I was speaking with the head of the human resources (HR) department at an investment firm that was a big fan of The Leadership Contract. Over several years, all leaders at the firm had experienced our training programs. The senior executive team spent considerable time learning the concepts themselves and ensuring they were effective role models for the rest of the organization. During our conversation, I asked this head of HR about some of the most tangible outcomes. She shared that leaders at all levels were stepping up in more significant ways. They were demonstrating more ownership for their roles. They were taking the initiative to work across the company on priorities with peers and colleagues. Then I asked her what she felt was the most significant impact. She immediately responded, “Our leaders are doing a much better job of holding other leaders accountable for being leaders.” She couldn’t have had a better answer. As a leader, you are expected to hold others accountable for their performance. Many leaders struggle with this. Now you may think it’s just junior leaders with little experience who struggle. Well, it’s not—some CEOs struggle as well. Studies show that close to 20 percent of CEOs cite holding others accountable as their biggest weakness and another 15 percent struggle with dealing with an underperformer.1 As a leader, you need to address these issues with those you lead. As we discussed earlier in the book, you may find many are accountable and committed to the technical parts of their roles. However, they may be less committed to being accountable leaders. This is where you must apply your focus. The real end state you want to achieve is one where individuals step up and are fully committed to being accountable leaders. No opting out. No coasting. No flying under the radar. You need to set the expectation for your direct reports to own it, step up, and demonstrate real accountability every day. If you succeed, you will elevate your ability to lead to the right level. You will also eliminate the inordinate amount of time you spend dealing with accountability issues on your teams. You will also create a ripple effect of accountability across your organization. This chapter will provide you with the strategies you need. We will explore how you can use the four terms of the leadership contract to guide your efforts to hold others accountable to be leaders (see Figure 7.1 below). Do you know with certainty which of your direct reports are truly accountable and which are mediocre? When I ask leaders this question, many have a response, but it is often based on a gut reaction rather than analysis. The first step to holding others accountable for being leaders is knowing where they stand. Taking stock of your direct reports from a leadership accountability perspective can be incredibly valuable. We will do this by completing a quick assessment based on the four terms of the leadership contract. To start, I’d like you to identify a direct report and think about how they are showing up currently as a leader. Now read each of the 20 statements in Figure 7.2 and check off whether the statement is strong or weak for the individual. What insights did you gain from your quick assessment of your direct report? Let’s have a closer look. First, if you found that you predominately checked off the 20 statements as strengths, then you can conclude you have a direct report who is an accountable leader. This is great. You must keep nurturing the person’s development and ensure they act as a role model for others on your team. The more leaders you have who set the tone of accountability, the more others will step up. Remember, accountability breeds accountability. Second, if you found you had direct reports who had an equal amount of strengths and weaknesses, then you need to focus your attention on helping them be stronger. The strategies in the rest of this chapter will help you do just that. You may also want to review The Leadership Contract Field Guide. It contains 75 valuable activities that can help your leaders become stronger and more accountable. Finally, if you have a direct report who is weak in most areas, this person needs your immediate attention. You will need to have a meaningful conversation with that individual to share your insights. Learn how they see themselves and determine what might be getting in the way. You can ask the person to do a self-assessment on the 20 statements. See what that reveals. Perhaps you haven’t been clear on your leadership expectations. Perhaps the person is committed to the technical parts of the role but hasn’t spent time thinking about being a truly accountable leader. Alternatively, the person may have good intentions to be accountable, but is struggling to create value and have impact. No matter what the issue is, an open and transparent conversation is an excellent place to start. If you rate a direct report as having many weak areas, you may also need to ask yourself whether they are a mediocre leader. Go a little deeper in your analysis by looking at the top five characteristics of mediocre leaders that we explored earlier in the book. The questions below will be helpful: If you find yourself saying yes to any of these questions, then chances are you have a mediocre leader on your hands. You will need to act. Begin by having a direct and open conversation. Gauge how the individual reacts to your feedback: Do they respond positively? Do they accept your feedback? Or do they react with defensiveness and anger? You may also need to reevaluate whether this individual is in the right role. Maybe they need to be moved into a more technically oriented position. Perhaps there is a culture fit issue. Regardless of what is going on, it would help if you took action to help this individual. If you don’t, you will inadvertently send a message that you are a leader who tolerates mediocrity. You wouldn’t want to do that, would you? One of the most important obligations you have as a leader is to set clear leadership expectations for your direct reports. Surprisingly, few leaders do this. I believe it’s the most significant missed opportunity for you to drive stronger leadership accountability among your direct reports. You see, without clear leadership expectations, you do not have clarity nor the foundation to hold others