Consistent Accountability - Across the Board

As I shared in the next to last chapter of Leading With A Clear Purpose, the compliance side of human resources absolutely drains the life out of me. And putting together an employee handbook, ones where values are often listed in the first few pages but have little relevance to anything else afterward, did that the fastest. But through all that, I was still able to pull some valuable lessons. Early on, one of the managers I was working with to create a handbook made a comment about how detrimental it can be to include canned work rules that we knew would never be administered. Having a policy that expressly profanity while supervisors use the blankedy-blankest language you could ever imagine to say good morning not only removes any teeth from that policy, it discredits every other work rule listed throughout the manual. The manager challenged me to consider that with any update we suggested; this wasn’t just a question of would it be a viable change, but was there a realistic change that the supervisors and managers throughout our facility would actually hold themselves or their teams accountable.

Soon after that conversation, I took over the majority of the unemployment claim hearings. One of my responsibilities in disputing claims was to show that our management team had followed the written policy and had done so consistently with other team members prior to the situation in question. If I didn’t have the documentation to prove our case, the company was on the losing end of the claim even if the employee had genuinely violated policies repeatedly. Just like the lesson I shared earlier from my time in behavior-based safety, any behavior that’s recognized or rewarded does indeed get repeated. 

When it comes to those oh-so-important core company values, establishing and maintaining accountability is paramount! Not only do we need to exemplify those values in everything we do, every manager and supervisor within our organization must do the same. But that’s not where it stops… The folks with those titles are not the ones in our organization who have earned influence; our most senior and our highly skilled team members have influence with the folks around them - be that positive or negative - and they’re likely the ones who have the most interaction with those team members on a daily basis, too. If they step outside the lines on living out the company’s values and we don’t address it, we’re by default endorsing that subpar behavior; not just with them but with everyone who’s watching.

All too often, I’ve seen supervisors and managers turn a blind eye to a highly skilled team member who has fallen short. Sometimes they justify that since the behavior only occurs occasionally. Many times, though, they avoid the issue out of concern that addressing it will cause the team member to quit. Regardless of why, the message actually sent is that any expectation we’ve previously set for modeling our values is really just empty talk. Although this won’t likely result in our values being completely blown off immediately, each time we fail to maintain accountability will perpetuate a downward spiral.

I've emphasized this with dozens, maybe even hundreds, of supervisors, managers, and executives over the last two decades; consistent accountability must be the norm - for everyone in our organization. Unfortunately, many of them initially perceive my push for maintaining accountability as an insistence on going straight to formal disciplinary action and duck that at all cost. That’s most definitely not that case I’m making, at least not at first, so we’ll dig into that next.