Episode 7 - Accountability (part 1)
June 21, 2023
So it begins! Part 1 of the multi-part Accountability discussion. We dive into Accountability and what it means to "hold someone accountable".
So it begins! Part 1 of the multi-part Accountability discussion. We dive into Accountability and what it means to "hold someone accountable".
(Transcript Start)
[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to
[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name.
[00:00:06] spk_0: What a dumb name. So stupid.
[00:00:23] spk_1: Hey, it's Matt, a solo intro to start just to give some context into what you're going to hear over the next 20 some minutes. Um We are going to do a little of a series, mini series on accountability. So it'll probably be the topic of the next couple of episodes. We spend a ton of time talking about this in person. Uh And when we're doing any training and we wanted to give it the time that we, we really feel it deserves in the podcast. So we are gonna, yeah, spend a couple of episodes going over sort of all the details and this first episode is going to be just centered around laying the foundation of accountability and I'm doing air quotes which doesn't help on a podcast but to hold someone accountable. So we're gonna use this first episode to sort of get all of our ideas out there. Uh And then use the next couple of episodes to talk through the details and the practical application of it like we normally do. But this just required a little bit more context given the fact that we're going to spend quite a bit of time on it and yeah, we're going to jump right in. So with no further ado. All right. All right. Should we
[00:01:33] spk_0: start with homework? Homework? Not, not like last time, not this time to
[00:01:39] spk_1: start. Stop listening to this homework. Now to start, we're going to recap last weeks, sorry. Two weeks ago. Homework. Yeah. Which was
[00:01:49] spk_0: it was um listening for indications of whether or not you're operating in a higher accountability environment or a lower accountability environment. So a higher accountability environment you'd hear like people seemingly able to take ownership of things. Um People being able to sort of actively talk through problems and in a lower accountability environment, we hear more things like, hey, that's not my problem. That's not my job. Don't look at me. So what sort of, what sort of environment do we operate in here? Matthew,
[00:02:23] spk_1: I don't know. It's, I feel like I have incredibly high accountability and you just, you just couldn't be bothered. There was a guy forwarded the email. I was like, Andrea was on an email and like, yeah, but it's in your inbox, it's in your inbox. Just keep, it's just the kitties just sitting in the office like what's going on here. Um So I, I thought about my environments and I have been in a higher accountability or accountable environments. And so when I was in grad school, I was working in retail and as you can, as you can guess, wasn't always the highest account of building environment in a retail where everyone feels like they are just a cog in the wheel. Right? No one at the store level is really going to make any change that's meaningful. So everyone just feels like they're here. I get my, uh, OSHA mandated break schedule and I have to follow and just get me out of here as soon as possible. And, and there, it typically, unfortunately, you, you, you've probably visited stores like this where it just sort of bleeds over into the customer service and you always have some people there that feel high accountability no matter what, which is true all over industry as well where just because someone is able to take ownership and accountability doesn't mean that it's directly indicative of what that environment is. But if the most of the people like in retail stores that people didn't really want to be bothered with anything, they didn't want to ever, ever, ever take ownership. But there were outliers and then as I transitioned over into the, the start up world, they do things to incentivize you to take ownership. They give you typically like some share of the company if you're really like, structurally. Exactly. So you are gonna feel more accountable if you feel like it's your company, right. So all of a sudden they're like, here's an equity stake in what we're doing. Yeah, I'm, I'm in, I will, I will show up early. I'll stay late. I'll do all those things that they, they traditionally tell you what looks like to be highly accountable. But you felt like you had ownership, right? Because you were an owner of the company. And so I've kind of seen these,
[00:04:30] spk_0: so you've been on two ends of this environmental spectrum of what it looks like to have an environment that either allows you as an individual to feel accountable or makes it very, very hard to feel accountable. And maybe that's where we should start. This discussion is trying to separate out the notion of accountability as um a product of an environment versus the phrase that we often hear, which is Matthew, I need to be able to hold you accountable.
[00:05:05] spk_1: Um And the mix up that holding people accountable leads to an environment that is high
[00:05:13] spk_0: accountability. Yeah, because that's really where the I think, I mean, I don't know if this is true everywhere, but at least where I came from, we, we kind of confused the terminology quite a bit. Um where we would say something like, hey, we need to hold that person accountable and really like if you couldn't use the word hold or accountable to rephrase what that meant, what we meant was we need to create consequence or punishment for this individual like whether that be like progressive hr disciplinary action or you know, putting somebody on a performance improvement plan or I mean, anything that would be considered like a a negative manmade consequence for your
[00:05:58] spk_1: behavior. And it served two purposes, it served to teach this individual that this behavior is not tolerated, but also to send a message to everyone else that if you do this behavior, you will be held accountable to that action and therefore you will have these consequences. So I hope that witnessing someone deal with these consequences is enough deterrent for everyone else to not do this behavior.
