 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||
|
|
|
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||
|
Accountability The impact of accountability = blame Most of the time people use the phrase “holding someone accountable” to mean fixing blame for a failure and meting out a punishment that befits the failure that the individual “caused.” Organizations that apply this form of accountability drive learning out by training people to hide failures and fight over ownership of perceived successes. Constant change requires seeing accountability differently In high change environments, we must understand accountability in a different light: It exists when people see it as their job to create success regardless of what conditions the world throws their way. Where this mind set is in place, you see leaders holding themselves and their people accountable for actively learning and adapting; deliberately experimenting, tracking results and adjusting to change, NOT “riding the horse we came in on” — trapped by the golden handcuffs of a prior success, clinging to it and rationalizing away failures. Re-purposing existing structures to foster true accountability A climate of accountability is a leadership task. It requires a social structure to maintain a forward focus…so that leaders avoid falling into the trap of waiting until there is a visible failure to begin asking the questions they should have been asking all along. The After Action Review cycle provides an especially effective container for asking these questions in a timely way. But there are other opportunities as well: What already “punctuates” your organization’s work? Typical examples are milestones and gates in projects, staff meetings, presentations to customers, monthly, quarterly or annual team meetings, project chartering, board meetings, employee surveys, annual reports. In their book “Execution,” Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan refer to these established regular processes as “social operating mechanisms.” A huge amount of time and energy goes into in these processes, but they are not normally seen as punctuation points in the blur of work, so a lot of potential value is typically left on the table. The questions and interactions every day in these existing containers plays a huge role in shaping the culture. And that shaping can be either toward or away from accountability. For instance, staff meetings are frequently (and often correctly) a target of complaints about wasted time. Review meetings focus primarily on past results or on tactical punch lists. From the perspective of Emergent Learning, meetings done that way are wasted opportunities, and the impact of re-purposing is often substantial and cumulative. Your choice! Signet can help you use these kinds of regular events as containers for deliberately shaping an accountable and agile culture. Sometimes it is simple as making a set of questions part of the regular agenda “What did you learn this week?” Questions can cause teams to validate results against objectives and assess how well it understands what caused the results and its environmentso that it can replicate or improve results going forward, developing a testable “hypothesis” about what will make it successful tomorrow. In one of our research interviews, a leader said that he made it his goal to figure out what questions the leaders who reported to him were not asking themselves, and he would ask that question in his regular review meetings. Over time, he trained these leaders to ask themselves what questions they weren’t asking before they came to the meeting. Signet helps strengthen existing social infrastructure
or establish new forums as needed, and coaches leaders on the questions
to ask in these forums to strengthen accountability for continuing improvement. Contact us << Emergent Learning Line of sight >>
|
|
|
|||