5 accountability pitfalls that kill companies

Steve Tobak 7/23/2012 www.cbsnews.com

President Obama's "If you've got a business, you didn't build that" speech hasn't just created a firestorm of political debate. It's got a lot of business people shaking their heads, as well. And that includes me.

While I understand what the president was trying to get at, the fundamental problem with his logic is that it flies in the face of one of the most important management concepts: accountability. When people are held accountable -- to themselves and their stakeholders -- things get done. Good things.

Actually, the speech does a pretty good job of explaining how accountability works, if you just reverse the cause and effect. You see, when people take risks and hold themselves accountable for the outcome, as our founding fathers did, that's what built "this unbelievable American system," to use the president's words.
Granted, that system does now exist, but only through the continuous replication of the concept of personal initiative and accountability. It's not the other way around. The founding fathers were entrepreneurs and innovators in every sense of the way we think of those words today. Had they not been, we wouldn't have this great system.

President Obama was certainly right about one thing. There are a lot of smart and hardworking people out there. And one of the best ways I know of to differentiate and ensure successful outcomes in business is to create solid accountability mechanisms.

Here are the top five "accountability" pitfalls that business leaders and executives typically fall into, in my experience. Some of them don't even appear to be accountability-related on the surface, which is why they're so insidious. If you want a high-performance management team, make sure you avoid them:
Unclear responsibility. This is probably the most common pitfall. Show me an organization and I'll show you managers with misaligned goals and vague responsibility. Two people shouldn't have the same functional responsibility or own the same goal. If you do that, you're asking for things to fall in the crack. That doesn't preclude "matrix" management; the trick is to ensure goals and responsibilities are properly aligned. It can be done.

No follow up. This is practically an epidemic in organizations. Executives are great at coming up with goals, strategies, even metrics. Unfortunately, they're also notoriously bad at following up. I don't care how driven and entrepreneurial executives are; without follow up, nothing good happens. Companies must have a relatively objective and, sorry to say this, strict process for both setting and scoring management performance metrics.

Compensation plans that reward poor performance. Closely related to the "no follow up" problem, most companies have terrible executive compensation plans. Maybe 1 in 10 actually rewards the right behavior and has enough teeth to foster accountability. The problem? The bar for making gobs of money is set too low, and there's not enough difference between success and failure, plain and simple.

Management behavior. When it comes to management behavior, most executives and boards just look the other way. That lack of accountability plays a key role in business failures because dysfunctional leadership results in bad strategic decision-making and poor employee performance and execution. Granted, coming up with metrics for this sort of thing is challenging, but I think "360s" are pretty effective.

Flawed corporate strategy. This is rarely seen as an accountability problem, but it is. When company executives push a flawed strategy, two things inevitably happen. First, smart people in the organization call them on it -- publicly or privately -- word gets around, and management credibility suffers, big-time. Second, folks will start covering their behinds, pointing fingers, acting passive aggressively -- all sorts of dysfunctional behavior that wreaks havoc with organizational performance.

Not surprisingly, I find that executive management teams at consistently successful companies make accountability a priority and, therefore, avoid these pitfalls. It take a real commitment of precious management time and resources. But not only is the payoff worth it, it's a necessity in our hypercompetitive business world.

What Successful People Do With The First Hour Of Their Work Day

By Kevin Purdy  August 22, 2012 www.fastcompany.com

 

 

How much does the first hour of every day matter? As it turns out, a lot. It can be the hour you see everything clearly, get one real thing done, and focus on the human side of work rather than your task list.                                       

Remember when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. You should too.

The first hour of the workday goes a bit differently for Craig Newmark of Craigslist, David Karp of Tumblr, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, career writer (and Fast Company blogger) Brian Tracy, and others, and they’ll tell you it makes a big difference. Here are the first items on their daily to-do list.

Don’t Check Your Email for the First Hour. Seriously. Stop That.

Tumblr founder David Karp will “try hard” not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an Inc. profile of him. “Reading e-mails at home never feels good or productive,” Karp said. “If something urgently needs my attention, someone will call or text me.”
Not all of us can roll into the office whenever our Vespa happens to get us there, but most of us with jobs that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work. It’s an idea that serves as the title of Julie Morgenstern’s work management book Never Check Email In The Morning, and it’s a fine strategy for leaving the office with the feeling that, even on the most over-booked days, you got at least one real thing done.
If you need to make sure the most important messages from select people come through instantly, AwayFind can monitor your inbox and get your attention when something notable arrives. Otherwise, it’s a gradual but rewarding process of training interruptors and coworkers not to expect instantaneous morning response to anything they send in your off-hours.

