Accountability and freedom are two sides of the same coin. When people are not delivering up to your expectations, it’s tempting to try to enforce accountability. Unfortunately, the more you try to control people, the less accountable they’ll become.
A few years ago, a mill was losing about $1 million a year due to employee theft. Stealing had become a company norm and people were taking tools even if they didn’t need them.
There was an implicit sense of pride in getting away with murder – especially trying to stealing the biggest piece of equipment. Management installed video surveillance and threatened retaliation. Rather than backing off, the challenge made the experience of stealing even more thrilling for people.
Accountability is always a sign of trust. It took a mindset shift to drop the stealing to almost zero. Instead of trying to control people, the company chose freedom.
Not Trusting People Is More Costly than the Risks of Trusting Them
Company rules send a clear message about how organizations perceive people. By installing cameras and threatening people, management were treating all employees as thieves. Thus, adding more fire to the fire.
The mill hired an organizational psychologist to uncover the root cause. After interviewing people, Gary Latham realized that employees didn’t want to get revenge on the company or make money. They were stealing simply for the thrill of it.
Latham’s advice was not to punish people, but to kill the thrill instead. He created a policy that is both effective and genius: “Employees can borrow equipment from the mill anytime they want.”
By making it officially allowed to remove equipment from the premises, the thrill was gone. It also cleared the past and rebuilt trust. Employees could return previously “borrowed” equipment without retaliation – no questions asked.
Your company norms say a lot about your assumptions about people – the more you control, the less you trust them.
Cynical managers micromanage, withhold information, and create limiting policies, harming trust and engagement. It’s no surprise then that organizations are facing a trust issue, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Small businesses are not immune to this phenomenon. Only 43% of employees trust their business leaders and managers, according to Breathe’s Culture Economy Report – a 16% decline in trust since 2018.
Because employees don’t trust the companies they work for, employers have to take the first step and rebuild trusting relationships with their employees.
There's a risk in trusting people, but the cost of not trusting them is much higher.
As Stephen M. R. Covey wrote in The Speed of Trust, “When trust goes down, speed goes down and cost goes up. The inverse is equally true: When trust goes up, cost goes down and speed goes up.”
Building a culture of freedom and accountability requires trust. Start with positive assumptions about your employees.
Don’t Kill Freedom; Change Your Mindset Instead
To build a culture of trust and freedom, make explicit all the assumptions under which your organization operates. Get ready to be caught off-guard.
That’s what happened to Dennis Bakke, the founder and CEO of Fortune 500 AES, when he realized how employees feel treated:
- Lazy – if they aren’t watched, they won’t do their work
- Transactional – they just work for the money and nothing else
- Selfish – they put their own interests over the organization’s
- Incapable of making good decisions – that’s why bosses must make them instead
- They need to be told what to do, how, and when – without bosses, there’s no accountability
Sounds harsh, right? But that's probably how some of your employees feel treated, too. Distrust harms not only morale and performance, but also self-esteem.
Most companies operate with a what gets rewarded gets done mindset. That’s why they struggle to increase accountability. Executives use perks, salary increases, and bonuses to motivate people, but a carrot-and-stick approach is ineffective to increase accountability.
Purpose, mastery, and autonomy are the best way to reward your team. Intrinsic motivation is more effective than extrinsic to drive people.
Mastery is the desire to improve. Seeing our potential as unlimited drives us to learn and practice. Getting better at what we do is more rewarding than any medal or award. As John R. Katzenbach wrote in Why Pride Matters More than Money, in the long-term, it’s what is rewarding that gets done.
A shared purpose drives people; they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. As Patty McCord wrote in Powerful, “The greatest motivation is contributing to success.” However, people want autonomy to achieve the mission in their own, best way.
Existential philosophy states that freedom is a fundamental condition of human existence. We are autonomous and love to make our choices, not to follow orders. Even when we receive one, we are free to decide whether or not we will carry it out.
Building a culture of freedom and accountability starts by reframing the corporate mindset. Here’s how AES leadership defined a new set of norms about its people:
- Are creative, thoughtful, trustworthy adults, capable of making important decisions
- Are accountable and responsible for decisions and actions
- Are fallible; we make mistakes, sometimes on purpose
- Are unique
- Want to use our talents and skills to make a positive contribution to the organization and the world
Treat people the way they want to be treated, not based on your assumptions.
How to Balance Freedom and Responsibility in Your Organization
Each organization has its own culture. Be ready to experiment and see what sticks with your team. Instead of copying what others are doing, create a framework that works for your organization. Use the following ideas as inspiration.
Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach:
You cannot impose freedom. Instead of developing a single plan for the entire organization, allow managers to consider what works best for their teams. Give them the freedom to work with their colleagues on how to approach freedom.
Align on the mission and values, provide freedom to execute:
Having a shared purpose brings people together. When everyone is part of something bigger than themselves, freedom feels less risky.
Freedom requires discipline:
Removing limiting policies and distributing authority doesn’t mean that your culture becomes a free-for-all. You need to define clear priorities, expected behaviors, and what’s promoted and rewarded, too. Designing a culture of freedom requires a framework.
Establish peer-to-peer systems:
Building a culture of freedom is not a free-for-all approach. Self-management organizations have systems in place to provide some structure. It’s not about removing control but building collective accountability.
Take the first step:
In most organizations, you have to earn trust. Many benefits and perks are dependent on your tenure – the longer you work there, the more trustworthy you become. Although this an established rule, it doesn’t make sense at all.
Turn managers into coaches:
A culture of freedom and accountability doesn’t require control over people. The role of managers should shift from overseeing people to providing advice and context rather than orders.
Establish a conflict-management system:
People’s disputes and conflicts usually land on HR or managers’ desks. This established habit quickly escalates things. Managers end up resolving most conflicts rather than encouraging people to solve them by themselves.
Focus on outcome, not presenteeism:
Micromanagement is more pervasive than we think. The pandemic has only made things worse, making it more tempting for managers to micromanage remote employees.
There are three levels of accountability, as Timothy R. Clark explains: task, process, and outcome. Organizations that score low in psychological safety focus on tasks or processes – bosses micromanage people to ensure they do things their way. On the other hand, companies with high trust focus on outcome. They don’t monitor what people do or how many hours they work, but what they get done.
Set up an advice process:
People don’t need empowerment; they need authority to make decisions and move forward without going through multiple approval levels. The advice process balances freedom with diverse perspectives – it seeks input and advice from those affected or those with expertise.
Increase Trust to Increase Accountability
When trust issues affect your organization, you can respond in two ways. You can add a surveillance system to control people or make it okay to borrow equipment.
Trust is a two-way street, but someone has to take the first step.
Start by reframing your assumptions about people. Do you think your employees are thieves, lazy, and selfish? Or hardworking, trustworthy, and dependable?
What about your company norms and rules? Do they treat people as grown-ups or kids? Do they promote autonomy or control?
Building a culture of freedom is not about removing accountability, but replacing a command-and-control approach with a system. Rather than enforcing accountability, create a culture of distributed responsibility.
When you doubt people, trust the system. It usually self-corrects.
To your greater success and fulfillment,
Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
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