Making It Happen

During our staff meeting yesterday, our internal business partner made two suggestions for increasing the number of call outs to clients. Call outs are a way of contacting clients to set-up appointments for our Client partners - people who are the key sales and account management folks. One suggestion was that the head of the business should make certain calls if we wanted to increase the likelihood of getting the appointments - these will be calls to Heads of business and other executives. And the second was that we should get the local newspaper business directory.

The idea of the local newspaper business directory is a great one because it will have a considerable listing of all businesses in Uganda. But it was the reason that we did not have it at that time that stunned me. We had been waiting for our accountant to buy it. I later learnt that the initial idea for the purchase of the business directory was discussed over three weeks ago. And here is the sad part, our neighbours (who seat right across from us) had the 2014 edition of the business directory all the while but none of us asked for it.

This story leads me to the numerous excuses we encounter for lack of productivity. It is not uncommon to for people to wait to be told what to do or make excuses like the one narrated above. First lest be clear, if I had followed up earlier as part of the process of providing support to the team, we probably could have caught this earlier. So I take full responsibility for the excuse giving culture. So when People don’t get engaged and show full ownership or when we allow the urgent and important take over, I am right there. 

An employee who is fired up about what they do and the type of contributions they want to make will not wait to purchase a local business directory or go late to a customer meeting due to city traffic. Neither will a supervisor who is focused on the growth and health of the business waited to be surprised at a review meeting about the lack of a business directory.

 Supervisors and leaders have a responsibility to intentionally provide the right experiences that inform what people eventually believe is acceptable in the work place. We need to look out for those behaviours strengthen our work ethic and drive excellent performance. This is what will drive a culture of accountability; the alternative is to accept mediocrity by our inaction.

So in the example, above we spent some time - including walking to our neighbours to get the local directory – to emphasise to the team what is acceptable. Doing what is necessary to grow the business must be rewarded and celebrated but waiting for the accountant to do what you can do is unacceptable. Everyone on the team learnt that ownership and proactive behaviour are specific choices we make on a daily basis and these choices have consequences for ourselves and the business.

And the way we interact daily to achieve results for the business will constitute what we believe about the business. And it is this belief that drives team results. As Roger Connors and Tom Smith put it in ‘Change the Culture, Change the Game’, every organization has a culture, either you manage the culture or it will manage you. And the best culture to have is a culture of accountability and leaders must create that needed culture of accountability’. Put differently, the culture produces the results.  If you need a change in results, you need a change in culture.

In the new culture, our people must take the initiative to figure out what to do and ask ‘what else can I do’. People personally invest in making things happen and focus on finding solutions. I recall Amos Ntakky, a former colleague of mine who went from the office to Nairobi to pick up a part for Private Branch Exchange (PABX) in order for us to full provision services for a customer. Until Amos travelled, our customer had waited for over 3 weeks for a journey that was 90 minutes round trip.

And the idea that we can deliberately create a new culture of accountability is by far better than the cynicism of ‘all my people are bad’. When we allow our frustrations to respond that way, we create the equivalent of the Pygmalion effect in our teams - what managers expect of subordinates and the way they treat them largely determine their performance and career progress. Less effective managers fail to develop similar expectations and as a consequence, the productivity of their subordinates suffers. Subordinates, more often than not, appear to do what they believe they are expected to do.

We are reminded that a unique characteristic of superior managers is the ability to create high performance expectations that subordinates fulfil. In other words, when we create a culture of high expectations and accountability, our people fulfil them.