[00:06:25] spk_0: Yeah. So that notion of holding someone accountable. Yeah. Covered large ground, right? You're gonna, you're gonna learn, you're gonna learn, you're gonna learn today. But then also everyone else was supposed to witness that which we would argue in this hop space is a, it's a very unhealthy view of what accountability is and not something that fits well into how we see the term accountability actually used in an organization that understands hop concepts. Because in the hop space, this idea of holding someone accountable doesn't make a ton of sense. Actually, the words themselves don't, it doesn't even make a ton of sense because accountability, true, accountability is much closer to the word ownership and you can't hold someone to ownership.
[00:07:17] spk_1: Not yet. I'm trying keep trying to, I'm gonna make it, I'm gonna make a stick.
[00:07:22] spk_0: Yeah. So maybe let's separate the ideas like the thing that we just talked about the holding someone accountable. Let's actually, for the sake of this podcast use that as punishment. We're going to just throw in the word punishment instead of using the word accountability to try to make things clear. And then let's talk about accountability by the definition that um we'd argue is much healthier. Um And that definition, it's actually, it's the, it's the Merriam Webster definition of it. Shout out to Merriam Webster,
[00:07:53] spk_1: I'm sure they're listening. Uh Big shout out shout fans over here, Merri Webster. Uh If you want, we can get you on here once we'd love to do it. That's something we've been talking about for a long time,
[00:08:06] spk_0: Marion Webster. Um It is so accountability by that definition, we would argue is the healthier definition. It's somebody's willingness to, to take responsibility or accept responsibility for their actions and to account for meaning to tell the story of their actions. And the part of that definition that I think is incredibly important is the fact that it's someone's own willingness to take responsibility, meaning that either like a, a person either feels responsible or they don't, in any given situation, you can't demand somebody feel responsible, you can't force someone to feel responsible. You can't use punishment to make someone feel responsible. You either feel it or you don't for a given situation. And there's a couple of different buckets, different factors as to why somebody either would feel responsible or not feel responsible. The first bucket, we don't have a ton of control over in an organization because it's, it's the individual and kind of how they see the world. Right? So, it's like, um, like if you're gonna sit with someone, maybe a psychiatrist or a psychologist and sort of unpack how you see the world that plays a part into whether or not you can feel responsible for your actions. Do you feel like you're a victim of environments or do you feel as though you have some sort of agency in the world? But that is not the only factor by any means, the environments that we're in also are highly indicative of whether or not we can feel responsible or feel ownership. So should we describe those environments? Low accountability, environments and high accountability environments? Yeah.
[00:09:49] spk_1: Yeah, let's do it. All
[00:09:51] spk_0: right. OK. You go, that's it. All right. OK. So an environment in which it is hard for any human to feel accountable, any human to feel ownership or responsibility is one in which when you come to work, um you feel like a cog in a wheel, right? So maybe you're your retail space, right? You're a cog in a wheel. Um It's highly command and control to the point that it feels a bit oppressive. It's the environments where we say terrible things like um oh we need you to not bring your brain to work Right. We need you to bring your body to work. Um, you're in a lot of parent, child dynamics in your relationship, right. So you're often being told what you're doing well or not doing well. Um, things are done to you. Um, they're not done with you. Um, you, you come into work and things are changed, right. And your opinion or your thought on, on these changes that directly affect you was not sought after things when they are changed, even how it affected you is not sought after. Um Yeah, those types of environments uh it's actually hard for any person to feel accountable. I'll
[00:11:01] spk_1: add to that. Um I'm just thinking about this now uh because of those all my retail experience, but uh which was when, when churn was very high. So when, when people left the company, uh when Turner was very high, it's very hard to feel accountable because you just feel like you don't know anyone. There's no sort of like, hey, I'm, I'm constantly feeling like I'm covering for someone or I'm being leaned on for my expertise but not rewarded for expertise. And now how can I take any ownership of? It's like I feel like I'm just being used and that's, that's something that we hear a lot, but I personally went through the retail side, but we hear a lot in our conversations and
[00:11:40] spk_0: part of that attrition sometimes when you tie back to why people are leaving has to do as well with the environment of, well, you know, I feel like I'm in parent child relationships all the time and like my ideas are not sought after, right? So they feed into each other. All right. So that's a low accountability environment in those environments. That's where you often tend to hear people say things like that's not my job or, you know, don't ask me,
[00:12:02] spk_1: talked about last week, two weeks ago, I keep saying last week, I'm gonna get it. I promise
[00:12:07] spk_0: you'll be lots of practice that you'll be. Um and I mean, and, and, and just to be clear in any group of people, you're going to have some folks that are just apathetic to their job, right? But this is when you hear a large number of people saying things like, hey, you know, don't look at me, look at my boss for that one. So that's a low accountability environment. And by the way, the reason why all of those things make it a low accountability environment. It's because it's really hard to take responsibility for your actions if you don't believe your actions are your own to take. But we can also picture the inverse of that. We can picture an environment where accountability is pretty easy to come by and that most people can feel accountable. And that's the one where you're, I mean, you're not in parent, child relationships, you're, you're in adult, adult relationships, people are super interested in how things are affecting you, your, your expertise and your ideas are sought after. You feel as though you have some level of ownership or agency to make changes. Um You feel as though your brain is valued. You don't feel like you're just a cog in a wheel or a number that's easily replaceable in those environments. Once again, you're gonna have some folks that are apathetic, but a large majority of the people are able to feel ownership because ownership is allowed to be felt.
