too easy to hide in a team meeting. It’s even easier to point fingers and divert attention.

2. Wading Through A Never-Ending Tidal Wave of Email

Electronic communication is at everybody’s fingertips all the time. You inbox pulls you in and demands you reply. It’s so hard to resist.

At its best, email is great for:

• Communicating remotely information that everybody needs to know.

• Documenting verbal communication.

• Maintaining asynchronous conversation in between scheduled conversations.

But so much of email is unnecessary, duplicative, and/or sloppy. The pernicious thing about all that email is that mixed in with all the bad email is important information, and we want to assume that, because we sent it, the recipient had read and understood it. Even worse than a message never sent is a message sent but never received.

3. Touching Base, Checking In, and Shooting the Breeze

“How are you?” “How’s everything going?” “Is everything on track?” “Are there any problems I should know about?”

These are questions managers most commonly ask their direct reports, yet they tell you very little about what’s really going on. They are gestures, mostly. You might as well say, “Tell me you are fine.” “Tell me everything is going fine.” “Tell me everything is on track.” “Tell me there are no problems I should know about.”

The worst thing about managing by “touching base” is that it makes you feel like you are staying on top of things, but it takes a lot more than rhetorical questions to really stay on top.

The right questions are: “What did you do? How did you do it? What steps did you take? What step are you on right now? Questions like that can’t be asked and answered in a meaningful way if the conversation happens just in passing.

4. Interrupting and Being Interrupted

Something pops into your head, you interrupt them. Something pops into their head, they interrupt you. “Do you have a minute?”

When you are interrupted, you are not at your best. Most likely you were in the middle of something. You have to break your attention. Pull yourself out of whatever it is you were doing. Try to focus. But you are not prepared. And what you really want is to get back to whatever it is you were doing before you were interrupted. Your responses to your direct reports (and anyone else) when you are interrupted are never going to be as thorough and accurate as they would be if you had time to prepare. The same is true for your direct reports and other colleagues when you interrupt them.

So what’s a manager to do? 

What do the very best managers do? The managers whose employees consistently deliver the highest productivity and quality, with high retention of the high performer and high turnover among the low performers, with the best business outcomes and high engagement/morale and team spirit, whose direct reports are most likely to describe the manager as “one of the best manager I’ve ever had.”

What is the common denominator among those managers? An abiding commitment to the fundamentals—relentless high quality communication. Consistently engaging every direct report in an ongoing, structured, content-rich one-on-one dialogue about the work that person does and the internal and external customers they serve. Things go much better when managers consistently make expectations clear and provide candid feedback for each individual every step of the way. Use team meeting only for what team meetings are good for—and make the most of them.

When managers build and maintain high-quality one-on-one dialogues with their direct reports, they almost always increase performance and engagement and achieve significant measurable improvements in business outcomes.

Check out these related posts: 

The Single Biggest Mistake A Leader Can Make

Keystone Habits: The Hyperlink to Accelerating Your Leadership Impact. 

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

 

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, third-party maintenance providers, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

How to Get Clarity, Accountability and Results in Five Minutes

 

FRUSTRATION!

The team and I had just invested three hours wrestling with significant issues.

We defined the criteria that would make for a good decision…we had healthy debate among different opinions…we listened…we looked for alternatives…we considered consequences to the organization…we pushed hard looking for the best answers…

And finally we made a decision.

Or we thought we did.

WHAT HAPPENED?

Six weeks later we were back together to discuss results.

And everyone looked at each other…

Maybe you know the look – a little nervous, eyes wide, searching the room for safety in numbers.

No one had followed through on what we’d decided to do.

Not one person.

After spending all that time and energy to arrive at a productive solution, nothing happened.

We had wasted our time.

What happened?

A DECISION IS NOT A DECISION WITHOUT…

Many teams and leaders have experienced this frustrating lack of follow-through after decisions are made.

It can happen even with a team of high caliber, motivated people who take their work seriously.

The reason is that in arriving at a decision, you have only answered one out of four essential questions.

You have answered the “Why”, as in: “Why do we want to do this?”

The answers to the next three questions take a decision from being a nice idea and turn it into reality – something that gets done.

And the good news is that for most decisions, it only takes five minutes to answer them:

1. Who Is Doing What?

Until someone is actually doing something, nothing has changed from before you made the decision.

