Accountability Without Authority

In this Mike on the Mic episode of The Better Leadership Team Show, I tackle one of the toughest leadership challenges: accountability without authority. I explain why accountability breaks down in cross-functional environments, how silos and finger-pointing form, and what senior leaders must do differently to drive results when they don’t control every lever. I also share practical mindset shifts and eight concrete strategies leadership teams can use to strengthen ownership, influence, and execution across the organization.

Thanks for listening! Connect with us at mike-goldman.com/blog and on Instagram@mikegoldmancoach and on YouTube @Mikegoldmancoach

Chapters

• 2:15 Defining Accountability vs. Responsibility
• 3:29 The CRM Implementation Example
• 6:52 The Problem of Multiple Accountabilities
• 10:06 Shifting from Control to Influence
• 10:26 Common Signs of Accountability Issues
• 14:17 Mindset Shifts for Effective Leadership
• 17:44 Practical Steps for Cross-Functional Accountability
• 29:45 Conclusion and Weekly Challenge

Transcript

Mike: 0:02

Accountability is not about control. We need to be able to be accountable without total control. Accountability is about commitment to those outcomes. Even when we don't own every input, it's about ownership and we need to spend more time debating our goals and our shared successes as opposed to using language like my department, my goals.

Mike Goldman: 0:39

You made it to the better leadership team show, the place where you learn how to surround yourself with the right people, doing the right things. So you can grow your business without losing your mind. I'm your host and leadership team coach, Mike Goldman. I'm going to show you how to improve top and bottom line growth, fulfillment, and the value your company adds to the world by building a better leadership team. All right, let's go.