[00:13:27] spk_1: Yeah. And another, another way to think about that is, you know, that agency is given, which we'll, we'll talk more about, I think later. But I know that for me when I was in these high accountability environments, uh no matter who I was reporting to, if I, if we had a question, they would look at, well, whoever the expert in the room was and they would say, yeah, I might be the most senior by title, but I don't have all the, what do you think we should do? And what, what are the gaps in, in getting that done? And how can I support you versus you're going to go and do this right now? And, and, and that's, that's such a, a big difference. And the other part of this conversation is it's, we're talking about it as if it's, you know, we're giving you a way to look at it and it's fairly static. You want to know where you are, you can start to sort of count the people that are talking in the, well, not my job, not my problem, whatever that is. And the kind of people that are saying, yeah, I think we can go, you know, let's try that out. I think we can make it work. And that's, you, you get a sense over time which way you're headed and that goes back to the environment we're creating,
[00:14:26] spk_0: right? And it's not just like it's not even just like an organization is either an organization of high accountability or low accountability. It can change by team, it can change by leader, it can change by working team, it can change by plant, it can change by relationship type, it can change about whether we're talking about the the parent child's uh contractor, you know, dynamic versus the dynamic of folks that are, you know, in the plant. So knowing whether or not we are in a high accountability or a low accountability environment is helpful. And the reason why it's helpful is that is something we can affect some change over which I think we'll get to next episode on how to affect some of that change. As a leadership team, we have some influence. Actually, a fairly large influence over whether or not the environment that we've created around us is a high accountability or a low accountability environment. We do not have the ability to control how people feel like as whatever they're unpacking with their psychiatrist or psychologist, right? We can't control whether an individual has a victim mentality or not, but we can certainly create an environment where accountability is much easier to come by. So that's accountability in the way that we want it to show up in an organization. But let's go back to this idea of punishment or the idea of holding someone accountable because what we want to make clear is um in this hop space, we want to need accountability. But we also recognize that we do need to use hr disciplinary action. They're just not for the same things. So hr disciplinary action or putting somebody on a performance improvement plan, how it's generally used in organizations. We use those as tools when we have a person problem, meaning we, we can, we made a hiring mistake like we like if we could go back, we just wouldn't rehire this human. Um For lots of reasons like these are, you know, folks that are extremely hard to get along with on a team, not like a differing professional opinion, but they're people who are like bullying, they're people who don't listen to their peers, they don't listen to direct information from, you know, from a boss. They are the person that kind of, they create problems around them everywhere they go. And in most organizations, it's not a very large number of people like you'd call them the bad apples. I hate that. But, but, but you, it's not a mystery as to who these people are when we do have person problems. And we finally are able to use performance management tools to give them a, I mean, you give people a fair chance, a fair chance to change whatever is going on before you ask them to leave. When that happens, when we're really sure we have a person problem. If they are exited from the organization, everyone thinks, oh man, it's about time. Like,
[00:17:24] spk_1: thank goodness we're not, we're not describing uh we make a joke like the loud chewers usually person problems. They're, they're, they're not the people who, um in a more serious note, like are healthy in sort of how they may disagree. They just because they're disagreeing with someone or maybe they're setting boundaries, doesn't mean they're a person problem. But when everyone around them is just waiting for the day that either get a new job and leave or uh get fired or retire. I mean, it's, it's on the leadership team to recognize that this person is, is, is a person problem.