accountable to be leaders. By not making your expectations clear, you also leave it to others to decide what is important. Don’t make this a guessing game: Be clear with your leadership expectations. If you recall the findings from my global research on leadership accountability, only 49 percent of companies surveyed claim to have set clear leadership expectations. Take a few minutes now to start thinking about the leadership expectations that you have for your leaders. Here are some ideas to get you started: Once you have identified the leadership expectations for your team, you should see a greater sense of clarity from your leaders. You will also see a more aligned and consistent approach to how your team members lead. I certainly learned this a few years back. I was leading a senior team driving a significant transformation in our business. My team and I were having a two-day offsite. Before this meeting, I sent an email to stimulate their thinking. In it I told them how excited I was about the journey we would be taking together. I also expressed that my expectations of them were changing. I reinforced how important accountability was to me, how I wanted to create a team where we had each other’s backs. I expressed the need for us to practice what we preached to our clients. I also reinforced that our leadership culture would begin with us, so we had to set the right tone for the rest of our team. I wanted our collective leadership experience to be one of the best career experiences they would ever have. I also told them we would have some challenging work ahead—changes in talent, changes in how we approached our business, and so on. A few of my team members immediately responded to my email saying they appreciated the clarity. They also admitted to feeling a little scared about where the bar was being set. I was, too. The challenge was enormous. These ideas inspired the conversation during our two-day meeting. They added their perspectives, and we developed an aligned set of leadership expectations for ourselves and our team. We communicated these expectations to our entire team. They became a foundation for how we behaved and how we led. You can take this one step further by using your leadership expectations to create your own leadership contract for everyone to sign, including yourself. In my book The Leadership Contract, I provide a sample leadership contract for the reader to sign. That sample leadership contract is tied specifically to each of the four terms. So if this idea appeals to you, you may want to check it out. In the end, there is power in setting clear leadership expectations. It’s an essential step to building accountable leaders. However, once you have implemented this step, you must reinforce the expectations regularly. This is what we will explore next. I worked with an energy company a while back. Their chief human resources officer said that the board chair of the company was a big proponent of leadership accountability. He often said that to drive and sustain accountability, a leader must apply constant warm intensity. By constant, he meant that as a leader you need to be deliberate and always setting the expectation of accountability. By warm, he indicated that people should sweat a little and feel the heat of being held accountable. If they don’t, then you aren’t challenging them enough. However, if you are too forceful and apply too much heat, they may not respond adequately. Finally, intensity means that you need to be focused and bring an energy that communicates the importance of the leadership expectations you set. How do you react to these three words: constant, warm, intensity? Once you have set your leadership expectations, you need to embed them in how you and others lead. Many leaders set expectations, but don’t do enough follow-up. Over time, clarity dissipates and accountability wanes. Old leadership behaviors resurface, making change difficult. About 20 years ago, I had an interesting insight into how this can happen. My wife and I were growing our family and decided to buy a larger home. To save a bit of money, we moved our kitchen appliances from our old house to our new home. There was just one problem. The layout in our old kitchen meant that our refrigerator door opened from the left-hand side. In the new home, the refrigerator door needed to open from the right side. No worries, I thought. I popped open a few plastic covers and removed some bolts and pins. In about 20 minutes, I got the door handle moved from the left to the right side of the refrigerator. Easy, right? Not so. For weeks afterward, I approached the refrigerator and instinctively reached for the handle on the left side of the door. This happened again and again. I would be looking at the door handle on the right side of the refrigerator, but my arm and hand would be reaching to the left side. Eventually, we all adapted to the new configuration, but it was surprising how long it took me. Now, you might be asking what an old refrigerator has to do with being an accountable leader? Well, any change requires us to discontinue old behaviors and replace them with new ones needed for success. All of us have muscle memory for aspects of our roles—habits that have served us well, or at least not gotten us into trouble. We cannot evolve and grow if we don’t change. Change also requires us to understand that there may be a new set of leadership expectations we need to embrace. Therefore, as a leader, you need to be unrelenting in holding those you lead accountable for being leaders. If you don’t, their muscle memory will have them reverting to old patterns of behavior. A useful way to sustain momentum is by having regular check-ins or conversations, say two or three times per year. Use these discussions to provide an open forum to have your direct reports discuss their own leadership. These check-ins are not intended to replace regular performance or coaching conversations, but rather to ensure you have time set aside throughout the year to focus on discussing leadership accountability. Use the check-ins to reinforce what is working well and provide feedback on areas that can be stronger. Here are some questions you can explore in your check-in conversations. Send them out to your direct reports before you meet, and then review the responses together. In The Leadership