Gain Awareness, Be Grateful

One smart, simple question on curated Q & A site Quora asked “How do the most successful people start their day?”. The most popular response came from a devotee of Tony Robbins, the self-help guru who pitched the power of mindful first-hour rituals long before we all had little computers next to our beds.
Robbins suggests setting up an “Hour of Power,” “30 Minutes to Thrive,” or at least “Fifteen Minutes to Fulfillment.” Part of it involves light exercise, part of it involves motivational incantations, but the most accessible piece involves 10 minutes of thinking of everything you’re grateful for: in yourself, among your family and friends, in your career, and the like. After that, visualize “everything you want in your life as if you had it today.”
Robbins offers the “Hour of Power” segment of his Ultimate Edge series as a free audio stream (here’s the direct MP3 download). Blogger Mike McGrath also wrote a concise summary of the Hour of Power). You can be sure that at least some of the more driven people you’ve met in your career are working on Robbins’ plan.

Do the Big, Shoulder-Sagging Stuff First

Brian Tracy’s classic time-management book Eat That Frog gets its title from a Mark Twain saying that, if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you’ve got it behind you for the rest of the day, and nothing else looks so bad. Gina Trapani explained it well in a video for her Work Smart series). Combine that with the concept of getting one thing done before you wade into email, and you’ve got a day-to-day system in place. Here’s how to force yourself to stick to it:

Choose Your Frog

"Choose your frog, and write it down on a piece of paper that you'll see when you arrive back at your desk in the morning, Tripani advises."If you can, gather together the material you'll need to get it done and have that out, too."
One benefit to tackling that terrible, weighty thing you don’t want to do first thing in the morning is that you get some space from the other people involved in that thing--the people who often make the thing more complicated and frustrating. Without their literal or figurative eyes over your shoulder, the terrible thing often feels less complex, and you can get more done.

Ask Yourself If You’re Doing What You Want to Do

Feeling unfulfilled at work shouldn’t be something you realize months too late, or even years. Consider making an earnest attempt every morning at what the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford to do:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

“Customer Service” (or Your Own Equivalent)

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark answered the first hour question succinctly: “Customer service.” He went on to explain (or expand) that he also worked on current projects, services for military families and veterans, and protecting voting rights. But customer service is what Newmark does every single day at Craigslist, responding to user complaints and smiting scammers and spammers. He almost certainly has bigger fish he could pitch in on every day, but Newmark says customers service “anchors me to reality.”
Your own version of customer service might be keeping in touch with contacts from year-ago projects, checking in with coworkers you don’t regularly interact with, asking questions of mentors, and just generally handling the human side of work that quickly gets lost between task list items. But do your customer service on the regular, and you’ll have a more reliable roster of helpers when the time comes.



Timeless Success Recipes From Stephen Covey

by Lisa Nirell July 20, 2012 www.fastcompany.com

 
"Here, have an oatmeal cookie."
That is the disarming way in which my first interview with Stephen Covey began in 2004. In light of Dr. Covey's passing this week, his lessons are more alive than they have ever been. I'm certain that my experiences with Covey were consistent with many others. This is my attempt to summarize those life lessons.
I wish that I could say my first live interview with Covey went smoothly. Although FranklinCovey's press team invited me to their Long Beach, Calif., conference, they asserted that Covey's full schedule would not allow time for me to interview him. My expectations were very low. Suddenly, after the Day 1 main session, the reporter from the Los Angeles Times contacted Deb Lund, the director of PR, and cancelled his interview. She offered me his interview time slot.
I paused three seconds for dignity, then said yes. Here's the rub: I had seven minutes' notice to prepare for the interview.
As a rookie journalist and freelancer for The San Diego Transcript, I was panicking over my lack of preparation. I felt that I just didn't have enough time to make a strong first impression.
My hike to the second story of the conference center felt somewhat like the Bataan death march. I kept a stiff upper lip, looked him straight in the eyes, and spoke the truth. "Stephen, I apologize for not being prepared for this interview." He deftly offered me an oatmeal cookie, sat back in his chair, and proceeded to ask me about my life, my family, and my passions.
Needless to say, the interview is one of my most memorable. Our 15-minute interview spilled into 40. We covered a wide range of topics. Five years later, he graciously agreed to endorse my book and granted me another interview.
Many will remember Covey for his prolific contributions to the burgeoning self-help movement. Others will applaud him for his global impact through his nonprofit endeavors and his prolific speaking and writing abilities. I applaud him for something else.
Covey had an uncanny abililty to push his ego aside and make others feel included and valued. His book, The 8th Habit, outlines his belief that we must find our voice and inspire others to find theirs. Even though we only met three times, he inspired me year after year to weave that philosophy into my daily business activities.
These are the timeless Covey gifts that Stephen gave me:

1. Encourage critical thinking during meetings. I ask for evidence behind every opportunity or problem. I seldom allow hearsay or gossip to drive my own strategic choices or my clients'. When I stray from this philosophy and make irrational, knee-jerk choices, I lose clients and create unnecessary tension. Covey says in The 8th Habit, "between stimulus and response there is a space where we choose our response."
2. I constantly strive for deeper meaning and purpose. While some of my contemporaries become enamored with the latest marketing automation, performance management, or social media platforms, I strive to stay grounded in my life's true purpose. Generating more leads or driving higher EBITDA are not examples of a noble purpose. Automated performance management and stack ranking programs have proven to be a hornet's nest, because they often stray from a company's purpose and assume that some people will always be worthy of termination. Are these ideas holding your company back from reaching its true potential?
3. I strive to eliminate the hourly worker mindset forever. Covey opened my eyes to the foolishness of our Industrial Age thinking. In The 8th Habit, he described the four Industrial Age maladies:
   --"The belief that you must control people;
   --Our view of accounting (People are an expense; machines are assets);
   --The carrot-and-stick motivational philosophy; and
   --Centralized budgeting ... a reactive approach that produces 'kiss-up' cultures bent on 'spending it so we won't lose it next year.'"
4. I schedule time for self-reflection every day. This may mean a five-minute check in with a colleague or my husband, but it gets done. During my CMO peer meetings, I encourage each member to provide a "check in": What's different from our last meeting? What worked in your performance? What didn't work? What are you celebrating? Self-knowledge must take front and center position to text messaging, email, and tweeting. The majority of senior executives I meet confess that reflection is often rejected in favor of addressing the crisis du jour (the urgent versus the important). Picasso once said that "without great solitude no serious work is possible." Perhaps he and Covey conspired at some point to help us strike more balance in our lives.

Covey made this world a better place. I will savor that "oatmeal cookie" moment for the rest of my life.

The truth about liars

Here's a riddle: What are the three times in life it is acceptable to lie? When you are an actor in a play, when you are bluffing in poker and when you are giving objections to a sales person.

Overcoming objections is especially difficult because prospects think it is perfectly okay to play it fast and loose with the truth. Let's look at the liars, half-truth-tellers, "concealers," and the delusional hopeful, whose greatest sin is that they lie to themselves first and then repeat it to us.
I don't have science behind me and I am not a poker expert that can read tells. I do, however, tend to think there are some indicators when the conversation is not completely truthful and those hints are worth watching for.

Over claims. Promises are too big for the person's position in the company or role in the project. Beware the overzealous prospect. They make claims that they can approve the deal because they are afraid you'll move past them and leave them out of the discussions.
Wait-and-see. When someone is delaying the timeline in a buying process he or she defined, it's not a great indicator of honesty. I have found that in these circumstances the person is often checking pricing with the incumbent vendor or negotiating with my biggest competitor while keeping me on the hook.
Too-good-to-be-true. "Price is not a major factor in this decision." "We're not considering any other providers." "We're going to bypass the normal testing phases and put this into full production." I've heard all of these and later in the process not one of them turned out to be true. Was the person lying? Let's say no. But I think she had convinced herself of something that in the end she should have known was not going to be true.
If, then. As in, "...if you just lower your price 11 percent, then we will make the decision right away..." only to find out this was a gambit in a list of demands. This liar is seductive because he preys upon our sense of urgency, and causes us to act as his agent in negotiations within our own firm. The "if, then" liars proceed to blame other forces within their firm, for further delays and heretofore unmentioned requirements, as a means to repeat the "if then" game to win even more concessions.

When I see these types of red-flags, I push. I think a mixture of self-confidence, raw curiosity, and authenticity can get you closer to truth, regardless if the person will tell you the truth or not. The biggest push is raw curiosity -- ask the questions that are uncomfortable. It always surprises me how often we don't ask the questions we know we should because we are afraid of the answer. As if by not asking the question, the answer doesn't exist.

Some of those tough questions can include:

• Why are you considering making a change at this time?
• What is the exact threshold of performance improvement that has to be achieved for us to win this business?
• Who has the greatest amount to lose in your company if you agree to do business with us?

Since you are delaying the decision for 30 days, what specifically will change during that period to enable you to make a better decision in 30 days?

If you made the decision today and went with our firm, what is the biggest thing that could go wrong? Who would be the first to point it out?

This is not the climatic scene of this week's episode of "Law and Order" ("ripped from today's headlines!"), but rather a hunt for information that will help you overcome the real objections. And that's the truth.