[00:18:04] spk_0: Yeah. Which most of us, like if we are with a group of people that we work with fairly routinely, you, you already, we already know who those folks are, right? We tend to know them by first and last name and many of them have nicknames and not in a good way. Not in like the, the loving nickname. Right. It's helpful,
[00:18:23] spk_1: Harry, there goes helpful, Harry going around just helping everyone out every
[00:18:27] spk_0: day. All right. So hr disciplinary action is a, is a fair way to help people adjust how they're showing up before we ask them to leave the organization that we use when we have a person problem. Which another way of saying that is we have a hiring mistake and if we removed that person, the problems that we're seeing would go away, right? That's a pretty clear indication we're actually dealing with a person problem. The other space of accountability, right? Which is has nothing to do with disciplinary action is the environment that we've created that allows people to take ownership. And what's difficult is if we mix these up, meaning if we use hr disciplinary action when we don't have person problems, when we just have a behavior that we kind of didn't like, but it's actually rooted in a system problem. It does not create accountability, it actually does the exact opposite. It creates that environment that we just described. It creates the parent child dynamic in which you feel like a cog in a wheel in which you don't feel as though your thoughts are valued and we actually create a low accountability environment in many places that misuse hr disciplinary action. Those are the places that you will hear. People say that's not my job, that's not my problem, talk to my boss, but it
[00:19:51] spk_1: creates the compliance mentality that sometimes leads to malicious compliance. I mean, and then you're talking about potentially tanking productivity and then it just, it makes it worse and worse and worse.
[00:20:05] spk_0: So we have, there's a lot wrapped up to mixing these concepts up. Not only as we described what you just said. Right. Compliance mentality or malicious compliance can be a problem. We also end up exiting people that, uh, don't need to be exited, right? They are not person issues and it's a huge waste of money, right? The amount of time that we spend bringing somebody on board that we spend training people and suddenly to exit someone. Um because we think that we have a person problem when truthfully we don't. Um all of that are things that are just of not a strategic way for us to be able to handle what's happening in our
[00:20:43] spk_1: organization. And on the flip side, if we are creating directly or indirectly this low accountability culture and it's increasing attrition. I mean, it's, it's the exact people are leaving because they don't want to be here because they're just a number, they're just a cog and it's just not the environment they want to be a part of and, and that's also the opposite of it, which is now we're spending more money to bring people back in and train them and, and it just becomes a sort of cycle.
[00:21:12] spk_0: So kind of our, our first step to kind of adjusting this accountability, difficulty is being able to separate out what we just talked about so far today. Right? This idea that we want to need accountability, but accountability is not the same thing as disciplinary action or punishment. Accountability is the culture that we create, that allows people to take agency. If you don't feel a sense of agency, you can't feel a sense of ownership, you do not feel accountable. The thing that we have control over as a leadership team is the type of environment that we've created. And we use our disciplinary action policies as a fair way to deal with person problems. So where do we want to take it from
[00:21:56] spk_1: here? I mean, we could go anywhere we could talk about um the fact that these person problems don't show up just in events all of a sudden we could talk about. Um and we will talk about in the future, like, how do you make an environment
[00:22:12] spk_0: where people can feel, feel
[00:22:14] spk_1: ownership?
[00:22:14] spk_0: Um Let's do this, let's start here. Let's leave people with just this thought so they can mull over it and then we'll give them a tiny bit of homework. So you just mentioned something incredibly important. It's the idea that when we do have a negative event, whether this be an operational upset, a quality issue, a safety issue, oftentimes people are left with this idea of like, well, how do I know if we have a person problem. Like how, how, how do I know if I'm supposed to discipline somebody as a result of this event? And the difficult part. But the in one case extremely difficult because it's different from what we've done before. But in another case, incredibly helpful is that events are not times for us to have to be thinking about disciplinary action because person problems are person problems before events occur. They are not like you don't have AAA person who is not a person problem suddenly become one right at the moment that an event happens. And suddenly we have to now decide whether hr disciplinary action is the right path. Why that becomes difficult is because it's very different from the how we've done things in the past, right? So it's a, it's a departure from what's known, we'll talk about that more in the next episode. But maybe we just want to have um people mull over a, a bit of a subject for their homework. Light, light, light. Um sometimes on the surface this seems to make a ton of sense. And then we find out that there's like a bunch of exceptions to the rules in our head. And so I think what we would like people to think about is when should people be punished in an organization? Like what is their personal belief system on that? When should people be punished?
[00:24:04] spk_1: And there you have it episode one on accountability with the homework of when should people be punished. We'll come back to this next episode and continue this Accountability mini series uh and go through some examples and, and just continue to talk about some real practical uses for accountability and the idea of holding someone accountable and how you do that. So we'll see you next time for episode two on this Multipart Accountability series. Thanks.
[00:24:44] spk_0: Well, that's it. Yeah, another
[00:24:47] spk_1: one in the books we did it.
[00:24:51] spk_0: If you uh want to send us any of your thoughts, actually fling us any of your thoughts you can do so at the website www dot hop podcast dot com.
