Transcript
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00;00;10;06 – 00;00;41;12
Hello and welcome back to Change@Work. I’m your host Chris Thornton. Joining me today is Michael Timms. Michael is a speaker leadership development consultant and the founder of Avail Leadership. He’s worked with thousands of senior leaders to instill powerful leadership habits that drive measurable improvement in performance, engagement and results. Michael, the author of How Leaders Can Inspire Accountability, which has been called the ultimate guide for embracing accountability as a leader by none other than Marshall Goldsmith.
00;00;41;15 – 00;01;04;16
He’s also the author of Succession Planning That Works, a highly regarded guide for identifying and developing talent within organizations. His work has been featured in HPR, Forbes, Fast Company, CNBC, and many others. And he is also on Ted. And if you if you look down in the episode description, you’ll see a link to his Ted talk. Michael, how are you?
00;01;04;18 – 00;01;25;15
I’m really good. How are you doing, Chris? Doing great. Thanks so much for joining. I’m very excited to talk to you about accountability. I’ll tell you why in just a minute. But let’s get to know you first. What’s the best thing you ate this week? My buddy, he made some smoked pulled pork in his smoker and we got together.
00;01;25;15 – 00;01;42;23
We actually had a ski cabin over the weekend. There’s three families in between the three families. We have ten daughters. Snow boys. We all specialize in girls. Got it. And he brought his pulled pork to that. And it was to die for. That sounds really great. Yeah. Nice work to him. Thank you for that. All right, let’s get into accountability.
00;01;42;23 – 00;02;03;11
Here’s what I wanted to talk to you and why I was so excited about scheduling this time with you. Is that one of the SEO Toros that I’ve worked with for many years? When we were talking about how things are going, are not going. She said, one of the things that we’ve missed, the biggest thing that we missed was driving accountability.
00;02;03;13 – 00;02;26;11
And that just hit me because they seem such an accountability driven organization, accountable for results, doing good things, getting the work done and she just made it clear they missed the boat on accountability. And I thought you could help fill that gap. What accountability means what it looks like. Let’s start with why did you decide to write a book on accountability?
00;02;26;13 – 00;02;49;03
Oh yeah. So my work started with I found a niche in succession planning because very few organizations do it well. I would consult and when I would first consulting organization, first step is to figure out what what is your promotion criteria. So what makes great leaders in your organization. And so I worked with focus groups. And I would just ask them to tell me success stories.
00;02;49;03 – 00;03;17;08
So tell me about the time that, you know, something worked out well. And then we dissected and we said what were the behaviors that led to those successful outcomes? Sure. And I did this with many, many different companies. And each company, we did many different focus groups and every literally every single focus group that I worked with. They either use the word accountability or they were effectively talking about the essence of accountability as being a key leadership criteria.
00;03;17;14 – 00;03;38;02
And I became really fascinated when I noticed this pattern. I’m like, okay, this there’s something here. And so that’s when I really started to delve into it and research and write and teach about accountability and how how you can create an environment of accountability where people are just striving to do the right thing and get the right results.
00;03;38;03 – 00;04;02;08
When you think about the biggest misconceptions of accountability, does anything come to mind? Yeah, the very first thing that comes to mind is people. I think they we misuse the word accountability. And we and we have, society has effectively weaponized the word accountability. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are going to hold you accountable. And to a lot of people, accountability is something that you do to somebody else.
00;04;02;10 – 00;04;22;09
We’re going to hold you accountable. I think that is one of the biggest reasons why we have a lack of accountability is because we, you know, we’re teaching people to fear it, right? What accountability is, is willingly stepping up and taking ownership of a problem and a solution willingly seems to be doing a lot of work there.
00;04;22;09 – 00;04;46;00
Right? And that’s a big, big piece of it. Yeah, that is the ideal. And I think there’s this misconception that people naturally are not accountable and that we must hold them accountable. The reality is, is that I think everybody most people come to work wanting to do a good job. Most people want to be good husbands, fathers, mothers, parents.
