The Leader's Journey with Lee Thayer

Accountability and the High-Performance Organization

Talk is not an accomplishment. It is typically what people do in lieu of an accomplishment. The more accomplishment-minded people in an organization are, the less they have to talk about. Consider these thoughts.

• The less people achieve, the more need they feel to talk about it.
• Communication fills the void left by having no clear purpose, or by failing to accomplish what needed to be accomplished.
• Much if not most communication in organizations is in lieu of accomplishment. Or it may simply be as irrelevant as are the people who engage in it as a substitute for purposeful performance.

Accountability means owning the outcome - not the talk. Accountability requires the competencies required to accomplish what needs accomplishing, and for avoiding those consequences that ought not to occur. To develop a high-performance organization, accountability is the tool that you, as the leader, must wield. You are, and the people in your organization must be:

• accountable for statements made.
• accountable for the promises that were made to anyone inside or outside the organization.
• accountable for an implicit promise.
• accountable for every accomplishment you and they sign on to, explicitly or implicitly, and for the ramifications of whatever occurs as a result of your or their failure to perform.
• accountable for developing all of the competencies required to accomplish what you have signed on to accomplish.

There is no accountability where there are no consequences for failing to accomplish what was agreed to. An excuse is the opposite of accountability. Every hour of every day there are "Moments of Truth" in every organization, as Jan Carlzon (then head of SAS) wrote some years back. In the outcomes of those moments of truth, there is either accountability or there is not. Making it necessary for people to be accountable is simply indispensable to making a high-performance organization.

Six Obstacles to Extraordinary Performance - Do You Know What They Are?

If you don't want to be tripped-up or blindsided by the most common obstacles to extraordinary performance, it helps to know what they are. Consider these:

1. One of the most basic of these obstacles is our compulsion for short-term thinking. We are a quick-fix society. However, becoming really good at anything requires a commitment to whatever it takes - and that includes the investment of time and effort required.
2. A similar obstacle that bars anyone's entry to world-class performance is recipe/panacea thinking. This kind of thinking culminates in your belief that somehow, there is a magical solution to your problems that merely has to be applied - the less effort, the better. Call it modern magic.
3. Closely related is the belief that words can be used to change people. That is, if you use just the right magic words, you can "motivate" people from being merely adequate to being truly masterful at what they do. This is a widely-held myth.
4. If you believe that the answer to your prayers is some how-to-recipe, then you must necessarily assume that people are interchangeable with respect to that recipe. They are not.
5. If you "go with the flow" - the conventional mindset - you will see the world as far more linear than it is. And you will see human behavior as far more controllable by you than it is.
6. Across the range of people we look to for leadership, such as the managers of our organizations, there is a significant shortfall of courage, of vision, of passion, of commitment, and of competence. All these are required for those who would either lead themselves or others. Such shortfalls function as obstacles.

As you consider these obstacles, ponder also these relevant thoughts:

• Most people are okay with the notion of change - as long as it does not involve them personally.
• Most people are satisfied with their mediocrity. In fact most people will work harder at preserving their mediocrity than at anything else. What do you think motivates them to do this?
• And finally, people and their byproducts are perverse. What sort of logic, therefore, is required to provide leadership to them?

Remember, realizing obstacles that can block extraordinary performance is the first step on the path to acheiving it. Would anyone like to add to the list?

Leadership - Having the Right Tool for the Right Task

A Phillips screwdriver won't work on a slot-head screw. It's tough to drive a staple with a hammer. A master carpenter has a tool for every purpose. An amateur has a few standard tools and tries to make them work for every purpose. So what's this got to do with leadership?

Leaders acquire or invent the tools they need to fit the circumstances. They let the situation or the problem define the tools or techniques needed, rather than defining the problem by the tools they happen to have available. The look at problems as an opportunity to learn something, rather than merely as an opportunity to apply something they already know.

So a leader is a tool-finder as well as a tool-maker. A leader realizes that unconventional situations require unconventional tools. Unlike amateur managers, who let the tools they happen to have define the situation, leaders let the situation define the tools required.

But, consider also this thought. A tool is the right tool only in the right hands. A master carpenter and the tool he or she is using are interdependent. They each enable the other. That's the way it needs to be with leaders.

By itself, a hammer does nothing it was designed to do. In the hands of an amateur, expect damage. In the hands of a master craftsman, expect superior results. No tool or technique can compensate for the inadequacies of their users. We are led - easily on our part - to believe that we can buy smarts, or at least buy something that would compensate for our own or others' incompetencies. However, you cannot. I cannot. No one can.

The right person is the person who is fully capacitated - fully competent - to combine with that tool or technique what can be achieved when each is "right." Consider these closing points:

• A poor tool in the hands of a fully competent person will produce results far superior to a magnificent tool in the hands of an incompetent person.
• Who is the "right" person? The one who is fully competent to make use of the right tool.
• Any shortfall in competence lessens the value of the tool.

A leader is someone who has the right tool for the right task - and knows how to use it.