The Influencer Blog - accountability tag

Improving Teams: Breaking the 20 barriers to speaking up

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:56:00 GMT

This is the fourth post in a series on Improving Teamwork within your organization. In this post, we will build our influence model, and we’ll begin by analyzing why our vital behaviors aren’t already pervasive in our teams.

The mistake most of us make at this point in an influence initiative is to assume that our current problems stem from a single root cause—that there is a simple cause, and therefore a simple solution, to our complex problems. But this is rarely the case with influence problems—problems that are profound, persistent, and resistant.

Profound: problems that are worth solving and not trivial grievances.
Persistent: problems that have been around a while and not one-time efforts at
Resistant: resilient problems that have defied your previous attempts to solve them.

In short, we’re interested in the kinds of problems that destroy lives, relationships, businesses, and societies—problems that are caused or worsened by human behavior

A key insight we discuss in chapter 10 of Influencer is that these influence problems are “overdetermined.” They don’t have one single root cause. They have multiple root causes. The reason they are so persistent and resistant is that, even when you get rid of one of their causes, there are others that continue to maintain them.

Successful influencers look for a conspiracy of causes in six different areas, or six sources of influence.
Below are twenty questions we’ve used to look for the causes involved in not acting on our two vital behaviors. First, remember our two vital behaviors:

Whenever anyone has a concern, he or she speaks up and explains the concern in a complete, frank, and respectful way.
Everyone holds everyone accountable for meeting expectations, for commitments, and for bad behavior—regardless of role or position.

Explore these questions with team members to understand why they aren’t acting on these vital behaviors. I’ve grouped the questions into six categories to reflect our six sources of influence model.

Source 1: Personal Motivation: Do people derive enjoyment, fulfillment, identity, or self respect from the vital behaviors?

1. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because they don’t like to. It feels uncomfortable, awkward, or even a bit risky.

2. Some people see problems as “other people’s problems.” They don’t feel personally responsible for solving them.

3. Some people fail to speak up or hold people accountable because they are burnt out or disengaged. They have a perspective that prevents them from taking action. They say, “Why should I try? Nothing will change anyway.”

4. Some people don’t see “speaking up” or “holding people accountable” as an important part of their role—they don’t take professional pride in these aspects of their jobs.

5. Some people see their work as “just a job.” They don’t see it as defining who they are or as a moral imperative. So they don’t see “speaking up” or “holding others accountable” as an ethical responsibility.

Source 2: Personal Ability: Do people have the knowledge, skills, and emotional control to perform the vital behaviors?

6. Some people find it difficult to speak up or to hold someone accountable when it’s a person who has a bad reputation or seems frustrated right now.

7. Some people find it difficult to continue to explain a concern when the other person has tried to cut them off. They don’t know how to maintain professional dialogue when the other person doesn’t seem to want their perspective.

8. Some people find it difficult to speak up when they know they might be wrong—when they are clearly not the expert, or when they aren’t sure how to describe the concern.

Sources 3 & 4: Social Motivation & Ability: Do others—peers, managers, friends, relatives, etc…provide sources of motivation and ability to perform the vital behaviors

9. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because, when they do, the people they confront get hurt feelings, get defensive, or get angry.

10. Some people have given up on speaking up or holding others accountable because, the people they confront don’t do their part to help solve the problem. They don’t feel listened to or respected, and the problem continues—so they give up.

11. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold others accountable because they doubt that leaders will back them up if they do.

12. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold others accountable because, if they do, they think they’ll be on their own. They doubt that anyone around them will come to their assistance.

13. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold others accountable because they would have to be the first. There isn’t a critical mass of respected people already speaking up and holding others accountable.

14. There are large power differentials based on pay, education, experience, and authority. People don’t speak up because they find these power differences intimidating—even when there’s no intimidating behavior.

Source 5 Structural Motivation: Do the formal selection, appraisal, promotion, reward, and discipline systems motivate the person to perform the vital behaviors?

15. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because speaking up and holding people accountable doesn’t get you a better performance review, better pay, or help your career.

16. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because no one holds them accountable for doing so. There are no costs or sanctions for staying quiet.

Source 6 Structural Ability: Does the environment make the vital behaviors easier or more convenient, and make the wrong behaviors tougher or less convenient.

17. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because there aren’t enough opportunities. It’s too difficult to find the right times and places to meet and talk about these kinds of issues.

18. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because the people they need to talk with are never around when they need to talk with them.

19. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because the people they need to talk with are physicians or patients or members of other departments who don’t really need to listen.

20. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because it’s not in their job description. They don’t think they are supposed to have these kinds of conversations.

If you are like most people, you’ve answered “yes” to many, if not all, of these questions. In most organizations these twenty questions represent twenty barriers to speaking up and holding others accountable. No wonder problems involving teamwork are so persistent and resistant!

In the next several blog postings I’ll build a robust influence strategy that will overcome every one of these root causes.

Part 2: How can I get safety issues on senior management's agenda?

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:24:00 GMT

How can I help my senior team pay attention to issues like diversity, workplace safety, or employee engagement if it’s not a part of my firm’s Strategic Advantage? (This is part 2 of my last post on diversity)

I spent time this week at TI Automotive in Caro, Michigan as a part of a workplace safety study VitalSmarts is leading. TI Automotive’s safety record is the envy of the industry and I wanted to learn how they do it.

