“Culture produces results,” writes Roger Connors and Tom Smith in their book, Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results (Portfolio Penguin, 2011). They ask us to reflect on two important questions: “So what is your desired cultured? And what are the desired results you are seeking?” The answers to these two questions are crucial to solving the immediacy of various, pressing problems, because clarity about the culture we seek to create helps us to define how the problems and challenges before us should be solved.
Annamarie Mann and Ryan Darby in their article, “Should Managers Focus on Performance or Engagement?” in the August 5, 2014 issue of the Gallup Management Journal, write: “High-performance managers hold their employees accountable for performance. It is not enough to be involved and provide direction. Great managers also ask their employees to take ownership of their success or failure. High-performance managers don't allow a culture of excuses or poor performance; no one thrives in such a culture. When managers don't hold employees accountable for performance, about seven in 10 employees (69%) are actively disengaged; only 3% are engaged.”
The intersection of creating organizational culture and holding people accountable is often forgotten in the rush to solve pressing problems, especially during times of complexity. Yet, we must not forget what Kevin Cashman wrote years ago, “Leaders get what they exhibit and what they tolerate.” We need to be very clear about what we role model, and be very clear about how we hold people accountable. Both impact and create culture that over time transcends the most immediate problems before us.
In order for accountability to be done successfully, the organizational culture needs to have transparency, participation, routine evaluation, and effective, bilateral feedback. On the surface this all seems manageable, but for many leaders and managers, they do not consider it a part of the work they need to do on a day to day basis. Often, this kind of work is framed up as the work the CEO or the Senior Team. However, in organizations that do handle complexity and adaptive challenges well, the leaders and managers understand that the avoidance of accountability will result in low standards of performance, and even dysfunctional teams. All of which will create a misaligned culture from what we aspire and what we actually experience.
Now, the dictionary defines accountability in the following manner: “an individual or organization is evaluated on its performance or behavior related to something for which it is responsible.” From the definition’s perspective, part of accountability involves excellent supervision which involves oversight. In short, the person being held accountable must be completely responsible for that which must be done, and must be able to give a satisfactory reason for doing the work. All of this involves having common language and common purpose, clear expectations, good communication skills, and an understanding of alignment. For the person holding someone accountable, they need to be able to supervise, coach, give feedback, engage in collaborative behavior, and define consequences and results at both the strategic and operational levels.
Culture, on the other hand, is the sum of behavioral norms that are agreed upon mostly by people in positions of power. Recognizing that the above definition of accountability involves quite a few behavioral components, exceptional leaders during times of complexity understand one basic, and very important fact. “In productive companies, the culture is the strategy,” writes Jason Jennings in his book, Less is More: How Great Companies Use Productivity as a Competitive Tool in Business (Penguin Putnam, 2002). “Unlike other companies, productive companies know the difference between tactics and strategy. The difference is the foundation that allows them to stay focused and build remarkable companies. They have institutionalized their strategy.”
In a company who defines their culture as a strategy, leaders understand that they have to consciously institutionalize their culture. This is a strategic choice, not just an operational reaction. In essence, they have to choose to define what is core, or most essential, to the company.
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book, Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (HarperBusiness, 1994), define the term, core, as the sum of core values and core purpose. They call it the “core ideology.” As they write, “… we did not find any specific ideological content essential to being a visionary company. Our research indicates that the authenticity of the [core] ideology and the extent to which a company attains consistent alignment with the ideology count more than the content of the ideology.”
On a parallel track, Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012), writes that building and maintaining a cohesive leadership team “requires an intentional decision on the part of its members…. teamwork is not a virtue. It is a choice - and a strategic one.” He continues, “A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.” In particular, this team must agree on the core ideology and then focus on creating a consistent alignment with it across the entire company. They also have to be able to articulate the core ideology, and the reason what it is mission critical to the success of the company.
While the concept of alignment seems so abstract and to a degree so does having and agreeing to plus articulating a core ideology, leaders, who are balancing the needs of the local community and the needs of the entire company, understand that alignment is everything, because it is essential to having a unified culture across the entire company rather than local or regional, cultural silos. Furthermore, once we have this unified core, we can hold people accountable to getting work done, and to getting it done in alignment with what we believe and how we aspire to work together.
When we do this important work of unifying the core of the company and creating alignment, we have to remember that on any given day, be it at the community level of the corporate level, 80% of the staff report to a front line supervisor and work side by side with a small group of co-workers. For these particular staff, their front line supervisor and their co-workers, not the senior leadership team or even the CEO, are their world. For them, these relationships are the company culture, and the place where alignment is aspirational or inspirational. For them, accountability is an operational experience, rather than a strategic choice.
Recognizing the impact of this perspective and the inter-relationship between culture and accountability, we need to focus more on the health and well being of our teams. For this is where the core becomes real on a day to day basis. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall wrote, “all work is teamwork.” Teams “help us to see where to focus and what to do.” Furthermore, people really care about which team they are on and who is leading that team.
Buckingham and Goodall build on this perspective when they wrote: “… what distinguishes the best team leaders from the rest is their ability to meet these two categories of needs for the people on their teams. What we, as team members, want from you, our team leader, is firstly that you make us feel part of something bigger, that you show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful; and secondly that you make us feel you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals.” In essence, the intersection of organizational culture and accountability happens at the local level every day. And it is this daily, local experience that creates or diminishes the capacity of the company during complexity.
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