Where Does Your Search for Accountability Begin?

When someone on your team fails to perform, who is really accountable?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson challenges leaders to stop treating accountability as something that begins after performance goes wrong. Instead, he introduces performance leadership, the upstream work required to successfully transfer responsibility from a leader to the person performing the work. 

Using the discipline of military marching as a powerful analogy, Ed explains how clear expectations, communication, coordination, practice, and visibility create the conditions for accountability. 

He breaks performance leadership into six critical areas: work description, assignment, planning, completion, evaluation, and remediation. Before blaming an employee for poor results, leaders must ask whether the work was clearly defined, assigned to the right person, properly planned, monitored, evaluated, and supported. 

The key lesson is simple: before pointing out the window at your team, look in the mirror at your leadership systems. True accountability begins long before the work gets done.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Transcript

Copy

Speaker 1 0:01

If you're leading a team and you feel stuck in chaos, conflict, or constant pressure, then LeadershipSOPs podcast is for you. And here's your host, Ed Tyson. Hi! Face follow word. March.

Speaker 0:23

Man. That was definitively the most marine thing I've done or said in decades. And strangely enough, it felt great. It was as if I was transported to another time. I never much liked marching when it was happening, but wow, it turns out it's still connected to my bones in some weirdly deep and unexpected way. Did you ever stop to ask, why do militaries march? I mean, why is marching the world over synonymous with military training? Even Sun Tzu's The Art of War, which is about strategy, leans into this predilection with a particularly bleak example in its opening passages. But why? Certainly, in the US at least, we haven't fought battles in formation since our break from tradition during the Revolutionary War, and likewise, it hasn't been the primary way to move troops since, I don't know, maybe the Civil War. So why in 1992, when I was at Paris Island getting my education, was it still among the first things I had to learn? And why in 2026, if I were to hike just south of here, just a few miles from my headquarters in San Clemente, would I find recruits doing it right now at Camp Pendleton? The answer, of course, is in what marching teaches and helps you unlearn because there is a fair amount of unlearning that goes on when you're learning to march, right? There wasn't a single Marine Corps recruit who showed up for boot camp that didn't know how to walk from point A to point B. But marching teaches you how to do it in the way your branch or your country does it. There's a lot happening there when you realize you need to relearn something as basic as walking from point A to point B. And you're all doing that together. You are relearning how to stand, walk, turn, and turn around. You learn who is giving the commands, the sound of their voice, the possible commands they might utter, and the sound of a gaggle versus the sound of a rigorous, disciplined machine. It is a full sensory experience, sight, sound, and kinetic synchronicity. To march, troops must key into that one voice, be familiar with the possible orders, process them all at the same pace, and then move in unison, leveraging the exact same body and head movements all while maintaining consistent dispersion and alignment in three dimensions. And here's one of the most important pieces. There's no place to hide. The entire team can see and hear failures immediately. With every step, attention and accountability must be absolute. And when done right, a collective power is harnessed internally and exuded physically, and in most cases projects a very intimidating precision. Now, as you can imagine, I don't think you should treat your leaders and teams like Marine Corps recruits. And I don't think you should be leveraging synchronized esprit de corps to intimidate others. But I do, I really do think, we can all learn from the basic exercise, breaking down a simple task, which you might already think you know how to do, redefining it as a team task, clarifying where the communications will come from and what they are likely to consist of, reaching agreement on rhythm and timing and what collaboration is allowed and not allowed, and relentlessly practicing what we're preaching together, achieving pride through synchronized execution and accountability. Now that, that sure does sound like something with applications in most organizational environments. Wouldn't you agree? Hello, and welcome to the Leadership SOPs podcast. I'm your host, Ed Tyson, leadership author, coach, and consultant, and creator of the Leadership SOPs framework, methodology, and app. Today we're going to talk about accountability. Now, I find what most leaders want to talk about when they bring up accountability is what to do when they don't have it, when they've already lost, or they're actively losing. Essentially, they want to talk about performance management, how to take remedial action with employees who fail to perform. There's no question performance management is a critical process which all leaders must perfect, but it is essentially reactive. Rather than focus here with our time, I'd like to get proactive and strategic about accountability by, as we frequently do here, going upstream, upstream of the handoff that took performance out of your leader's hands and put it into a contributor's hands. Essentially, I want to shift the conversation from downstream performance management to upstream performance leadership. Performance leadership is honoring the upstream work which must be done to enable the transfer of responsibility from a leader to an individual contributor. Frankly, if this work hasn't been done, the transfer actually hasn't happened. Responsibility hasn't been appropriately transferred, and accountability remains with the leader. In other words, leaders who skip this work that we'll discuss today and the connective tissue between their scope, work, and