00;04;46;00 – 00;05;12;06
They want to be great coaches. They want to be great managers or whatever. When they show up and I think a lot of times the environment around us encourages us not to take accountability sometimes for sure. When you think about some of the habits that drive accountability, you you decide to step up. I’m going to be accountable for the results and and how it’s done, how I get those results right.
00;05;12;06 – 00;05;40;10
So not results at any cost or and by any means necessary, but doing it in the right way. Are there any habits that can help build that muscle to be accountable? Yeah. When I started looking at accountability and how to create this culture of accountability, how do we inspire others to be accountable? It became apparent to me that the number one way to inspire other people to be more accountable is to be more accountable ourselves.
00;05;40;12 – 00;06;01;28
And the opposite is also true. If I am not accountable, it makes it very hard for other people around me to be accountable. Give you an example. Yeah. About a year ago, I wrote an article about Air Canada. They got like the lowest On-time rating of any carrier in North America for like, the second year in a row.
00;06;02;00 – 00;06;22;04
And, when the article, you know, there’s a number of articles written about it and they quoted the CEO is the very first thing he talked about was pointing to, oh, there’s these, you know, there’s different, you know, technical reasons why we were at the bottom of the pack. And the commentators were like, every single airline has those same constraints.
00;06;22;04 – 00;06;39;08
There’s nothing unique to your airline. But the CEO. The very first thing out of his mouth was pointing to all these external factors. And, you know, I can just imagine he is going back to his executive team and saying, well, hey guys, we’ve we’ve got to be more on time. So what are you going to do about it?
00;06;39;10 – 00;07;01;23
And I can guarantee you the executive team is telling him, well, the reason we can’t do this is because this department isn’t doing their job and they’re not doing their job, and this is external factors. And it’s contagious. And so accountability needs to start at the top. And if and if the the leader is not demonstrating accountability, if the leader is not taking ownership of their part in problems, nobody else will.
00;07;01;26 – 00;07;28;20
Can you tell me about reluctance to grab on to accountability, reluctance to step up? I think one of the things that I’ve seen in companies that I’ve worked for previously, some of them are more interested in blame than actual accountability. What have you seen in that area? Yeah, the very first thing that if you want to create a culture of accountability, you’ve got to eliminate blame, as in that one example.
00;07;28;20 – 00;07;52;22
But I just share with you that, you know, the CEO was was blaming other factors. Well guess what? Blame is contagious and so everybody else will as well. But there’s an interesting relationship with blame and accountability. Blame is how you kill accountability because. Yeah. And you use the word reluctance I think people want to take ownership. I think people want, to do the right thing.
00;07;53;00 – 00;08;13;11
But when I earlier I was talking about, you know, sometimes the environment doesn’t support people taking accountability. It’s the blame environment. And so when people allow blame to fester in or in an organization, nobody, nobody is going to step up and say, oh, yeah, you know what? That was my bad. If they think that they’re going to be blamed and shamed for doing that.
00;08;13;11 – 00;08;39;13
Yeah. And so it’s this, you know, blame is the complete, complete opposite of accountability and is how you kill accountability in an organization. And so step one, you talked about some habits, about how to create a stronger culture of accountability. Step one is for each one of us to stop blaming, you know, when we have a problem.
00;08;39;15 – 00;08;59;17
I think many of us for sure myself, I know that I have a natural inclination when something goes wrong. My natural instinct is like is to look for someone or something else to blame. And so I think step one is to fight that natural inclination for those of us who who are naturally inclined to do so and to resist that urge.
00;08;59;17 – 00;09;28;17
So that’s that’s step one. But step two is actually kind of a nice follow on from resisting that urge to blame, which is okay if I’m not if I’m just going to hold judgment here for a second, I’m not going to blame you. I’m not going to blame external factors. What is going on here? The very next thing you should do is to take a look at, hey, did my actions did my behavior bring me to where I am right now?
00;09;28;19 – 00;09;51;11
Maybe not 100% in my actions, but was there something that I did or did not do that contributed to this problem? And if you can verbalize that, if you can say, hey, you know what, here’s what’s wrong. I like pointing out the problem. And, you know what? I can see that this is something that I did or didn’t do that that made it more likely for this to happen.
