Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC  

Every great team has a special breed of leader. This new breed of “high-performance leader” is radically different from leaders in traditional, hierarchical organizations. These leaders have made the transition to a model where all team members - as well as the leader - are held equally accountable.

High-performance leaders have scuttled the traditional hierarchical organizational model and replaced it with a flat, horizontal one. A horizontal structure allows a team or a business to act quickly and decisively amidst rapidly changing market conditions. And when it comes to the relationship between team members and their leader, a horizontal structure means casting off the old leader-follower dynamic, revamping if not completely doing away with the distinction between the two.

Impossible?! No! Difficult? Yes, but well worth the effort. Read on to learn how to create an entire team of leaders.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

The Accountable Leader by Howard Guttman 

Leader to Leader, No. 51, Winter 2009

Highlights from the article:

• The high-performance leader-player dynamic rests on a radically different notion of accountability. On a high-performance team, not only are team members held accountable for results by the leader; they are expected to hold one another accountable and - in the most significant departure of all - they are expected to hold the leader equally accountable.
    

• It takes effort and skill to make the transition to a model where all team members - and their leader - are held equally accountable. Overcoming players' reluctance to cross functional lines, question their peers and leader, and deliver honest, candid feedback requires change at the deepest, "inner person" level - on the part of both the leader and the team.
    

• There are six actions a leader can take to move toward high performance:

1. Show How It’s Done. Leaders who ask for honesty must prove that they really want it - even if it is directed at them. They do this most convincingly by listening to a critique of their own performance and acting on it, by changing behavior that the team tells them is unacceptable, by not cutting off dissenters or denigrating their opinions, by not pulling rank when it's time to make a decision. They walk the talk by modeling peer-to-peer accountability for everyone else.

2. Invite Feedback. It can be difficult for people to deliver negative feedback to the positional leader of a team. So leaders have to intentionally, and genuinely, open the door to receive it. "Getting good feedback, honest and timely, is one of the hardest things for any leader because of the natural fear in the system. You have to really disarm people if you want the truth, and the faster you can get the truth, the faster you can apply the learning to yourself and your business."

3. Admit Your Mistakes. One of the best ways a leader can encourage mutual accountability is by owning up to personal mistakes in front of the team. Unlike old-school leaders who carefully maintain the fiction of their infallibility, it’s important to openly admit misjudgments and turn them into learning experiences.

4. Learn to Depersonalize. Allowing your team to hold you accountable takes having a thick skin. It’s critical to never get rattled or become defensive.  This takes great skill - and courage.

5. Get Help If You Need It. Many leaders who set out to create great teams focus on changing the mind-set of their players, yet are never able to complete the self-transformation. The leader who pays lip service to total accountability but still bristles at receiving any less-than-laudatory comment needs to ask, "What story am I clinging to that's keeping me from making this change?" and "Why?" Self-examination may be enough to break through the barrier; if not, personal coaching may be called for.

6. Relax and Learn. For most team leaders, receiving feedback evokes all the joy of a tooth extraction, and team members generally wind up equating feedback with pain and suffering. But feedback on great business teams isn't typically a brutal, punishing experience for the leader who receives it or the players who give it.

• The journey to accountability begins with you, the leader, and your willingness to change your mind-set about leadership and followership. Once this occurs, you can then go about reframing the thinking of those on your team.

  
For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.leadertoleader.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?ArticleID=757

   
Cultivating Accountability in the Workplace

Accountability continues to be the single most powerful and desired characteristic of a successful environment, yet why is it so misunderstood and so often mistaken for “resentful compliance?" How can leaders cultivate a culture that embraces accountability? Author Mardig Sheridan shares the following thoughts:

What are some of the basic fundamentals around this idea of accountability?

• Accountability is frequently used by leaders to ask, “Who is accountable for finishing this deliverable or task, so we know who to blame if it doesn’t get done?” That is a misuse of the concept of accountability.

• In traditional accountability, I hold that employee accountable by issuing consequences. It takes an enlightened leader to say, “What is it about my leadership that this person didn’t achieve their goal or worse didn’t come to me to get support in order to get it done?”

• At its core, accountability is represented by the phrase, "If it's to be, it's up to me." The hardest thing to do is to look at yourself and say, “What I can control is all I can control.” And, I can control a lot more than I may be willing to admit to.

• This is the essence of accountability - getting away from the “Yeah, but you don’t understand - this happened.” I can easily justify my own victim experience by thinking that the issue is not really about me.

• As a leader, I need to ask myself, "What is it that I can do to engage with others so that they are willing to take the stance of accountability?" I can then hold them “able” because they agreed to it. Great leadership is not about having to issue consequences but rather to stay in touch regularly with each person on your team in order to get results.

How can you create an environment that has a bias toward action, rather than resentful compliance?

• This is all about getting the team aligned on a vision of where we are going, so that the people actually feel compelled to do it. There is no way you can get people to feel incentivized and motivated to accomplish something unless they are emotionally engaged.

• If I have a bunch of people in resentful compliance, I, as the leader, need to ask myself, “What is it about my leadership that isn’t engaging them in a way that they really feel a part of what’s going on? That they feel ownership of what it is that we’re doing?” More times than not, in some way or another, the reason is that there is an atmosphere of fear. If there is an atmosphere of fear, then I have to look back to myself as the leader and ask what I am doing that is creating this fear.

 
Next Month

Self-esteem is at the heart of all human relations and productivity in organizations.  Finding ways to nurture a positive self-concept - i.e. self-esteem - in each individual is the bottom line, the key to increasing productivity and the quality of the workplace.

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