operational plan should be looking in the mirror rather than out the window when it comes time to determine who is accountable. Likewise, the reverse is true. Leaders who attend to this work build the essential will and capabilities required for critical performance handoff and individual accountability. They will succeed. They will transfer that responsibility, and they will be right in holding the members of their team accountable for performance. As you'll recall, in episode four, we talked about the power of getting your leaders to craft leadership SOPs for clarifying and aligning on their scope, their strategies, culture, objectives, and purpose within their unique ecosystems. In episode five, we then discussed the need to translate the scope into the work by translating things like purpose, culture, and strategies into a work design, the work methods and tools, organizational governance and structures, rewards and recognition systems, and knowledge and capabilities required to succeed. In episode six, we addressed how to go from your highest level why, what, and how in that scope and work design to exactly how in your operational plan and budget by integrating the predetermined, projected and proposed effort into a single schedule which times the use and production of critical resources. Obviously, all of these upstream concepts impact a contributor's ability to know the why, what, how, exactly how, with whom, and when an activity should occur. However, these dimensions almost never carry us all the way to task performance. And that is what lands us at the doorstep of today's topic. Most plans do not have the ability to schedule every piece of work or work package. Even great plans required more detailed performance leadership and systems to transition from strategies, operating models, structures, and plans to individual work package assignment and performance. And that happens within a leader's personal or organizational work management SOPs. The systems your teams use to describe, assign, plan, complete, monitor, evaluate, and manage performance. I've seen work management systems ranging from paper and pencil systems to AI-infused automated workflow technologies. Typically, the work, the culture, and the resources available drive which system is appropriate to you. The important thing is a work management system should set expectations and track all major work through the work cycle, from intake through completion, evaluation, and remediation in the case of defects. Often, establishing such systems is the first step to helping new leaders shift from optimizing individual pieces of work, which may have been their job in prior roles, to helping them optimize workflow and collective community performance. Work management systems provide critical process data, without which process improvement and performance management are very constrained. Having such a system is effectively table stakes. It is all but impossible to lead effectively without one. Hitting the jackpot, of course, is having one that integrates with work suppliers, individual contributors, and downstream stakeholders. Today, we're going to focus our discussion on six focus areas, which should drive your performance leadership discussions with your leaders. They are work description, work assignment, work planning, completion, evaluation, and remediation. As we bite into each one of these areas, think back to why militaries march. We are creating the expectations, the conditions for accountability to transfer from leaders to those who will perform the work. Now, sitting here with this microphone in my face, I can't answer these questions for you, but we can talk through how you might arrive at the right expectations for your leaders. First and foremost, before we start, you should expect that they do have a management system. As weird as this may sound to some of you who have very sophisticated ones, I can tell you that I have personally never had a job. Not one, aside for some restaurant work in and before college, where my leader actually handed me one. I was always left to my own devices for creating these systems, tracking what work was coming in, who I had given it to, when it was due, if it had been completed, etc. Not only that, but not one leader I worked for requested one. Don't let this be the kind of performance leadership you display. If your functions don't have systems in place, work with your leaders to develop one that fits the work. If you have one, think about these areas as we go through them and whether your leaders have considered them in their formal or informal systems and whether or not they need to be improved. So I started, remember, with work description. What are the expectations? What are the systems and tools to track it? What is the work? Where did it come from? What type is it? What is the priority, sequence, or dependencies relative to other work? What is the anticipated level of difficulty and effort? Who is available to even do that work? Who qualifies? What time-sensitive data is already known about the work, like its start, duration, or completion? Then you get to work assignment. So again, thinking about the expectations here. What are the systems and tools for tracking it? Who will perform this work? Are they qualified and capable? Are they available and trained? What are the relevant roles and responsibilities for others who might join them? Have all parties been notified of the work and its importance? I can't tell you on this one how many times this has gone awry where I see leaders assign peers to the same work, but only give the details to one, and calamity ensues. Moving to work planning. What are the expectations, systems, and tools for tracking that? Is there an existing plan or process expectations? And what are they? Is a plan expected to be developed? Is it part of the work itself? And if so, who will develop, review, and approve it? Then, once it is produced, where is it kept? Did it receive the sign-offs? How do we know? Then moving from work planning into work completion, our fourth focus area. What are the expectations, systems, and tools for tracking it? How will the work be monitored and reported on? Will there be observers of the work? Will you be there? Or an automated monitoring