00;09;51;13 – 00;10;06;24
What you’ve just done is you’ve you’ve given everybody permission then to do the same thing. It’s like, oh, okay. Well, if and regardless of what you have a leadership position or not, it’s more powerful when you do it as a leader. Oh for sure. You know, this is the problem. I think this is my part in the problem.
00;10;06;24 – 00;10;29;08
You’re not like falling on your sword and saying, yeah, the whole thing is my fault. Unless of course, it is. But usually if you take a hard look at any problem in your life, you can usually find some way that you’ve contributed to that problem. And that’s super powerful because like I said, it creates the psychological safety that everybody else needs to be able to do the same thing and say, you know what?
00;10;29;08 – 00;10;49;23
Hey, Michael, you know, I appreciate you saying that. This is my part in the problem. Is there a third habit that we could focus in on as well when I when it comes to driving accountability? Well, going back to that first habit about blame. The challenge with saying okay well just don’t you know when you have a problem don’t blame.
00;10;49;26 – 00;11;19;06
I think most people are like okay well what if it really is somebody else’s fault. Yeah. Yeah that’s yeah that’s, that’s, that’s what people naturally is when I say don’t blame us, that’s pretty much the first thing that comes out of people’s mouths. And that will lead to the third habit. Okay. The reason why most of us have this natural inclination to blame when things go wrong is that we have this weird psychological gremlin running around in almost all of our brains.
00;11;19;06 – 00;11;44;03
It’s called the fundamental attribution error. You know, they’ve been studying this thing for decades, but recently they kind of they actually realize that there’s some brain dynamics the way that the brain is wired. Yeah, actually encourages us to blame first and ask questions later. And so we have to rewire ourselves to ask questions first before we before we start accusing, individuals.
00;11;44;06 – 00;12;08;23
So my little trick to circumvent, to stop blaming is to is instead of saying, who did this to ask, where did the process break down? Okay. And yeah, if you can go to processes first, it makes everybody less defensive. I’m not out for blood. I’m not trying to kill or blame or shame somebody here. Right. I’m here to analyze the problem.
00;12;08;25 – 00;12;35;21
And then we say, okay, where did the process break down? You know, you can say, well, you know, was I part of the problem? Was there a process problem? And that is what we’ve discovered is there’s there’s a whole scientific field of study around why problems happen. It was kind of led by the safety movement. But what we have discovered as a society is that more often than not, when a problem happens, it happens for multiple reasons, not just one.
00;12;35;26 – 00;12;54;01
There’s usually not just one point of it. Yeah. There are usually multiple factors that contribute to most of our problems. And the trick is, is to get everybody thinking about before we talk about the human element, what are all of the factors that contributed to this problem? So when we say, hey, where did the process break down?
00;12;54;01 – 00;13;17;10
That’s really habit number three which is engineer the solution. And I’ll tell you how looking in the mirror actually often leads to engineering the solution. So the three habits are number one don’t blame two. Look in the mirror and three engineer the solution. And I have found that as I actually, you know resist that urge to blame.
00;13;17;10 – 00;13;41;08
Hold judgment for a moment, take a look in the mirror and say, hey, how did I contribute to this problem? Often those two steps lead to an obvious engineered solution. I’ll give you a simple example. I use these, presentation templates for doing live polling. Okay. And so we’ve got a whole bunch of live polling templates and one day I discovered that one of these templates was deleted and I was tagged.
00;13;41;11 – 00;13;59;09
Yeah. You know, and so there’s only two other people in my company. And so I talked to my assistant, she said, no, it wasn’t me. So we knew it was actually her assistant, who must have done it. And she was she was tagged and she said, I am going to murder melt. That’s like, okay, before we murder you all here, let’s walk through the three habits.
00;13;59;09 – 00;14;19;10
So don’t blame. Know we’re still mad at Mel. Have it to look in the mirror. We said, did we? You know, is there anything that I may have done that have. Yeah. You know, led to this template being deleted? As soon as I asked the question, I realized, I said, oh, my sister’s name is Carrie. And I was like, oh, Carrie, you know what?