[00:25:03] spk_1: That's Hoppo DC A ST dot com. It's still such a stupid name. We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.
(Transcript Start)
[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to
[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name.
[00:00:06] spk_0: What a dumb name. So stupid.
[00:00:23] spk_1: Hey, it's Matt, a solo intro to start just to give some context into what you're going to hear over the next 20 some minutes. Um We are going to do a little of a series, mini series on accountability. So it'll probably be the topic of the next couple of episodes. We spend a ton of time talking about this in person. Uh And when we're doing any training and we wanted to give it the time that we, we really feel it deserves in the podcast. So we are gonna, yeah, spend a couple of episodes going over sort of all the details and this first episode is going to be just centered around laying the foundation of accountability and I'm doing air quotes which doesn't help on a podcast but to hold someone accountable. So we're gonna use this first episode to sort of get all of our ideas out there. Uh And then use the next couple of episodes to talk through the details and the practical application of it like we normally do. But this just required a little bit more context given the fact that we're going to spend quite a bit of time on it and yeah, we're going to jump right in. So with no further ado. All right. All right. Should we
[00:01:33] spk_0: start with homework? Homework? Not, not like last time, not this time to
[00:01:39] spk_1: start. Stop listening to this homework. Now to start, we're going to recap last weeks, sorry. Two weeks ago. Homework. Yeah. Which was
[00:01:49] spk_0: it was um listening for indications of whether or not you're operating in a higher accountability environment or a lower accountability environment. So a higher accountability environment you'd hear like people seemingly able to take ownership of things. Um People being able to sort of actively talk through problems and in a lower accountability environment, we hear more things like, hey, that's not my problem. That's not my job. Don't look at me. So what sort of, what sort of environment do we operate in here? Matthew,
[00:02:23] spk_1: I don't know. It's, I feel like I have incredibly high accountability and you just, you just couldn't be bothered. There was a guy forwarded the email. I was like, Andrea was on an email and like, yeah, but it's in your inbox, it's in your inbox. Just keep, it's just the kitties just sitting in the office like what's going on here. Um So I, I thought about my environments and I have been in a higher accountability or accountable environments. And so when I was in grad school, I was working in retail and as you can, as you can guess, wasn't always the highest account of building environment in a retail where everyone feels like they are just a cog in the wheel. Right? No one at the store level is really going to make any change that's meaningful. So everyone just feels like they're here. I get my, uh, OSHA mandated break schedule and I have to follow and just get me out of here as soon as possible. And, and there, it typically, unfortunately, you, you, you've probably visited stores like this where it just sort of bleeds over into the customer service and you always have some people there that feel high accountability no matter what, which is true all over industry as well where just because someone is able to take ownership and accountability doesn't mean that it's directly indicative of what that environment is. But if the most of the people like in retail stores that people didn't really want to be bothered with anything, they didn't want to ever, ever, ever take ownership. But there were outliers and then as I transitioned over into the, the start up world, they do things to incentivize you to take ownership. They give you typically like some share of the company if you're really like, structurally. Exactly. So you are gonna feel more accountable if you feel like it's your company, right. So all of a sudden they're like, here's an equity stake in what we're doing. Yeah, I'm, I'm in, I will, I will show up early. I'll stay late. I'll do all those things that they, they traditionally tell you what looks like to be highly accountable. But you felt like you had ownership, right? Because you were an owner of the company. And so I've kind of seen these,
[00:04:30] spk_0: so you've been on two ends of this environmental spectrum of what it looks like to have an environment that either allows you as an individual to feel accountable or makes it very, very hard to feel accountable. And maybe that's where we should start. This discussion is trying to separate out the notion of accountability as um a product of an environment versus the phrase that we often hear, which is Matthew, I need to be able to hold you accountable.
[00:05:05] spk_1: Um And the mix up that holding people accountable leads to an environment that is high
[00:05:13] spk_0: accountability. Yeah, because that's really where the I think, I mean, I don't know if this is true everywhere, but at least where I came from, we, we kind of confused the terminology quite a bit. Um where we would say something like, hey, we need to hold that person accountable and really like if you couldn't use the word hold or accountable to rephrase what that meant, what we meant was we need to create consequence or punishment for this individual like whether that be like progressive hr disciplinary action or you know, putting somebody on a performance improvement plan or I mean, anything that would be considered like a a negative manmade consequence for your
[00:05:58] spk_1: behavior. And it served two purposes, it served to teach this individual that this behavior is not tolerated, but also to send a message to everyone else that if you do this behavior, you will be held accountable to that action and therefore you will have these consequences. So I hope that witnessing someone deal with these consequences is enough deterrent for everyone else to not do this behavior.