system? What aspects of the work will they monitor, either the people or the system? And how and when will that data be made available to the performers? Will mistakes be remedied in real time or will it only be made known later? How will status updates be tracked and communicated? Once the work is actually performed, we get to that work evaluation. So this is still before performance management. And you need to establish what are the expectations, what are the systems, and what are the tools for tracking this information? How will the work be evaluated? And by what criteria? How will that evaluation be communicated? Who will see it? Everyone or just some people? And then we finally get to the work remediation. How and when will exemplary work be recognized and rewarded? And how and when will work process or product defects be communicated and remedied? How many chances does a poor performer get to get it right before they face consequences? And what are those consequences? And what escalation and other processes exist to provide a sense of fairness and psychological safety in that process. Notice here, we got all the way to the sixth item. Define the work, assign the work, plan the work, complete the work, evaluate the work. Then we're worried about remediation. We got all the way to number six and we finally got to a place where we were at performance management. And that's because almost all of these upstream activities are the leaders. Everything was owned by leadership. That's why I like calling it performance leadership. But now we do get to that final leg of the race. It has been run, performance has happened, and it has either occurred or not occurred as defined. All the upstream work, though, before the passing of the baton, this is why we have leaders, because of just the amount of work that is represented here to create these systems, to manage and run them appropriately. This is why the work of leading is different than the team's work, because there is a lot of it. By the time you get to performance management, your leaders should have run most of the race, leading the collaborative development and communication of the scope, the translation of the scope into a work design, and an operating plan and budget, then getting even more detailed by defining and maintaining a work management system like the one we just discussed. If you haven't helped your leaders create a work management system yet, I would suggest you begin by asking them, maybe collectively, if you sense this is a broad or systemic gap, how do they do it today? How could it be done better? And provide them and you better process information, process data for better process improvement. Or another approach is the next time an accountability issue comes up during a coaching session, work this list of six focus areas backwards with your leader, helping guide them upstream, helping them understand these focus areas and the performance leadership work involved. If they come to you with a performance issue, ask them to share how their work management system suggests these issues should have been handled, and whether that is how they've been handled so far with this individual and others. Ask them to show you the work evaluation standards and trends for this individual and the team at large. Guide them even further upstream by asking about planning and completion documentation. Was there a plan or process? Was it communicated? Did they ignore it or use the official process and tools and still get a poor result? Finally, how was the work originally described and assigned? Was it documented and clear? Or as is so often the case, did the most important details about this work disappear at the speed of sound as they left your leader's lips? Was there competing work being performed in tandem? Was it clear which assignment was more important? Was the right, most capable and available individual assigned the work? Setting these expectations and following whatever processes and tools they contemplate is the only way leaders can really hand the baton off at this critical moment in the relay race. Everything, up to the actual doing of the task, is performance leadership. It is a relay race in which almost every critical leg is actually run by the leader. They need to know this. They need to know it is unacceptable for them to come to you pointing out the window at the final runner, the anchor of the race, when the baton is still actually in their hands. It was never appropriately handed off. When things go wrong, they need to know to look first at their processes and systems, the ones that are 100% in their control, 100% their work, their responsibility, and that can't be transferred. And recognize that when we don't build these processes, these interconnected systems, we are not performing the critical work of leading. Now, before I wrap up, there's one more thought I'd like to leave you with. Everything we've been discussing today assumed a level of simplicity we said is almost never true all the way back in episode one. We discussed this performance leadership flow as if all the leaders and all the performers are your people, so to speak, your direct or indirect reports. But leadership almost never works that way. Your team is almost never enough. There is almost always a broader community of effort involved, often with their own work management systems, priorities, processes, tools, and definitions of quality. These are your peers, other departments, sister companies, customer suppliers, partners, regulators, etc. Whether, how often, and how we engage these stakeholders to build the trust and credibility we need before we need it often determines what success is and whether we even have a shot at achieving it. So having already discussed planning and accountability, stakeholder engagement is exactly where we're going next on the LeadershipSOPs podcast. Don't forget to find, follow, and engage with me on LinkedIn or within the LeadershipSOPs app. And as always, lead on.

Speaker 1 20:50

So that's it for today's episode of LeadershipSOPs. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 value VIP Day with Ed Tyson himself. Be sure to head on over to leadershipsopspodcast.com and pick up a free copy of Ed's gift. And join us next time.