00;14;19;10 – 00;14;38;27
I’ve almost accidentally deleted one of those templates. And then a moment she’s like, actually, so have I. Yeah. And we saw so why? And it dawned on us, the reason is, is because our templates were mixed in with our work in process. There was they were all and and we were deleting our work and process quite often.
00;14;38;29 – 00;15;02;03
Yeah. So there was no safety mechanism to prevent anybody from accidentally deleting it, you know. So what step three is engineer the solution. The obvious engineered solution is to create a folder called templates and just put them in the folder. And it’s a very basic safety mechanism. But if we had not walked through those three habits she would have murdered Mel.
00;15;02;03 – 00;15;20;20
She would have. That would have been a very unpleasant conversation that those two people we’ve had. Yeah. And now she would have felt bad because she or she would have argued, no, I didn’t do it. So either in an argument or she would have felt like a failure and all, you know, that would have been her be more careful next time.
00;15;20;22 – 00;15;39;12
Right. Care more? Yeah. Care more. You obviously don’t care. You’re being careless. Well, actually, what we did is because of our poor process, we set a trap. Yeah. This poor person to fall into. Yeah. Which he’d almost fallen into yourself. Totally. Which we’d all fallen into right now. It could have been me. It could have been my assistant.
00;15;39;12 – 00;16;01;09
But it just happened to be this person who fell into it first. Right? Number one, I’m glad Meldon died. So that’s a good outcome. We didn’t. Nobody murdered Mel, so that’s good. I don’t want to take it away from Mel. Not make it about, Not make it about your team. But what I have experienced is when one person drops the ball, it becomes a competence issue, becomes a performance issue.
00;16;01;09 – 00;16;24;00
It becomes a you can’t trust them type of thing. Now, there are certain situations where people lose trust in their their their reasons why they do. But I think you’ve put your finger on something so important. Which is it? If you’re setting people up to be that close to failure, you should expect them to fail like you did this, right?
00;16;24;00 – 00;16;55;25
You you’ve created a trap for them to potentially fallen, and it’s then they get tagged with that they don’t care enough or they’re not somebody you can fully trust. Keep an eye on them. And, they can pretty easily get into a low performer type of rating. Does that make sense? That’s so and that’s a really insightful comment that our leadership, the way that we approach problems, can actually create low performance in other people.
00;16;55;29 – 00;17;11;03
Yeah. And I don’t know about you, but I have actually felt that I’ve been on the receiving end of that. Oh, I’ve been blamed so many times, by a manager. Yeah. I worked for a guy who was a total glamor, you know, anything that went wrong, you know, he would blame and shame me and and others, for that matter.
00;17;11;05 – 00;17;33;14
But what it did is it destroyed my self-esteem. And so when you when you have less confidence, you make more mistakes. Yep. And I was put into this cycle of low confidence and low performance. And my low confidence reinforced my low performance, which reinforced my low confidence in this downward spiral. And I’ve seen this, not just with myself.
00;17;33;14 – 00;17;55;24
I’ve seen this repeated with with other other people in other organizations. And what you end up with is people who are hesitant to take the initiative to do anything. Yeah. Because I don’t want to do anything. Anyone screw up if I screw up, I’ll get in trouble and I’ll get all you get blamed for this. And this is why I say blame kill’s accountability.
00;17;56;00 – 00;18;15;07
Yeah, it’s really key. And it’s critically important that the people in leadership positions do not rush to blame that they first look at themselves, then they look at the processes. And as you do that, people are far more willing to say, oh yeah, you know what? And obviously, yeah, I forgot to do this. I should have done that.
00;18;15;13 – 00;18;34;03
Great. That’s all we need to do is acknowledge that. And can we put any fail safes in place to prevent you from forgetting to do that again? Can we engineer the solution? Yep. And believe it or not, Chris, accountability and creating a culture of accountability or starting to create the foundation of a culture of accountability is really that easy?
00;18;34;05 – 00;18;50;27
Resist the urge to blame. Look in the mirror and acknowledge, hey, what is my part in this? And then three engineer the solution to prevent these problems from happening again. And as you do this, people will be far more confident to, you know, when they make a mistake like, well, I know Chris isn’t going to blame me.