Contract, I wrote a lot about what I called leadership turning points. These are moments when an individual assumes a new leadership role that brings a new set of expectations and a higher degree of responsibility, scrutiny, and pressure. In my team’s work with thousands of leaders over the years, we have defined four critical leadership turning points. At each one, you must sit down with your direct report to discuss what your expectations will be going forward. It’s a great habit to establish, and an even better way to embed your leadership expectations with those you lead. It’s also crucial because, as we already discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, many leaders struggle and even fail to integrate into new leadership roles. Don’t let this happen to you and your leaders. Let’s quickly explore the four critical leadership turning points: Each turning point represents a significant shift in leadership expectations. Not only does the role change, but the leader must also change at a personal level by developing a new mindset aligned with the new leadership expectations. You must help your leaders understand these expectations, as well as how they need to step up and demonstrate strong accountability. You can’t just be putting someone into a role, hoping for the best. No matter how enthusiastic the individual may be, it’s better to pause and have an explicit conversation about the changing demands and expectations of the role. Here are a set of questions you can use when a direct report takes on a new leadership role. Begin by explaining your leadership expectations, then engage in a discussion that addresses these questions: The more you can support your direct reports at leadership turning points, the more successful you’ll be in helping them continue to step up and be accountable. Once you lead others, you realize that part of your role is helping them build their own personal resilience and resolve as leaders. As you know from your personal experience, leadership is hard work. The position is demanding, and many leaders don’t fully appreciate this until they are in the role. You can help your leaders become more self-aware about how they respond to adversity, scrutiny, and the pressure of a leadership role. I remember one direct report I led years ago who was relatively new in a leadership role. He was a great performer, but whenever something would go wrong, he would become quite unsettled. One day, we had an issue crop up on a project he was overseeing. His workstation was just outside my office. I had my door open, and I could sense him fidgeting and getting distracted. It was early in the morning, so a lot of our team wasn’t in the office yet. I peeked out of my office door and asked him to come in for a chat. As soon as we sat down, he started to vent. He was frustrated with how things had quickly gotten out of control, creating an issue with the project. He continued to vent. I listened. When he paused, I asked him, “Are you planning on letting this ruin your entire day?” He was surprised by my question. We discussed that stuff happens, but as leaders, we must be able to respond, reframe, and move on. Given how he was reacting, he was on the path to letting this problem interfere with his entire day as well as his judgment. Had he not paused, he would not have been at his best to deal with any other issues that came his way. We discussed his game plan to fix the problem. He thanked me for the conversation, and his mood and tone changed immediately. It’s helpful to understand the resilience and resolve of your leaders. Here are some things you can look out for, so you can better help them: As you review the seven questions above and think about your direct reports, what insights jump out at you? Where do you need to focus your attention? If you can help your direct reports strengthen their resilience and resolve, you will provide tremendous value to them both professionally and personally. We need to become more transparent and open in discussing the hard work of leadership. It’s one of the most valuable things that happens in our leadership contract programs. Leaders open up about their struggles and provide support to one another. An essential part is of all of this is being able to be vulnerable with others. Dr. Brené Brown has eloquently written about this in her books.2 She describes vulnerability as the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure that we feel when we open up and talk about something outside of our comfort zone. If you let your direct reports know you are available to lend some support and help them reframe a situation, particularly when they are having a rough day, you will be valued and admired. If you are the leader people know they can be vulnerable in front of and feel safe with, you will have a tremendous impact on their lives. Be that kind of leader! As organizations continue to drive more collaboration and innovation across their enterprises, all leaders will need to know how to work across departments and divisions. Working in this way may be new to many leaders. You can help them navigate these uncharted waters by positioning them strongly and helping them build relationships with peers and colleagues. Here are some ideas to consider: In this chapter, we focused on what you can do to better hold others accountable for being leaders. There is a real opportunity for you to be the leader in your organization who helps others succeed. The side benefit is that you will also develop a reputation as a builder of truly accountable leaders. Top talent will seek you out and ask to work for you, because they know they will become better with your support and leadership. Gut Check for Leaders: How to Hold Others Accountable for Being Leaders As you think about the ideas in this chapter, reflect on your answers to the following Gut Check for Leaders questions:Make Leadership Accountability a Priority in How You Lead
Understanding Your Assessment of Your Direct Report
Do You Have a Mediocre Leader on Your Hands?
Define Your Leadership Expectations
Reinforce Leadership Expectations Through Regular Check-Ins
Clarify Leadership Expectations at Critical Leadership Turning Points
Increase the Resilience and Resolve of Your Direct Reports
Help Your Leaders Succeed Within the Broader Organization
Final Thoughts
Notes