You respond by sharing your common purpose: “I was just hoping to come up with a way to ensure that we’re both working on the job we hate the most. Neither of us likes to do it.” Then you Contrast: “I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t a good friend. I think you are. I just wanted to talk about the one job.” Then you apologize: “I’m sorry if it sounded like I was falsely accusing you. I’m just curious about why you left in the middle of a job when you knew I really wanted you to lend a hand.”
People Violate Your Trust
This is probably the most dangerous emergent problem, the number one killer of accountability, and the chief reason most people can’t hold others accountable without breaking out in hives. You ask a person who reports to you why he failed to attend the computer training class he had agreed to sit in on, and he explains that he would have been there but “something came up.”
Not knowing if this is code for a motivation problem or an ability problem, you ask him exactly what prevented him from keeping his promise. You’re thinking that if it wasn’t a meteorite crashing into his cubicle, you’re not going to be all that sympathetic. You know he hates computer training. However, he desperately needs it, and so you inconvenienced everyone else on the work team to schedule it around his needs. Now he’s telling you that something came up:
“Omar in payroll needed someone to run over to headquarters for him, and I was the only one who drove to work today. Everyone else came in on the subway.”
“And running an errand for Omar was more important than the training?” you ask.
“Of course! It was the payroll.”
“Well, yes, the payroll is important.”
The problem with what just happened is that you allowed this to become a conversation about choosing payroll over training. That’s not the big issue, at least not yet. It should be a conversation about trust. The other person made a promise and unilaterally decided to break it. This is a huge violation of trust and an insult to the relationship. To mask this breach of accountability, the other person focuses on the content (payroll versus training) rather than the relationship.
Is this a big deal? Almost nothing in a company, including the payroll, is more important than finding a way to fix the lack of accountability this scene depicts. The person failed to live up to a commitment, and nothing happened. Actually, he was allowed to ignore the real issue: the broken promise.
Something Came Up
Companies that continually allow things to come up without dealing with the breach of promise don’t survive very long. And while they are limping along, they’re horrible places to work. Nothing destroys trust more than casually giving assignments and then hoping against hope that people will deliver. You may like the fact that your boss doesn’t always follow up with you, giving you substantial freedom, but you hate it when others are equally loose and unpredictable. Heaven help the company that lets things come up.
In a similar vein, when family members allow one another to break promises and ignore the consequences, pain and suffering are just around the corner. When it comes to child rearing, arbitrary accountability is a big contributor to delinquency and insecurity. Giving family members the luxury of arbitrarily choosing which promises they’ll keep — turning life into a cafeteria of commitments in which people can keep one of this one but not one of those — drives people insane.
The Intersection of Flexibility and Focus
Let’s be realistic. Things do come up. In today’s tumultuous world, changes occur all the time, and if you can’t make mid-course corrections as new information pours in, your company will die. You have to be strong and flexible. You have to be able to bend but not break.
How can you be at once focused and flexible? It’s actually easy. At the heart of every workable accountability system, there is one simple sentence: “If something comes up, let me know as soon as you can.”
This sentence represents the marriage of flexibility and focus. In these 12 words, two seemingly contradictory elements form a perfect harmony: the yin and yang of accountability. Although the words are sparse, to speak them is to say:
“I want you to live up to your promise. Please don’t unilaterally break it. I want you to focus on getting the job done. At the same time, I realize that the world can change. Things come up. Many of these barriers will negate your existing promise. If something does come up, let me know as soon as possible so there are no surprises and so we can decide together how to handle the situation.”
Consider the following situations:
Sometimes the thing that comes up will affect motivation. For example, your son is on the way to take a makeup algebra test after school and his uncle stops him along the route and asks him to go to the movies. He’s been lonely since his divorce, and your son thinks he should go along. So he wants to change his priority. But not without talking to you. Together you should decide if your son should provide familial support or if he should take the makeup test, or maybe you can find a way to do both.
Sometimes the thing that comes up will affect ability. For instance, the air-conditioning unit breaks down, and the production manager thinks she should let everyone go home early even though she promised to finish a project. This may be the right solution, but she should first check with the major stakeholders (in this case, her boss) to see if this is the best solution for the situation. Maybe, based on the reasons for the deadline and the costs of missing it, it makes better business sense to pay the service experts overtime plus a surcharge to get the equipment fixed right away.
With a policy of “If something comes up, let me know as soon as you can,” we should expect pretty immediate communication. Thanks to modern technology, when we say, “Let’s talk as soon as you can,” we know that can be pretty fast. Between e-mail, voice mail, text messages, and cell phones, we are always no farther away from each other than the speed of light and the click of a button. To put this in perspective, you can track someone down in China about a hundred million times faster than Marco Polo.
The Foundation of Crucial Accountability
Let’s return to our friend who told us that he didn’t attend the computer class because something came up. What should we say to him? Naturally, the way we approach the failed promise will depend on our own private history of accountability. If our company promises are merely rough guidelines, include the possibility of a surprise, or are made with a wink, we’ve reaped what we’ve sown. There’s really not much we can say. In fact, in a huge number of companies (and families are no different), the following is true:
Results = no results + a good story
In institutions where accountability is shaky, people treat you as if you’ve succeeded as long as you have a good excuse or story. In this inventive culture, failure accompanied by a plausible excuse equals success. And we all know what the good story is: “Something came up.” It’s the catchall story. It keeps you from ever being held accountable — that is, if friends, family, bosses, and coworkers actually let you get away with it.
But you know better. You understand that an accountability discussion by definition deals with broken commitments, and if you don’t have to keep commitments, everything falls apart. You also know that things change, and so if there is a need to change, talk as soon as you can.
Therefore, when you first started working with your team, you spoke in great detail about the all-important sentence: “If something comes up, let me know as soon as you can.”