[00:06:25] spk_0: Yeah. So that notion of holding someone accountable. Yeah. Covered large ground, right? You're gonna, you're gonna learn, you're gonna learn, you're gonna learn today. But then also everyone else was supposed to witness that which we would argue in this hop space is a, it's a very unhealthy view of what accountability is and not something that fits well into how we see the term accountability actually used in an organization that understands hop concepts. Because in the hop space, this idea of holding someone accountable doesn't make a ton of sense. Actually, the words themselves don't, it doesn't even make a ton of sense because accountability, true, accountability is much closer to the word ownership and you can't hold someone to ownership.
[00:07:17] spk_1: Not yet. I'm trying keep trying to, I'm gonna make it, I'm gonna make a stick.
[00:07:22] spk_0: Yeah. So maybe let's separate the ideas like the thing that we just talked about the holding someone accountable. Let's actually, for the sake of this podcast use that as punishment. We're going to just throw in the word punishment instead of using the word accountability to try to make things clear. And then let's talk about accountability by the definition that um we'd argue is much healthier. Um And that definition, it's actually, it's the, it's the Merriam Webster definition of it. Shout out to Merriam Webster,
[00:07:53] spk_1: I'm sure they're listening. Uh Big shout out shout fans over here, Merri Webster. Uh If you want, we can get you on here once we'd love to do it. That's something we've been talking about for a long time,
[00:08:06] spk_0: Marion Webster. Um It is so accountability by that definition, we would argue is the healthier definition. It's somebody's willingness to, to take responsibility or accept responsibility for their actions and to account for meaning to tell the story of their actions. And the part of that definition that I think is incredibly important is the fact that it's someone's own willingness to take responsibility, meaning that either like a, a person either feels responsible or they don't, in any given situation, you can't demand somebody feel responsible, you can't force someone to feel responsible. You can't use punishment to make someone feel responsible. You either feel it or you don't for a given situation. And there's a couple of different buckets, different factors as to why somebody either would feel responsible or not feel responsible. The first bucket, we don't have a ton of control over in an organization because it's, it's the individual and kind of how they see the world. Right? So, it's like, um, like if you're gonna sit with someone, maybe a psychiatrist or a psychologist and sort of unpack how you see the world that plays a part into whether or not you can feel responsible for your actions. Do you feel like you're a victim of environments or do you feel as though you have some sort of agency in the world? But that is not the only factor by any means, the environments that we're in also are highly indicative of whether or not we can feel responsible or feel ownership. So should we describe those environments? Low accountability, environments and high accountability environments? Yeah.
[00:09:49] spk_1: Yeah, let's do it. All
[00:09:51] spk_0: right. OK. You go, that's it. All right. OK. So an environment in which it is hard for any human to feel accountable, any human to feel ownership or responsibility is one in which when you come to work, um you feel like a cog in a wheel, right? So maybe you're your retail space, right? You're a cog in a wheel. Um It's highly command and control to the point that it feels a bit oppressive. It's the environments where we say terrible things like um oh we need you to not bring your brain to work Right. We need you to bring your body to work. Um, you're in a lot of parent, child dynamics in your relationship, right. So you're often being told what you're doing well or not doing well. Um, things are done to you. Um, they're not done with you. Um, you, you come into work and things are changed, right. And your opinion or your thought on, on these changes that directly affect you was not sought after things when they are changed, even how it affected you is not sought after. Um Yeah, those types of environments uh it's actually hard for any person to feel accountable. I'll
[00:11:01] spk_1: add to that. Um I'm just thinking about this now uh because of those all my retail experience, but uh which was when, when churn was very high. So when, when people left the company, uh when Turner was very high, it's very hard to feel accountable because you just feel like you don't know anyone. There's no sort of like, hey, I'm, I'm constantly feeling like I'm covering for someone or I'm being leaned on for my expertise but not rewarded for expertise. And now how can I take any ownership of? It's like I feel like I'm just being used and that's, that's something that we hear a lot, but I personally went through the retail side, but we hear a lot in our conversations and
[00:11:40] spk_0: part of that attrition sometimes when you tie back to why people are leaving has to do as well with the environment of, well, you know, I feel like I'm in parent child relationships all the time and like my ideas are not sought after, right? So they feed into each other. All right. So that's a low accountability environment in those environments. That's where you often tend to hear people say things like that's not my job or, you know, don't ask me,
[00:12:02] spk_1: talked about last week, two weeks ago, I keep saying last week, I'm gonna get it. I promise
[00:12:07] spk_0: you'll be lots of practice that you'll be. Um and I mean, and, and, and just to be clear in any group of people, you're going to have some folks that are just apathetic to their job, right? But this is when you hear a large number of people saying things like, hey, you know, don't look at me, look at my boss for that one. So that's a low accountability environment. And by the way, the reason why all of those things make it a low accountability environment. It's because it's really hard to take responsibility for your actions if you don't believe your actions are your own to take. But we can also picture the inverse of that. We can picture an environment where accountability is pretty easy to come by and that most people can feel accountable. And that's the one where you're, I mean, you're not in parent, child relationships, you're, you're in adult, adult relationships, people are super interested in how things are affecting you, your, your expertise and your ideas are sought after. You feel as though you have some level of ownership or agency to make changes. Um You feel as though your brain is valued. You don't feel like you're just a cog in a wheel or a number that's easily replaceable in those environments. Once again, you're gonna have some folks that are apathetic, but a large majority of the people are able to feel ownership because ownership is allowed to be felt.