Until then, it is just a nice idea.

Keen readers will recognize two questions here: what is being done? who is doing it?

I prefer to combine them because it forces ownership. There is no task without a specific person having responsibility for completing it.

For smaller decisions there might be only one or two answers to this question. For larger strategic initiatives you might have an entire work plan outline dozens of tasks and people responsible.

2. By When?

As a team, agree upon deadlines for tasks to be completed.

When these deadlines are shared and publicly available, everyone is much more likely to meet them.

3. How Will We Know?

This is a critical question and the one teams most frequently ignore.

When someone completes a task, what do they do next?

• Do they need to pass the results to another person or group?
• Should they update the team and let them know?
• Will they make a presentation of their findings?
• Do they report completion in a project management software?

The specific answers depend on the task and project.

The point is accountability and efficiency.

Everyone knows what they are accountable to do, the team knows if it’s been completed, and no one is left waiting around for information they need.

STAND OUT

Who is doing what? By When? How will we know?

You can ask these questions whether you are the positional leader of a group or not.

In fact, it’s a great way to establish yourself as a leader who gets things done – people notice when you produce clarity, accountability, and results.

These questions aren’t new – you probably learned them in your earliest school days.

Despite their simplicity, many teams struggle to get things done because they don’t get clear answers to every one of these questions.

If you want anything to change, they are the most important five minutes you’ll spend.

Click here to read a related post: The Enormous Cost of Unclear Communication--And What To Do About It.

To your greater success and fulfillment

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

 

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, third-party maintenance providers, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

 

Don't Just Promote Accountability – Build a Culture of Ownership (Where People Pick Up the Trash)

 

Accountability and ownership are similar but not the same. Here's why it matters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Organizations have an accountability crisis, according to the Workplace Accountability Study. Leaders know that accountability is vital for success. However, they struggle to build a culture of ownership within their teams. 82% of respondents say they have limited to no ability to hold others accountable – they either try but fail or avoid it altogether.

Employees don't have a good relationship with accountability either. Accountability systems fail to motivate them. Most people think that feedback occurs only when things go wrong. A study by Gallup found that only 14% of employees feel their performance is managed in a way that inspires them to take more responsibility.

When accountability is absent, people don't take obligations seriously. Only  one-third see due dates (or "by-whens") as real commitments. A vast majority aren't sure what their company is trying to achieve and one-third feel that priorities frequently change, creating confusion.

Accountability is difficult to achieve, yet attainable. One of the problems I see is that leaders think they can impose a sense of responsibility on others. Instead, I advise that they focus on creating a culture of ownership – if you want people to feel responsible, empower them to own their work.

The Differences Between Accountability and Ownership

We’re living in a metrics-obsessed world and organizations are using a staggering number of metrics. However, they struggle to create accountability systems that actually work.

PartnerHero CEO Shervin Talieh wrote on Forbes, "How we approach metrics has remained largely unchanged. Our mindset around metrics and the way we measure outputs are topics conspicuously missing in most discussions about the future of work."

As Talieh explains, there's a dangerous side to being metrics-obsessed: "This creates organizational rigidity and establishes that when the target is hit, people can take their foot off the gas. Simply put, it stops the cycle of continuous improvement."

Often leaders focus on monthly and quarterly results, promoting short-term thinking rather than true accountability. Thus, people care more about hitting the metric of the month than about doing the right thing.

Take the idea of tying CEO's bonuses to stock price. It definitely drives stock increase, but at what price? By focusing on selfish metrics, companies pay a long-term price – employees and the community also suffer the consequences.

This doesn't mean you should stop using metrics, but instead focus on building a culture of ownership. Reward the behavior that will help you achieve your key performance indicators.

Accountability and ownership go hand in hand but are two different things.

Accountability is to be held responsible for fulfilling your duties and responsibilities. It requires answers and has consequences. Accountability is an external process defined by others. Someone – the organization or your manager – will hold you accountable by providing goals and measuring progress.

However, a sense of ownership is not something that you can impose. It's intrinsic rather than extrinsic, just like motivation. People (not you) choose what drives them. The good news is that when team members feel ownership, they don't just care about achieving the goals: they go the extra mile.

In healthy cultures, people have a strong sense of ownership. They don't need external pressure to achieve lofty goals. No one is waiting for someone else to do something – or to tell them to do something.

