TRANSCRIPT: Threats About Accountability Don’t Work

Threats Don’t Work

Hello and welcome, everyone.  I’m glad to have you join me.   Our topic today is Threats Don’t Work.   If you’ve been in management longer than a week you’ve had people who have challenged you when they didn’t do what they needed to do.  You may have caught yourself telling them, “Hey, I’m warning you, if you do that again you’re going to be in trouble.”  We’ve all been there, and we all do those types of things.

It reminds me of a joke I saw once when a poster was put up that said Repeated Late Arrivals Will Be Executed Upon Appearance.  I mean, it’s funny that you’ve got such a problem you have to put a poster up that says repeated late arrivals are going to be executed upon appearance. It’s funny, but it’s unrealistic, isn’t it?   In our regular, everyday life we, as leaders, understand that accountability is essential in order to have success for our teams, so we have to have people follow the rules.

We need people to be on time.  We need them to complete projects on time.   We need them to be engaged with our customers.   We need them to be respectful of the vision for the company.   But the real question is, how do we get it?  We might need it, but how do we actually hold people accountable effectively?

I’ve learned over the years that most managers struggle with effectively holding people accountable, and the reason is because they really don’t want the conflict.

How many of us have avoided having that conversation that we knew we needed because we know that there’s going to be conflict?   How do we know there’s going to be conflict?   In most cases, we’ve already had conflict before by having a conversation with that individual.  The real problem is that we actually create accountability issues because of the way we communicate with our team.

Oftentimes we won’t address something that somebody’s doing, and that they shouldn’t be doing, because we don’t want the conflict.    So we avoid it and, therefore, we put it off.   By putting it off we often wait until we get angry about it.   Once we get angry about something, even people who normally would not have conflict are okay with creating it at this point, because they’re angry.   They feel like they’re being taken advantage of, and they can’t believe their team member doesn’t understand.

They feel like they’ve been cutting them some slack.  “The person has been late three days this week and I haven’t said a word.  They’re hoping I don’t notice, but I have noticed and they didn’t even give me an explanation. They didn’t do anything.”  So by the third time it happened, you get upset and you’re angry.  You go storming over and say, “Hey, you’ve been late three days this week.   I want to know why and I want it to stop immediately.”   You’re angry, and you’re communicating in an angry way.

When we do that we have used what I call the Shock Factor. We’ve shocked that employee by insinuating, “Hey, I’m not as dumb as I look.”   That might work from a standpoint that you’ve proven you’re paying attention, but it didn’t produce any real result.

By losing your anger in addressing the situation, you’ve created a barrier between you and that individual that will take weeks, months, and sometimes years to get over.   That individual will constantly be on the lookout from that point forward to determine whether or not you’re angry.   They’ll avoid you and avoid conflict with you.   They’ll avoid doing things, because they don’t want that anger to come back out.

It starts with us as parents with our own children.  How often do we let our kids do things, and then we get ticked off about it?   We blow up and they get angry.   When you create that type of angry response, you don’t get the reaction that you want.

I learned this the hard way with my oldest daughter.  She was really good at pushing the envelope and totally loved pushing it with her mother.  She would push and push, and her mother would tell her, “If you don’t do this by the time I count to three, you’re going to get in trouble.”   So she would start counting, “One and two and three.”

I explained to my wife that I  wasn’t sure counting was a good thing to be doing because now she thinks she can get away with anything unless you’re counting ‘one, two, three.    My wife didn’t like conflict and was trying to avoid it.

This went on for a while and our daughter’s behavior kept getting worse.   One day it was just the two of us, and she started doing something that she shouldn’t have been doing and I said, “I would appreciate it if you stopped that.”   When she didn’t stop  I immediately picked her up and punished her.   I corrected her immediately and when I did she looked at me and said, “But, Daddy, you didn’t count!”   I looked at her and said, “No, and I won’t ever count.  If I ask you to do something, I mean for you to do it now.”

That’s the way you want to behave as a leader.  You want to react at the first occurrence so that your anger isn’t the force that causes you to take action.   That lesson never left my daughter.  I never had another situation where she misbehaved and was watching me to determine whether I was going to correct her.

But you know what?  What I learned at home, I didn’t learn at work.  I’d wait until I lost my temper and then I had a real problem because these people could leave anytime they wanted.

Your employees don’t have to stay, they can quit.   I learned that I was creating a barrier that was going to be nearly impossible to overcome.  I was forcing people to be deceitful.  And that is what you would be doing too.  You force them.  You’re encouraging them to watch your moods, watch your attitude and watch your body language instead of just having a good interaction with you.

The fact is, not everything that needs to be corrected is a major issue.  Sometimes things happen.  For example, sometimes people are late to work for a reason – the car may truly have broken down, they may have had a sick child, they may have had an emergency they had to take care of.   You should ask what’s going on so that you know. Don’t assume they’re just being lazy and showing up late.

You’ve got to create a dialogue with people so that you can communicate with them.  Simply threatening them is not going to correct poor behavior.   It never has and it never will.   Begin to monitor how you communicate with people so that you can have intelligent conversations and determine what the real problem is.   Then it’s much easier for you to move forward.

In addition to watching the way we communicate, it’s important to monitor the frequency that we communicate with our team members.  Frequency of communication is so important and so overlooked today.    I hear the excuse that ‘I’m just too busy’ regularly.   I just completed a meeting where a high-level leader was telling me they were back-to-back-to-back-to-back all day, and saying it like that was a good thing.   But it’s not a good thing to be booked back-to-back-to-back.  What happens is that you have no time for real, genuine interactions with your people.   I just don’t think that works.

When I talk about frequency, you should know that studies show that the only interaction most people have with their manager – or with their leader – is when they do something wrong.  That’s the only time they hear from them.  They make a mistake, and true to form, here comes the leader – here comes the manager – and they give them the correction talk.   All that does is let them know that the only way they have dialogue with their manager is when I do something wrong.   That will build a wall between you and your team that will prove impossible to overcome.

This is why more frequent communications are necessary.   It shouldn’t happen only when they do something wrong.  As their leader, you should be looking for when they do something right.   Point it out and be positive about it.  et them know that you appreciate what they are doing.   When you do, you’re creating a real dialogue with a human being and, therefore, conflicts will be far, far less possible because they will know that you appreciate them as a human being.  You appreciate them as an employee and you appreciate them as a valued team member.

If you’re only communicating with them when there’s something wrong, then you’ve got a problem.   Not only are you communicating poorly and with the wrong frequency, but it never provides you with the platform to be able to listen to somebody else.

Too many times in leadership we want everybody to listen to us, but we are poor listeners ourselves.   The key to great relationships is truly listening to the other person. You cannot give someone a greater compliment than to listen, and when I say listen I mean listen with attention. Not just look at them and be thinking about what else you’ve got to do next.  What I’m talking about is to listen with true intent and be involved in the moment.

That makes you a completely different type of leader.  It makes you a leader that people really value and they want to be part of the team.   They want to achieve their goals because they know they’re being valued as a human being.

When you truly understand that threats don’t work, that you must communicate well and often, and that you should also focus on listening well, that’s when you are becoming the leader that others want to follow.

Thank you for joining me today on threats about accountability don’t work, and have a great week!