Mike: 1:12

I've done a number of podcast episodes on the whole concept of accountability, and I will continue to do more because it continues to be, one of the biggest, if not the biggest struggles that I've see leadership teams having. And part of the proof is when I look at my most popular podcast episodes, it's all the ones on accountability. So what I wanna talk specifically about today within the idea of accountability is accountability without authority. That is such a challenge for leaders. And let me explain what it is, explain why and how it's a problem, and then talk about some ways to. start improving your ability as a leader and as a leadership team to execute on that. When I start working with a new leadership team in my coaching business, one of the first things that I explain to them is the difference between accountability and responsibility. and the way I explain the difference between the two is that responsibility is about who is rolling up their sleeves to get a job done. And responsibility could be one person, it could be 500 people that are all rolling up their sleeves to get a job done. Accountability is always an only one person, the one person who owns that KPI, that project, that priority, that task, the one person who owns it, which means that they own. Defining that priority or project or strategy. They define how we measure success. If we are in the green, we're gonna pat them on the back. If we're in the red or the yellow, we're gonna say, what's our plan to get back into the green? To get back to success? One person owns it. Now here's an example of the importance of having one person. Be accountable versus multiple people being accountable for, and I'll use a project as an example, and I'm gonna use the example of a CRM tool, a client relationship management tool. And while I'm not a CRM expert, I have never been a CRM consultant. This is a conversation. That I have heard at least three dozen times, and you've probably heard it as well. So here goes this is every CRM conversation, about going live I've ever heard. So the head of technology is on his or her way to the weekly accountability meeting for the leadership team. Thrilled because the new CRM just went live on time and on budget. they're just ready to get a standing ovation in the weekly leadership team meeting. They're gonna. Be carried out on the shoulders of their peers. And when they state that the CRM has now been live for the last month, and it was delivered on time and on budget, they wonder why they're not getting a whole bunch of, cheers, in fact, not only are they not getting a standing ovation and pats on the back, here's what they get. The head of Operations says, well, it's great that it's live and it was done on budget and on time, but who cares if we're not getting what we need out of the tool? My understanding as the head of operations is that I was gonna be able to use all of the great new information on our sales funnels and pipelines to better plan my resources to better plan my inventory, and none of that stuff is up to date. Most of our sales opportunities aren't even in the system, so I can't use it. So congratulations that it's live on time and on budget, but who cares? The next person to speak is the head of sales who says, damn, right. That our sales funnels aren't up to date and every sales opportunity is not entered into the system. I told you two months ago that if my salespeople need to go to 12 different screens and spend two hours entering a new opportunity, I'm not forcing them to do it. I need them out there selling, not sitting behind their laptop, who's right? The head of technology who went live on budget and on time, the head of operations who's saying they're not getting not, they're not getting value. The head of sale sales who says they're not gonna have their salespeople sitting behind a laptop instead of out there selling, they're all right. And that's the problem. The problem is in that scenario, and in most scenarios, there were multiple people accountable. For the successful implementation of that CRM, everybody in a silo was trying to make it a success or work with it in their own way. And when I try to convince a leadership team that wait a minute, in that situation, one person needs to be accountable, I get pushback. Especially from the head of technology saying, wait a minute, like, I don't know Mike, who you think ought to be accountable, but how could I be accountable? Operations doesn't report into me. Sales doesn't report into me. I have no authority over them, and my answer is. Welcome to the Senior Leadership Team. Welcome to the life of being a senior leader. This is why we get paid the big bucks. We need to be accountable at times for things we don't have total control of or total authority for. Now, in that CRM example, who should have been accountable? Frankly, I don't care. Maybe it could have been the head of technology, maybe it could have been the head of operations or the head of sales. It's different for different companies. There's no one right answer, but I will argue one and only one person needs to own the successful, not only successful implementation. But the successful realization of the business case, the successful realization of the result that you're trying to get. Now, this is not easy, especially some of you listening might. Have a matrix structure in your organization, which makes things complicated already, let alone being accountable for things that, that you have no authority for. Matrix structured, shared services, dotted line, accountability, all of those things add complexity. So the central question is how do you stay accountable? How could you hold yourself accountable when you don't control? Every lever, how can I be accountable if I don't have the authority for all of the folks that need to be involved? It's an important question because without that, the only person in a company that can truly be accountable for any, for anything cross-functional is the CEO, and that's not scalable. The CEO can't be accountable for everything. Leadership teams need to hold themselves accountable, not wait for the CEO to hold each silo accountable. So on this episode, we're gonna, we're gonna unpack how this challenge derails even the strongest leadership teams and how we shift from control to influence, how we shift. To a better ability to have cross-functional accountability. So what are the common signs of this problem of accountability without authority? Well, one of the signs is projects tend to stall because we're waiting on them. And if you're listening to this and not watching this on a video, my them was in air quotes. We're waiting on them. We're waiting for some other department to get their job done. It's not my fault. I'm no, I'm not in control of that. I'm just waiting on them. Another common sign is silos form, because accountability feels unclear. Who is accountable? There's multiple people accountable. No one is accountable and therefore, silos, form, and cascade down through the organization. Another common sign is finger pointing alignment meetings, turn into