Where ownership is the motivation, accountability is taking responsibility for the outcome.

Taking ownership of a project doesn't mean you own it – it means you care about your role and the overall outcome. Taking ownership is a commitment. You feel responsible to yourself, not just others.

A culture that lacks ownership is easy to spot, usually manifesting in:

• Silos across teams: When people focus on small pieces or don't do something because it's not their job.
• Bystander effect: Everybody sees the trash, but no one cares to pick it up (more on this later).
  

Do as I say, not as I do: Managers expect people to operate in a certain way but then act as if rules don’t apply to themselves.

Ownership-driven employees take the initiative – they commit to tasks as they see them arise and don't need to be told what to do.

 
Why Psychological Ownership Matters for Your Team

Accountability is doing what's rewarded or measured; ownership is taking good care of your work and responsibilities.

People understand what they are accountable for – consequences for underperformance are often clear. However, being held to account causes anxiety. A recent neuroscientific study revealed that we respond to being rated with a sense of being threatened — we feel unsafe when someone puts us in a box in this way.

Accountability systems are the formal and informal ways that leaders talk about, assess, and reinforce the contributions of team members. They include everything from annual performance appraisals and routine check-ins to measuring progress toward goals and tracking project milestones.

Ownership inspires people to go above and beyond. It's a state of mind in which you feel in charge. Not only do you have the motivation, agency, and willingness to step up – you will also do whatever it takes to achieve the goals.

Psychological ownership is the experience of being psychologically tied to something, creating a powerful emotional connection. As behavioral scientist Francesca Gino wrote, "The state of psychological ownership is not only cognitive but also affective: simply by calling an entity — whether an object, another person, or a job — 'mine' suggests that we have an emotional connection to it."

According to the Gallup, building a culture of ownership is the result of multiple elements:

•     Challenging work and problems to solve
•     Meaningful goals with a clear purpose
•     Autonomy to decide how to achieve goals
•     Connection to the team, job, and organization
•     Opportunities to grow as a result of going above and beyond
•     Feeling appreciated by colleagues and leaders
  

Research by Perce et al. uncovered three roots that contribute to psychological ownership: efficacy, self-identity, and belonging.

Efficacy is the ability to produce a result – the satisfaction of creating an outcome based on one's actions. Self-identity results from what we feel we own: if you love your job, you attach your identity to it. Self-identification can be felt toward a purpose, team, job, or company. Finally, belonging is a fundamental part of being human, as we are social animals who need to be connected to others to thrive.

For an employee, psychological ownership is not always necessary for work but definitely enhances it. A study by the University of Minnesota Duluth found that psychological ownership is associated with job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, and performance.

The same study uncovered that accountability and responsibility result from psychological ownership rather than drive it. When we feel ownership, we expect accountability from ourselves and others.

Accountability is the path to psychological ownership.

A manager responsible for the success of a project will feel personally accountable for the outcome but will also expect participation and accountability from team members. By feeling this type of personal and managerial responsibility, a sense of ownership for the outcome quickly develops.

Interestingly enough, according to research by David McConville, formal ownership rights (such as stock options or profit-sharing schemes) don't necessarily increase psychological ownership and productivity.

Ownership is not about making people feel like owners but that they own their work. 

How to Build a Culture of Ownership

Focus on the why

Often leaders are so obsessed with creating alignment around goals and metrics that they lose perspective – they focus on the tree, not the forest. While ensuring team members know 'what' they need to achieve is vital, it's still more important that they understand the 'why.'

Rather than focus on the outcome, emphasize the impact you’re looking for. Creating a culture of constant improvement or Kaizen is more important than creating more business leads. Instead of "We need to increase the number of clients by X," try, "We want to provide such a high-quality service that clients will not want to do business with other companies than ours."

Don't just tell your team what they need to achieve – be absolutely certain they get the why. Define what success would look like and let people decide how to achieve it.

Pick up the trash

In most companies, people ignore the trash on the floor, leaving it for someone else to pick up. At Netflix, picking up the trash is a metaphor for taking care of problems, small and large. The company doesn't have a rule to enforce it but rather promotes a sense of ownership. Picking up the trash is a habit built naturally to prevent the "that's not my job" excuse.

Encourage discipline, not rules.