[00:13:27] spk_1: Yeah. And another, another way to think about that is, you know, that agency is given, which we'll, we'll talk more about, I think later. But I know that for me when I was in these high accountability environments, uh no matter who I was reporting to, if I, if we had a question, they would look at, well, whoever the expert in the room was and they would say, yeah, I might be the most senior by title, but I don't have all the, what do you think we should do? And what, what are the gaps in, in getting that done? And how can I support you versus you're going to go and do this right now? And, and, and that's, that's such a, a big difference. And the other part of this conversation is it's, we're talking about it as if it's, you know, we're giving you a way to look at it and it's fairly static. You want to know where you are, you can start to sort of count the people that are talking in the, well, not my job, not my problem, whatever that is. And the kind of people that are saying, yeah, I think we can go, you know, let's try that out. I think we can make it work. And that's, you, you get a sense over time which way you're headed and that goes back to the environment we're creating,
[00:14:26] spk_0: right? And it's not just like it's not even just like an organization is either an organization of high accountability or low accountability. It can change by team, it can change by leader, it can change by working team, it can change by plant, it can change by relationship type, it can change about whether we're talking about the the parent child's uh contractor, you know, dynamic versus the dynamic of folks that are, you know, in the plant. So knowing whether or not we are in a high accountability or a low accountability environment is helpful. And the reason why it's helpful is that is something we can affect some change over which I think we'll get to next episode on how to affect some of that change. As a leadership team, we have some influence. Actually, a fairly large influence over whether or not the environment that we've created around us is a high accountability or a low accountability environment. We do not have the ability to control how people feel like as whatever they're unpacking with their psychiatrist or psychologist, right? We can't control whether an individual has a victim mentality or not, but we can certainly create an environment where accountability is much easier to come by. So that's accountability in the way that we want it to show up in an organization. But let's go back to this idea of punishment or the idea of holding someone accountable because what we want to make clear is um in this hop space, we want to need accountability. But we also recognize that we do need to use hr disciplinary action. They're just not for the same things. So hr disciplinary action or putting somebody on a performance improvement plan, how it's generally used in organizations. We use those as tools when we have a person problem, meaning we, we can, we made a hiring mistake like we like if we could go back, we just wouldn't rehire this human. Um For lots of reasons like these are, you know, folks that are extremely hard to get along with on a team, not like a differing professional opinion, but they're people who are like bullying, they're people who don't listen to their peers, they don't listen to direct information from, you know, from a boss. They are the person that kind of, they create problems around them everywhere they go. And in most organizations, it's not a very large number of people like you'd call them the bad apples. I hate that. But, but, but you, it's not a mystery as to who these people are when we do have person problems. And we finally are able to use performance management tools to give them a, I mean, you give people a fair chance, a fair chance to change whatever is going on before you ask them to leave. When that happens, when we're really sure we have a person problem. If they are exited from the organization, everyone thinks, oh man, it's about time. Like,
[00:17:24] spk_1: thank goodness we're not, we're not describing uh we make a joke like the loud chewers usually person problems. They're, they're, they're not the people who, um in a more serious note, like are healthy in sort of how they may disagree. They just because they're disagreeing with someone or maybe they're setting boundaries, doesn't mean they're a person problem. But when everyone around them is just waiting for the day that either get a new job and leave or uh get fired or retire. I mean, it's, it's on the leadership team to recognize that this person is, is, is a person problem.
