Accountability Expectations

At the center of Proactive Accountability are two key accountability expectations.  Ensuring that all employees buy into both is critical and will be accomplished through accountability launch meetings that guarantee every employee within the organization understands and agrees with both expectations. 

Communication Expectation:  It is understood that whenever an employee commits to a project or work deliverable, he or she will meet the quality and timeliness of the deliverable, and if it's not obvious to the manager, communicate this to the manager when the deliverable is completed. 

Problem Expectation:  If the employee cannot meet the quality and/or timeliness of a deliverable, he or she will communicate ahead of time to the manager that there is a problem, why there is a problem and how they plan on correcting the problem.

With the problem expectation understood and agreed to by all employees, there will never be a legitimate excuse by an employee for not communicating problems ahead of time to a manager.  This expectation will be fundamental to a manager's ability to hold the employee accountable for non-performance AND – more importantly – discourage the non-performance from happening in the first place.

Expectation Clarification

Holding any employee accountable for an expectation that he or she did not understand or agree to clearly is unfair.  Too often, a manager assumes an employee understood and agreed to the work deliverable(s).  The manager forms this assumption because they hear "no" when asking an employee simply, "Do you have any questions about the deliverable?"  Amazingly, the manager is shocked when the deliverable is not turned in on time or the quality is sorely lacking.  And instead of taking responsibility for helping to cause the problem, the manager blames the employee – which only creates resentment and morale issues.  Or even worse, the manager never adequately addresses the perceived non-performance with the employee.

Why does this happen?  Many managers simply have not developed the critical skills involved in the art of clarifying expectations.  In addition to clarifying scope expectations, this skill involves leveraging situational accountability so that the less confidence a manager has in an employee, the more interim deliverables the employee will have.  This approach eliminates the problem of the manager learning at the last minute that an underperformer won't deliver.  More important, the manager teaches an underperformer how to raise his or her performance and – if handled correctly – offers the underperformer the empowering incentives of fewer interim deliverables and less frequent follow-up.

Growing an Accountability Culture is designed to equip your managers with the ability to excel at this critical accountability skill.  Starting with classroom instruction that is followed up with developmental assignments, coaching and 360-degree feedback, participants will become increasingly proficient at the skill of clarifying expectations.  

Proactive Follow-Up

Consider this: in an ideal work environment, where employees consistently meet both accountability expectations 100% of the time, when would your managers need to initiate follow-up?  In a word, never!  That's right, never.  Why?  Employees always would take the initiative in following up with their respective manager. They consistently would come to the manager either to let him or her know that the work is done on time and meeting quality standards, or to inform the manager ahead of time if there is a problem. 

Although such a utopian work culture is unrealistic, the objective of this program is to move your organization significantly closer to that ideal. 

This critical principle, which is at the heart of Proactive Accountability, means that the only time managers follow up with an employee is when an employee doesn't meet scope and accountability expectations.  This program will teach your managers how to deal with this by leveraging the language of accountability.  Learning this, your managers will confidently hold underperforming employees accountable in a way that minimizes unacceptable performance in the future and moves the team to a true culture of accountability. 

Your management team will learn two key strategies for eliminating this underperforming behavior.  For example, let's assume 30% of a manager's team doesn't initially meet both accountability expectations.  Leveraging both strategies, this manager will be able to reduce that percentage over a period of time to 25%, 15%, 10% and then 5%.