blame sessions. I got my job done. it's not my fault that Joe didn't do his piece. And these problems that start at the senior leadership team level, the finger pointing and blame at a senior leadership team level cascades down through the organization. When I see at the middle and lower levels of an organization, for example. The sales team having big problems with the service team and the service team having big problems with the operations team and the operations team having big issues with the product development team. All of those things tend to be rooted in problems at the senior leadership team level in. Many mid-market organizations, leaders operate in systems that reward ownership within silos, but they rarely think cross-functional. They really train in how to do this and coach in how to do this at a cross-functional level. So let's talk a little bit about the mindset shift that's needed, and then we're gonna talk about some very kind of tactical, structural ways to put this into place. But we always have to start with mindset. And the first mindset shift we need to make is a task-based mindset to a results-based mindset. As a junior level team member, as a middle manager, we are typically held accountable to getting tasks done. As a senior leader, we need to be held accountable. For results, not tasks, we need to be held accountable for improving our talent density. As an organization, not implementing a new leadership development program, we need to be accountable for better inventory management and better client service and speedier closed sales opportunities. By implementing a CRM. Not that the CRM went live on time or on budget, that's why we get paid the big bucks as senior leaders because we don't get paid for getting stuff done. We get paid for results, measurable results. And the other mindset shift is that. Accountability is not about control. We need to be able to be accountable without total control. Accountability is about commitment to those outcomes. Even when we don't own every input, it's about ownership and we need to spend more time debating our goals and our shared successes as opposed to using language like my department, my goals. Some practical mental questions that you could use to get that mindset right for you and for your peers. On the leadership team is when there's a problem. Instead of pointing the finger, ask the question, what could I do? What could me and my team do to move this forward? It's not about finger pointing, it's about looking in the mirror. Who do I need to align with? Not wait for, again, we can blame that we're waiting for someone else to get something done, or we could better align with them to figure out a better answer. Ask yourself the question, which peers on the leadership team or which departments do I need to better communicate with or create a stronger relationship with? And we need to model that accountability from the top again. When you see problems with different departments, not getting along, fighting with each other, blaming finger, pointing at middle levels and lower levels of your organization, I'd say is a 95% chance that stemming. From you at the senior leadership team level. So we need to model this at the top. Now, how do we model that? What are the structural ways that we could actually, what are the processes we could put in place so that we are constantly modeling and executing on this from the top? And I'm gonna take you through eight different. Ideas here. First is when you are defining priorities, and I don't care, you might call them rocks as I do. You might call them OKRs, you might call them priorities. The name doesn't matter, but we need to get used to setting and having ownership for cross-functional. Priorities, rocks, OKRs, like the successful results of implementing A CRM. So when we're creating priorities as a company, it's easy to create priorities for the sales team, for the service team, for the technology team, for the finance team. But where are you creating cross-functional priorities? With an owner, with one person accountable. So that's number one is make sure you're creating those cross-functional priorities to give folks more of a team view of ownership versus just within their department. Number two is, you know, I've talked in other podcasts about something called the functional accountability exercise. and, very simply, that's what are the functions in your company who's accountable? For each function, and that's important, but here we need to talk about something different. and it's something called the process accountability exercise. Every company has some number of cross-functional processes that are critical to the organization. There might be five, there might be eight, something like that. Critical cross-functional processes. one example might be hiring and onboarding a new employee. Which may go from, you know, HR to the line manager, technology might be involved. Finance might be involved in onboarding people and making sure they have everything they need to succeed. Launching a new product may start with product development, but then move to operations and service and sales, going live or launching a new client. It might be cross-functional. What are those cross-functional processes that are critical? And who owns those processes? It's easy to say the whole launch of a new product. Well, that's owned. depending on where you are in the launch of the new product, it may start with an ownership, in the, you know, the innovation. function within our organization, but then that may pass to operations that had, has to build this new product and then it may pass over to service that needs to make sure they can service the new product and sales to make sure they're selling the new product. Those are silos, and yes, there needs to be some accountability there, but who has got the cross-functional accountability for the end-to-end process? Of successfully launching a new product and successfully launching a new product is not just, huh, great. We now have a new product successfully. Launching a new product probably has more to do with profitability generated from that product, so we need cross-functional accountability. So think about process, cross-functional process accountability, and who owns those cross-functional processes, not multiple people, but for each cross-functional process. Who's the one person that owns it? Now, whether it is a cross-functional process or a cross-functional priority, like implementing a new CRM, we need to be clear. About the cross-functional measures of success, what is the measure of success for onboarding a new employee or a new client? What is the measure of success for implementing a new CRM or ERP system? It's the end result, not the intermediate results that each function might be accountable for. What is the end result? So. We need to make sure, number one, that we make our priorities, some number of our priorities and projects cross-functional. Number two, we need to have process accountability, cross functions. And number three, when we have that, we need to be clear about those measures