[00:18:04] spk_0: Yeah. Which most of us, like if we are with a group of people that we work with fairly routinely, you, you already, we already know who those folks are, right? We tend to know them by first and last name and many of them have nicknames and not in a good way. Not in like the, the loving nickname. Right. It's helpful,
[00:18:23] spk_1: Harry, there goes helpful, Harry going around just helping everyone out every
[00:18:27] spk_0: day. All right. So hr disciplinary action is a, is a fair way to help people adjust how they're showing up before we ask them to leave the organization that we use when we have a person problem. Which another way of saying that is we have a hiring mistake and if we removed that person, the problems that we're seeing would go away, right? That's a pretty clear indication we're actually dealing with a person problem. The other space of accountability, right? Which is has nothing to do with disciplinary action is the environment that we've created that allows people to take ownership. And what's difficult is if we mix these up, meaning if we use hr disciplinary action when we don't have person problems, when we just have a behavior that we kind of didn't like, but it's actually rooted in a system problem. It does not create accountability, it actually does the exact opposite. It creates that environment that we just described. It creates the parent child dynamic in which you feel like a cog in a wheel in which you don't feel as though your thoughts are valued and we actually create a low accountability environment in many places that misuse hr disciplinary action. Those are the places that you will hear. People say that's not my job, that's not my problem, talk to my boss, but it
[00:19:51] spk_1: creates the compliance mentality that sometimes leads to malicious compliance. I mean, and then you're talking about potentially tanking productivity and then it just, it makes it worse and worse and worse.
[00:20:05] spk_0: So we have, there's a lot wrapped up to mixing these concepts up. Not only as we described what you just said. Right. Compliance mentality or malicious compliance can be a problem. We also end up exiting people that, uh, don't need to be exited, right? They are not person issues and it's a huge waste of money, right? The amount of time that we spend bringing somebody on board that we spend training people and suddenly to exit someone. Um because we think that we have a person problem when truthfully we don't. Um all of that are things that are just of not a strategic way for us to be able to handle what's happening in our
[00:20:43] spk_1: organization. And on the flip side, if we are creating directly or indirectly this low accountability culture and it's increasing attrition. I mean, it's, it's the exact people are leaving because they don't want to be here because they're just a number, they're just a cog and it's just not the environment they want to be a part of and, and that's also the opposite of it, which is now we're spending more money to bring people back in and train them and, and it just becomes a sort of cycle.
[00:21:12] spk_0: So kind of our, our first step to kind of adjusting this accountability, difficulty is being able to separate out what we just talked about so far today. Right? This idea that we want to need accountability, but accountability is not the same thing as disciplinary action or punishment. Accountability is the culture that we create, that allows people to take agency. If you don't feel a sense of agency, you can't feel a sense of ownership, you do not feel accountable. The thing that we have control over as a leadership team is the type of environment that we've created. And we use our disciplinary action policies as a fair way to deal with person problems. So where do we want to take it from
[00:21:56] spk_1: here? I mean, we could go anywhere we could talk about um the fact that these person problems don't show up just in events all of a sudden we could talk about. Um and we will talk about in the future, like, how do you make an environment
[00:22:12] spk_0: where people can feel, feel
[00:22:14] spk_1: ownership?
[00:22:14] spk_0: Um Let's do this, let's start here. Let's leave people with just this thought so they can mull over it and then we'll give them a tiny bit of homework. So you just mentioned something incredibly important. It's the idea that when we do have a negative event, whether this be an operational upset, a quality issue, a safety issue, oftentimes people are left with this idea of like, well, how do I know if we have a person problem. Like how, how, how do I know if I'm supposed to discipline somebody as a result of this event? And the difficult part. But the in one case extremely difficult because it's different from what we've done before. But in another case, incredibly helpful is that events are not times for us to have to be thinking about disciplinary action because person problems are person problems before events occur. They are not like you don't have AAA person who is not a person problem suddenly become one right at the moment that an event happens. And suddenly we have to now decide whether hr disciplinary action is the right path. Why that becomes difficult is because it's very different from the how we've done things in the past, right? So it's a, it's a departure from what's known, we'll talk about that more in the next episode. But maybe we just want to have um people mull over a, a bit of a subject for their homework. Light, light, light. Um sometimes on the surface this seems to make a ton of sense. And then we find out that there's like a bunch of exceptions to the rules in our head. And so I think what we would like people to think about is when should people be punished in an organization? Like what is their personal belief system on that? When should people be punished?
[00:24:04] spk_1: And there you have it episode one on accountability with the homework of when should people be punished. We'll come back to this next episode and continue this Accountability mini series uh and go through some examples and, and just continue to talk about some real practical uses for accountability and the idea of holding someone accountable and how you do that. So we'll see you next time for episode two on this Multipart Accountability series. Thanks.
[00:24:44] spk_0: Well, that's it. Yeah, another
[00:24:47] spk_1: one in the books we did it.
[00:24:51] spk_0: If you uh want to send us any of your thoughts, actually fling us any of your thoughts you can do so at the website www dot hop podcast dot com.
[00:25:03] spk_1: That's Hoppo DC A ST dot com. It's still such a stupid name. We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.