J: Welcome to Slingshot25’s Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Jackie.
C: And I’m Courtney.
J: And something that we’ve been thinking about a lot, actually, is accountability.
C: Mm-hmm. Everyone’s thinking about it. That’s what I see. Talking about it. Complaining about it.
J: That was my hesitation. When I was going to say something, we’ve been thinking about is accountability, I was really thinking it’s not just we. There’s a much bigger, a much bigger zeitgeist here around accountability.
Everyone’s talking about it. Everybody wants it, and they seem to be struggling with how to make it.
C: Yeah, and, and they’re struggling with, uh… We kind of hear… I don’t think people have ever said this to us explicitly, but they’re kind of saying, “Kids these days, am I right?” Mm. Like, we hire people, they’re not doing what we thought.
It’s really frustrating. Back in my day, you know, we could just tell people what to do, and they did it, and that isn’t working right now. Right. ‘Cause we kind of have accountability upside down.
J: Yeah, we do. We do have accountability upside down. And, um, and it, I think when… So, we’re going to get there. We’re going to get to a new definition of accountability, but I think it will help to explain why we may see such generational and different perspectives on this, um, because, uh, it’s, it’s…
When, when we, when, when we frame accountability in a certain way, we… I don’t know where I’m even going with this, Courtney. I have
C: No idea. Well, I’m, I’m as, I’m as curious as you are, so…
J: Should we just- Uh- Maybe I’ve, maybe I’ve oversold this. Maybe I should just give the definition of accountability.
C: Well, let’s start there, and then we can kind of back into, um…
Yeah, let’s just start there. Accountability is having an environment, like when people accept responsibility for what happens next. What we want is to have a world where our employees, they come in, they know the assignment and they do what needs done, but they don’t stop there.
J: Mm.
C: Right? If there is, you know, a piece of garbage left behind, they bend over and pick it up, and you don’t have to tell them.
It’s taking responsibility for what happens next, and it turns out, in our environment, like when people don’t do that, we get frustrated. Mm-hmm. Like, we expect you to care. We expect you to, to do it all. We expect you to think ahead, and we have expectations that we didn’t tell people.
J: That’s right.
C: And part of building accountability is getting, and we teach this.
Part of the reason we’re going to pause on this is that we’ve now built a workshop to help people explore how to create an environment where people can be accountable.
J: If you really think about that definition, it starts to flip things upside down, because I’m guessing that most of anyone who’s still listening at this point, um, is when they hear the word accountability, they instantly get, like, a, a feeling or a thought about holding someone accountable. In other words, making someone do what they’re supposed to do. That’s how we tend to conceive of accountability. So, we end up conceiving of it from essentially a punishment perspective. Punishment isn’t really a term we use directly in the workplace. Um, we don’t dole out punishment really.
That’s not the, that’s not the framing of what we do. What we do is we withhold rewards. We withhold opportunities. We, um, you know, we have other ways of, of giving people signals that that is… That they are not doing what we want them to do. They’re not performing according to our standards. Mm. So we conceive of it from this angle of, um, of coming at it from kind of this, this punishment perspective.
Or even just having tough conversations with somebody and they squirm a little. You know, that’s all kind of in this realm of punishment inside the workplace. And so that’s how we tend to conceive of accountability, making people do what we want them to do through more of this punishment angle.
And when we flip the definition of accountability, not re- it’s not really flipping it over. It’s actually more, I think, kind of expanding it. Mm-hmm. And then we start to realize that accountability is much more an expression of high commitment than it is a cure for low commitment.
C: Yeah.
J: And so that means that a leader’s job is to create an environment, and, and we have a lot to say about that, about how you create an environment, because that’s where the real work is.
Yeah. To create an environment where people are far more likely to be accountable, and then you don’t have to get out what we call the pointy end of the stick of accountability as often. It doesn’t mean that it’s, that you never use what we would call the pointy end of the stick of accountability, meaning you’re going to, you’re going to give someone feedback and, and, and ultimately, uh, potentially could even lead to, you know, um, removing them from the organization because they continue to not do what they are supposed to do.
C: Yeah. And, and what we’re doing… So, with all that in mind, like, if that’s the goal, that people are taking responsibility for what happens next, you have to back up and say, “What, as a leader, do I need to do differently to create that?” And so, what we’ve done in the Creating Accountability workshop is we take those environmental pieces, and it’s a workshop.
And we actually give leaders and teams time to unpack the environment. The first thing, and probably the biggest chunk of time that we give leaders time to work on, is setting expectations. Mm-hmm. There is… And we probably won’t get into all of it on this Shotcast, but when you think about- It’s really, really, really ha- hard, if not impossible, to hold anyone accountable for something that you haven’t set an expectation for.
J: Mm-hmm.
C: And not to give away the end of the book, but we’re kind of horrible at setting expectations. We don’t even know what we expect. We certainly haven’t told anyone. A lot of times, we realize what our expectations were because we’re frustrated, and we’re frustrated because someone missed them.
Think about like, oh, this person’s late, or this person’s not collaborating with me, or this person didn’t ask my input. Do they know they’re supposed to?
J: Right.
C: I have numerous coaching clients where the leader’s frustrated with an employee. Fair enough. Be frustrated. And when I say, “Have you told them?
Do they know?” That’s your… The first thing in the environment are the expectations you have of your people. And so, it’s just, uh, this is real work, and it, it’s, we all kind of think, like, everyone knows what we expect. They don’t. And so, in the workshop, we give teams and leaders time to unpack, explore, write down their expectations, and we, we give them space to say, “Okay, how are you going to communicate those?”
Mm-hmm. And then we f- we s- we spin further in the environment of a little brown, do you have your tools and resources, and, you know, are you, are you rewarding and m- motivating the right things? But all that stuff’s part of the environment. Mm-hmm. And, and we want to… That’s how you create an environment for that.
J: Yeah. That’s right. In essence, all accountability work on a leader’s part, um, becomes… Well, not all of it, but most of it becomes crafting the environment, which I’ll tie back now to the runaway point that I was never a- I was not able to land five minutes ago, which is when we, we can… Y- you can see how we can easily default in the space of kids these days because in trying to create that environment means you really need to understand how the person that, that you are working with understands their own environment.
That’s right. And those things are different by generation. They just, they are. N- neither better nor worse. It’s just they’re different. And so, the workshop includes, you know, exercises that make you really think kind of full spectrum about how you’re communicating expectations and, and not just the final outcome kind of expectations, but all of the stuff that happens in getting there.
Yep. Because one of the things we know is that you don’t have employees who are doing simple work typically. You have employees who are doing complex and adaptable work. Um, and so there’s a lot of, of things that come up between now and the ultimate outcome that people are having to navigate through that, and that is also a rich space for sharing expectations and m- ensuring that perhaps, you know, employees from different generations are working together to s- to make sure that we’re all kind of seeing the way forward in the same way.
J: My goodness. I had a lot to say about accountability, and turns out there’s a lot more
C: Before you do that, if you want the workshop, drop us a line. Oh, yeah, very specifically. Like, like this thing is catching… We’re busy doing them. Um, it’s good, good, good stuff.
We’d love to help you with it.
J: Yes, please give us a call. And, um, that’s, that’s all we’re going to cover on this Shotcast. I know you’re dying for more now, and we always have more to say, and we certainly have a lot more to say in that workshop. So, if you want more, uh, make sure you get in touch with us at Slingshot25.com.
Until next time