First, a bit of background: TI Automotive isn’t in business to be safe. They’re in business to provide cutting-edge fuel, brake, and powertrain technologies. Their workplace safety record doesn’t provide them any kind of unique monopoly in their industry. It’s not their Strategic Advantage. It’s more of a Competitive Necessity. And yet, they maintain an obsessive focus on keeping their people safe. How and why do they maintain this focus on a “non-strategic” area?

What we learn from TI Automotive’s approach to safety can be applied to other Competitive Necessities like diversity and employee engagement—issues that are important, but may not seem strategic.

Here’s how Mike Wildfong, their general manager puts it, “I use safety as the leading edge of accountability. We need accountability to achieve the quality, productivity, and cost targets we set. But I start with safety. If I can’t achieve accountability around safety, then I can’t achieve accountability around anything.”

See what he’s doing? Mike has identified a small cluster of vital behaviors related to accountability (for more on vital behaviors, see Influencer, chapter 2). These same few vital behaviors drive quality, productivity, costs, and safety. And he’s using safety as the “leading edge” to introduce and promote these vital behaviors.

Back to Mike, “How is anyone going to object to safety? If you come to me and say you don’t want to be held accountable for keeping people safe, that’s a major tell. You’re signaling you don’t want to be held accountable, period. That you don’t want to be on the accountability bus.”

Mike is using safety as a test for buy-in. But his approach goes deeper than that. He builds an entire six-source influence model (see Influencer, pages 73 – 82) designed to promote the safety behaviors, the vital behaviors, related to accountability. And these vital behaviors not only drive safety, they drive quality, productivity, and cost control.

Why does Mike’s approach work? Here are a few of my thoughts…

The vital behaviors that drive safety are virtually the same as those that drive quality, productivity, and costs. They include rounding to discover problems, speaking up when you have concerns, diagnosing causes, reaching decisions on solutions, and following up to ensure success. Mike teaches people to use quality tools like the “5 Why’s” and communication tools like Crucial Conversations to support these vital behaviors.
When a senior leader cares about workplace safety, he or she is saying, “I care about you.” Mike is unashamedly passionate about safety. And this passion creates a relationship that is deeper than a simple boss-subordinate transaction. He genuinely cares about the people who work for him. Review chapter six in Influencer to see how important these deeper relationships are to your success.
Workplace safety connects to Personal Motivation—see chapter four in Influencer. It provides a powerful motive for mastering the vital behaviors. For example, “keeping a co-worker safe” is far more inspiring than “improving shareholder equity.”

I don’t want to give the impression that Mike focuses exclusively on safety and counts on quality, productivity, and costs to come along on a free ride. Mike’s mantra is “Safety, Quality, Volume, Cost.” These are the priorities, and that is their order of importance. Everyone at TI Automotive is quick to recite these priorities and they use them to drive decisions.

Imagine your focus is diversity or employee engagement, not safety. Ask yourself whether your focus could be the “leading edge” for broader more strategic changes.

What Do You Care About: Saving Money or Saving Lives?

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:35:00 GMT

At VitalSmarts, we are in the middle of a workplace-safety study, and I’m interviewing a lot of managers and supervisors. Often I hear them ask, “What do you care about: saving money or saving lives?” Then they’ll assert, “You can’t have it both ways.” While this perspective sounds reasonable, our research suggests that the opposite is actually true. The supervisors with the best workplace-safety records are also the ones with the best financials.

It turns out the question isn’t, “Do you hold people accountable for costs or for safety?” The question is, “Do you, or don’t you, hold people accountable?”

We’re finding a similar pattern in healthcare. The managers whose teams have the highest scores in employee engagement and patient satisfaction are also the best at cost containment. They are best at making sure their department’s FTEs track patient census and acuity levels.

Again, the question is not whether you manage toward employee engagement, toward patient satisfaction, or toward cost containment. The question is whether you manage. Managers who are good at speaking up and holding people accountable seem to be able to achieve “all of the above.”

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around these patterns. They seem like judgment errors to me. So, here are my thoughts. Feel free to add yours…

First, I think we’re far too quick to assume that values like safety and finances are mutually exclusive. We jump to the conclusion that focusing on safety means giving up on finances. Of course, there are times when values are mutually exclusive. We can all imagine situations when saving lives requires breaking budgets. However, in the real world, these situations are the exceptions, not the rule. In the real world, we should assume that most of our values can be achieved most of the time—that we don’t have to pick and choose among workplace safety, employee engagement, patient satisfaction, and strong financials.

The second mistake we make is to assume people’s successes and failures reflect their priorities and values—when they more often reflect their skills. Most of the goals we pursue in the real world, or at least in business settings, reflect values everyone holds—at least to some extent. It turns out we all want safety, quality, productivity, engaged employees, and customers who are thrilled. As a result, although people differ in their level of passion for one value or another, their passion doesn’t predict their success. Instead, their success is predicted by their skills.

The bottom line: When people aren’t achieving a work-related goal you care about, your first thought should be, “What makes this hard for them?” not, “Why don’t they care?” Always look in Source 2 of the Influencer model: Personal Ability. Our research shows it’s a key ingredient in almost every successful solution.