Netflix provides employees with lots of freedom, power, and information to make decisions. In turn, it generates a sense of ownership and self-discipline. To avoid controlling rules, Netflix trusts that employees have its best interests at heart. Whenever there's an issue, they ask tough questions to make sure no one leaves the trash for others to pick up:

• Are expectations being clearly communicated or was misunderstanding a key cause of this?
•     Is this problem created by an outlier who may not be a fit at Netflix?
•     Why would someone acting as a responsible adult do this?
  

Reward collaboration, not individual goals – ownership is a collective mindset.

Delegate authority, not just responsibility

Managers often expect people to become more accountable without giving them the power to make decisions. Distributing decision-making rights to those closest to the work provides speed and, usually, better outcomes. Those in more proximity to the 'client' or problem are better informed to make decisions.

The Andon Cord is a concept that was vital to the Toyota Production System. It consisted of a pull cord or button that any worker could activate to stop production, prevent faulty cars, and fix the problem.

Delegating authority increases a sense of ownership – people take the outcome more seriously. If you want people to own the consequences, let them own their decisions.
Reward the behavior, not the metric

Adding accountability does not always equal success. When Mailchimp added the notion of direct accountability to a measure for one of their teams a few years back, team members chose work that drove the metric they were accountable for – to the detriment of overall customer experience and revenue. A classic example of perverse incentives.

As John Foreman, Chief Product Officer at Mailchimp, wrote, "When you add accountability to the movement of a measure, you do indeed 'get what you measure.' But it often feels Shakespearean. You get what you measure, but what you get is not what you wanted."

Mailchimp learned that it's better to focus on indirect accountability: Reward the behaviors that help move the needle.

Rather than checking if his team "moved the measure," Foreman recommends asking:

•     What are the levers you have on the team for moving your measures?
•     Why did you think the work you just completed would move your measures? Why do you think it did or didn't have the desired results?
•     What have you learned from that experience that will influence your next work?
•     Tell me why the work you've planned next, then, is going to move your measures?
  

Employees should own the behaviors that will move the metric – they should do what's right, not just achieve a short-term target.

Focus on the end product, not the project

The difference between focusing on the project and the end product is ownership. It encourages people to care about quality and outcome, not just deadlines or milestones.

Customer engagement platform Twilio organizes staff into small teams that own the experience from end to end. As CEO Jeff Lawson explains, "Our teams are defined by three things: the customer they're serving, the mission they're on in service of that customer, and the metrics that tell us whether we're doing a good job." This approach allows each team to take the ball and run with it.

Leaders at Twilio strive to poke holes through the organization to increase visibility across teams. For example, developers sit in on sales calls or occasionally handle support tickets for their products.

When people focus on the forest, not the tree, their sense of ownership increases.

Stop rewarding unfairness

When organizations give underperformers a pass, they reward a lack of accountability. Even worse, they usually punish high-performers by giving them more work to offset low performers' inefficiency.

Fairness is crucial to promoting a sense of ownership within your team. If people don't feel treated fairly – either because managers play favorites or give low performers a pass – they will disengage or fight to get credit. This thus promotes individuality.

Prioritizing fairness at work helps overcome biases within accountability systems. Studies show that managers tend to treat certain groups advantageously over others. Fairness is about rewarding people for the outcome, not input such as presenteeism or busyness.

Allow people to define standards

When goals and metrics are defined by managers, they feel foreign. It's hard for people to own something that "comes from the top" without being consulted. Inviting people to help define the standards not only creates ownership: it also removes the need to get buy-in.

Hubert Joly, a former CEO of Best Buy, applied that principle to turn the dying electronics retailer around. He asked store managers, "What does it look like when we are at our best?" By encouraging employees to dream of a better future – to define the standard for the company – Joly created a culture of collective ownership.

When people help set the bar, they feel more motivated to reach and exceed their goals.

Building a culture of ownership

Accountability is important, but ownership creates a more profound impact. A culture of ownership replaces blame with questions. When things go wrong, people focus on learning from it instead of pointing fingers.

As a leader, showing genuine appreciation can go a long way in reinforcing positive behaviors. Reward those who step up and go above and beyond. Avoid giving a pass to those who don't care – this will send the wrong message to those who do have a sense of ownership.

Metrics matter. However, focusing on doing the right thing is more important. Reward the behaviors that move the needle, not the people who are good at beating the accountability system.

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

 

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement ? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.