of success. And again, the measures of success shouldn't be the measures of, yeah, we've got these 12 tasks done. It's an actual outcome we're measuring and that outcome at some level should impact our P&L. Number four is we need a way on a weekly basis to hold each other accountable. So I recommend weekly accountability meetings of the senior leadership team, not weekly status meetings where everybody is just, wow. here's what I got done this week. Who cares? We have real work to do, but if we have cross-functional measures of success for our priorities, for our cross-functional processes, we need a way to actually hold each other accountable. And it's not the CEO's job to hold everybody accountable. It's all of your jobs on the senior leadership team to hold each other accountable. And it's important you have a forum to do that. And that forum is your weekly accountability meeting. That was number four. Number five, after action reviews, you know, after, measuring a process for some period of time after a project or a priority is completed, have an after action review. What could we have done differently? Is one question. As a cross-functional team, what could we have done differently to get better results? But then the second question is, what could I have done differently? What could my department have done differently to move this along? Very often it's in those after action reviews, which by the way, could be after action, could be after a great result or a horrible result, or anywhere in between. It's those after action reviews where we typically. Identify ways we could have worked better together as a team, or we could have done a better job of accountability without authority. It's sometimes where the important relationships are built after difficult debates are across functions that are so important for building cross-functional accountability. Right. Cross-functional accountability starts and ends with strong, trusting relationships, vulnerability based relationships across departments where people are willing to say, I'm sorry, I screwed up. Need some help. So that's number five. after action reviews. Number six is the opposite of that. It's called a pre-mortem. A pre-mortem is opposed to a post-mortem, which is sometimes the word we use for an after action review. A pre-mortem says before launching a new priority or a new project that is cross-functional. And you could do this even if it's not cross-functional, but especially if something is cross-functional. Do a pre-mortem. A pre-mortem says if we magically time travel into the future. And in that future, we realized this project or this priority was not successful, what are the possible reasons why we might have fallen down on this? And let's together cross-functionally try to figure out how to solve this. Doing that allows whoever is that one person accountable for that priority or for that project to better understand what they need to do, who needs to be involved. And now that you all kind of, you know, own, the way to get this done. That one person who is accountable for the project could better hold everyone accountable because they're not dictating. Number seven, and I've mentioned this on probably four different podcast episodes, is something I call the peer accountability exercise. If a big piece of accountability without a authority is building the relationships. Amongst peers on that senior leadership team so you could influence each other and hold each other accountable. The big piece of it is feeling comfortable holding your peers and being held accountable, being able to give and receive feedback without fear of retribution. All those things are so important for accountability without authority. The peer accountability exercise is a critical way to do it. I'm actually traveling later today to a client where we're gonna do this as part of our quarterly planning session, and it is a, an exercise where the leadership team sits around in a circle. And each member of the leadership team gives feedback to each other member of the leadership team. What's one thing you do that I want to thank you for? That is such a great help to the team. And what's one thing you do that I'd really like for you to change or improve upon or stop doing?'cause it really hurts the team. Now if you wanna dive into that, the process of doing that is pretty important. I should not. Pretty important. Very, it's very important how you run that exercise. So search for, I have another podcast actually called the Peer Accountability exercise, where I dive deep on that whole process. That was number seven, the peer accountability exercise. And number eight is something I call triad coaching. And very often I will have leadership teams divide themselves into groups of three. You could do this in groups of two as well if you have a smaller leadership team, but divide into groups and coach each other where each member of that diad or triad comes up with something they would like to be coached on, and they communicate to the other one or two leaders what it is they're struggling with. And the other one or two leaders coach them. On it. The power of that is it helps build this vulnerability based trust amongst team members, which again, is gonna make that mindset shift and that process shift for being able to hold each other accountable and hold yourself accountable. So much easier.'cause you're building trust across the team. So let's wrap it up. The key idea here is. You don't need full authority to drive full accountability. Not only do you not need it, it's critical that you are able to drive that full accountability cross-functionally on a leadership team where the leadership team is just not gonna work. So here's my challenge to you this week. Look at one cross-functional one. Look at one cross-functional initiative in your company that is stalled or maybe just not stalled, but moving slower than you'd like, or not getting the results that you'd like. And ask yourself, what could I influence to move it forward? Even if you're not accountable, help that person who is accountable if you are accountable. Ask yourself the question, who do I need to better influence? Who do I need to build a stronger relationship amongst my peers on the leadership team or amongst the other departments in order to move this forward? Not who's screwing up? Who do I need to go tell the CEO, tell the teacher and get them in trouble? No, not that. Let's assume that everybody's trying to do the right thing. Right. This whole idea of the law of positive intent, that everyone is just trying to do the right thing with the information they have and the resources that they have. Who do you need to build a better relationship or better influence to move this thing along? But remember, as a member of the senior leadership team, you get paid for results and not tasks. Which means you need to be able to hold yourself and others accountable even when full authority isn't there. And remember, you can't build a great company without a great leadership team. I hope I got you closer to that today. Look forward to seeing you again soon.