I received a call from a distressed Fortune 50 executive, lamenting that his company is struggling to create a “culture of accountability.”
Newsflash: If your employees exhibit “Who me?” attitudes, your company lacks accountability. This behavioral deficit adds cost to every process, impairs product quality, angers customers, and repels investors.
Accountability is a value taught (or not) in homes, neighborhoods, schools, houses of worship; in music, on TV, in movies; and from politicians, from business leaders, and in the general culture.
If children aren’t raised and trained to be accountable — to do what’s necessary and proper, to take responsibility for their actions, without being told — it’s harder to expect and enforce such behavior in adulthood.
Moreover, children who witness the hypocrisy of unaccountable adults not suffering any negative consequences will disregard everything they’re taught.
Carrots & Sticks
In corporations, accountability starts at the top and propagates downward.
When employees know that their CEO, and all the other execs on the org chart, will enforce both carrots and sticks, they will toe the line. If, on the other hand, the CEO encourages and rewards cheating, that will be the result.
To wit: Wells Fargo may never recover from its fraudulent anti-customer activities. Same for Facebook, whose shares plunged 18+ percent today (the largest one-day drop in Wall Street history) — because its data-sharing chicanery and subsequent coverup, eventually exposed, have driven away customers and revenues.
Obligations & Responsibilities
As stated above, people take their cues from their leaders.
Lou Holtz, Hall of Fame football coach and motivational speaker, recently talked with sportscaster Joe Buck about his life, career, and success philosophy. Holtz compared athletes of today with those of 40 years ago:
“Today, everybody wants to talk about their rights and their privileges. Forty years ago, we talked about our obligations and our responsibilities. I believe that we still need to get back to the obligations and responsibilities you have to other people.”
Lou Holtz brilliantly defined accountability. By shining a light on spoiled athletes, he explains its absence in today’s culture. Entitlement, which blankets our society, is the antithesis of accountability.
Yet, Holtz downplayed the situation: He didn’t mention political correctness, safespaces, microaggressions, perpetual outrage, and the other hallmarks of our Millennial-driven culture that obviate accountability.
Bottom line: CEOs must create accountable companies from a large pool of unaccountable, entitled employees — who are influenced and nourished by a culture that neither demands nor reinforces obligation and responsibility.
Parting Advice to CEOs
Accountability requires leadership, starting with you.
If you want to run an accountable company with a strong brand, you need people who live and breathe obligation and responsibility — and demand it from those around them. This is an uphill fight.
Don’t allow “Who me?” slackers into your company, retrain those who slipped in through faulty interviewing practices, and purge the rest.
Alternatively, scoff at and dismiss the aforementioned, and continue complaining about your unaccountable company.
© 2018 Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.
About the Author
Marc Rudov is a branding advisor to CEOs,
producer of MarcRudovTV, and author of four books