00;18;50;27 – 00;19;08;23
So yeah. Hey, Chris, this was my bad. Here’s what I had to do to fix it. And that as a manager, as a leader, that’s all we want from our people. They say mistakes are going to happen. We acknowledge that. What are you doing to mitigate the consequences of that mistake? And what are you doing to prevent that mistake from happening again?
00;19;08;26 – 00;19;30;18
Pretty powerful. Pretty. I am reflecting on everything that you just said, and I can see myself as a leader, not always inspiring accountability like the title of your book. I think I’m better at that now. I think my team, when they team members, when they listen to this little don’t let me know if I am better or not.
00;19;30;20 – 00;19;54;28
But I also can think of how small I made myself in previous roles when I was in a blame culture, how small I made myself, and what a lost opportunity that was because I just didn’t. I want to screw up. I didn’t want to lose my job. I didn’t want to, you know, all the things I didn’t want to, as opposed to thinking, what do I want to do?
00;19;54;28 – 00;20;19;10
How could I add value to this team? To be fair, I’m not great at everything. Sometimes the answer can be process is fine performer. It’s not the right person, it’s just not the right person. But I like the how you’re going toward. But look at the system first before you make the call on the person in that process.
00;20;19;10 – 00;20;40;03
Does that make sense? Exactly. And that and that is the message, hopefully that people will take away from this. It’s like, yeah, it’s not like it’s never the person. Sometimes it is. Yeah. The problem is, is we jump to that conclusion way too soon. Oh, it’s so easy. Before we have all of the information, find out what are all of the other factors that contribute to the problem.
00;20;40;03 – 00;21;00;29
And then if one of those factors is the person and if they haven’t, you know, acknowledged it, then we need to do something as you were actually. Can I tell a quick story out of this? Please do, because I also want to emphasize the opposite. And we’ve talked about the negative yeah aspect of hey, look, when we have a blame culture, this is what it does to people.
00;21;01;01 – 00;21;19;14
But as you were talking, I was thinking about this, the story that was just told me. And actually, I can see the name, okay, because it’s a positive story. It was Microsoft. So I was presenting at Microsoft when I taught these three, three habits. There was a guy in the audience and he couldn’t contain himself. He’s like, I got to tell you the story.
00;21;19;16 – 00;21;36;25
He’s like, because the best boss in the world, he said, does exactly what you just said. And he told a story about, he made a mistake. He screwed up, and it was kind of visible. You know, I really screwed up some of the people within the organization in different departments, and they were mad at him. And basically they got mad at his boss.
00;21;36;27 – 00;21;57;25
His boss took the blame, said, you know what? That is on us, and we’re going to fix it. She actually came into town shortly after and met with him and he walked in. And he is like, I am just going to get I’m just going to, you know, and he was so, so worried. And he walked in there and she said, what are you doing to fix this problem?
00;21;57;28 – 00;22;16;17
And he said, okay, well here’s a solution. Yeah. And what are you going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again? It’s like, okay, well, so this is the failsafe that I’ve got in place is what I’m going to do. Make sure it doesn’t happen again. Okay. Great. See you later. Okay. He was like, that was the most amazing demonstration of leadership I have ever seen.
00;22;16;20 – 00;22;36;07
Actually, I think the question she she actually said is what did you learn from this? Nice. And he would walk on hot coals. Now sadly he would do it. Yeah. Yeah. And he said, and I’m not the only person everybody would do anything for that leader. And we resolve the problem. Make sure that it won’t happen again.
00;22;36;07 – 00;22;58;06
I learned my lesson. We’re all better for it. And we would do anything that she asked us to do. So that’s the positive side. Yeah, of resisting that urge to blame and kind of walking people through those three habits as a leader. Michael Sims is the author of How Leaders Can Inspire Accountability and also Succession planning that works become both up.
00;22;58;09 – 00;23;15;04
Michael goes into a lot more detail from the discussion that we started here. Pick up the book How Leaders Can Inspire Accountability to Learn a lot more. Michael, thank you so much. Thank you, Chris, for having me. Really appreciate. It was great.
