Results, good or bad, are never attributable to one person. Therefore, holding 1 person accountable for them, either by heaping praise or launching scorn in their direction, will often result in behaviours you don’t expect. I have worked with too many leaders in the past who had a desire to get their measurement systems down to the individual contributor level so they could hold each person on their team accountable. While the intent is laudable, the reality is that organizational performance and accountability are a little more complicated than just the sum of what individuals do.
There is an easy test you can do to gain a greater understanding of this. Take a toy construction set and create a simple 4 step design. Now the hard part, find 8 willing friends and divide them into 2 teams of 4. Each team will be given the instructions for assembling the design and then asked to compete to see which team can complete the most assemblies in a given time.
Instruct the 1st team to use a job based production method. This means that each individual will complete each assembly from start to finish, on their own. Essentially you have 4 individuals whose performance is completely independent.
The instructions for team 2 are to work in a serial flow process. Person one does step 1 of the assembly and passes it to person 2 for the second step of the assembly and so on. The team works together to produce the end product with each member of the team dependent on the other to create a finished product.
The end result will be predictable. The serial flow process team will outproduce the job shop team by 4 or 5 to 1 every time. When teams work together in dependent ways, they outperform individuals working in isolation every time.
In his book “The Goal”, Eliyahu M. Goldratt, helps us to start to understand why this is. He tells the story of Al Rogo, a plant manager, leading his son’s scout group on a hike. He uses this story to illustrate some of the main system challenges that lead to the need for the Theory of Constraints. The relationship among dependent events, statistical fluctuations, throughput, inventory, and operating costs are all highlighted in his story. What he also illuminates, without realizing it, is the inherent flaw in measuring down to the individual in order to create performance focused accountability within an organization.
On the hike, Al starts in the lead. He is the “LEADER”. What happens very quickly is that large gaps start to appear in the group. Some scouts are keeping up while others are falling behind. To fix this he picks one of the fast kids who is keeping up to lead and he takes up the rear to keep the kids together. To his confusion, gaps still appear.
What he works out is that as each of the scouts varies their pace, gaps appear and grow because everyone behind a slower hiker can only walk as fast as the slowest hiker in front of them. As the fluctuations in pace reverberate through the group, gaps grow and grow. Everyone going at their own pace isn’t working. Even though the fastest kid at the front of the line will get to the end of the hike at this pace faster than the planned time, the team will take longer to complete the hike because they are not finished until everyone is at the end point. The performance of the team isn’t dependent upon the slowest hiker alone. His overall pace will be slower than if he was hiking alone because of the impact of the fluctuations in pace from the other hikers in the group.
To keep the group together, he decides to put the slowest kid at the front of the line. While the team stays together, this still has the same effect. The group stays together however their performance is now dictated by the pace of the slowest hiker.
Until he figures out how to get the others to help the slowest kid, team performance doesn’t improve. In this story, it turns out that the slowest kid is carrying the heaviest pack. He gets each hiker to take some of the load from the slowest hiker and the team speeds up. Until they figure out how to co-ordinate their efforts and work together, the team is limited in it’s performance.
This highlights the weakness in either trying to level performance of every individual, or having everyone go at their own pace. The team will still only perform to the level of the lowest performer.
Goldratt is using this analogy to describe a mechanical system in which the constraints are the capacity levels of machinery. However, in today’s complex business world, where systems are often more organic, a critical constraint is often human performance. Unlike machinery, human performance is never fixed. We can learn. We can coordinate our efforts. We can leverage the different strengths of team members. We can focus and re-focus in order to adapt and create flexibility in how our organizations respond to variable demand.
Getting a team to perform at a higher level isn’t solely about getting each individual on the team to perform better. It is about creating a system that leverages each individual’s capabilities in a way that raises the performance of the entire team beyond the level of the weakest performer.
Focusing only on individual performance will not likely yield the best result. In extreme cases, it can lead to people within the team sabotaging the performance of others in order to save their own skin. Inadvertent sabotage may take place by not helping others because the only thing you are held accountable for are your own results.
Those that are perceived to under perform and are reminded of this constantly will disengage. Resentment sets in and a blame and victim culture ensues.
So how do you deal with this as a leader? Without individual accountability, it will be difficult to achieve any real progress. However, if you focus solely on individual performance, you are not likely to get the level of organizational performance your team is capable of. The challenge is to find a balance between individual and team accountability.
One of the most effective ways to deal with this is to focus individual accountability around actions that contribute to a team result. The team results must always be measurable. Some of the individual actions may be measurable yet others will not be. This does not make them less valuable. It means that we need to value both the actions and behaviours we can and cannot measure equitably.
If we go back to the definition of accountability I wrote about in my previous post – “The Accountability Myth – if it really exists, how come there is so little of it around here?” – that it is owning the consequences of our actions, then we can start to develop methods for balancing between team and individual accountability.
What this means for the individual is that they need to first focus on owning their actions. This doesn’t just mean the actions that they have created a written commitment to. It also means the actions and behaviours they actually do. This can include inaction on things they said they were going to do. To balance these actions with team accountability, the focus for the leader is to identify and recognize how individuals’ actions impact team results.
By linking individual actions to team results, this allows a leader to take into account all the behaviours that impact on team results, not just the ones that can be measured.
I was working with a front-line leader once on getting him to recognize some of the top performers on his team. My thinking at the time was that if he did that, other individuals would aspire to be top performers and their own performance would improve.
When he resisted singling out these top guys I inquired as to why. His response was thought-provoking and helped me deepen my understanding of how to create an accountable team.
He said that the top performer was able to perform because the guys at the bottom who are stuck doing the “shit” jobs enable them to do the work that makes them stand out. He wasn’t going to single out the top performer and leave out the others on the team who’s work set him up for success. This statement clearly helped me see the importance every team member’s contribution has in making the team successful, no matter how large or small the perceived contribution.
This front-line leader’s approach was to recognize the team as a whole in their success. As part of doing this, it is important for a leader to recognize everyone’s contribution. Recognize both the individual who’s innovative idea spawned a leap in performance but also recognize the individual who was rolling in the mud and getting their hands dirty doing the work no one wanted to do that allowed the first individual the time and space to come up with their innovation.
So much of the focus on accountability in organizations has become creating better and better measurement systems that we start to miss the point. The measurement system only points out the consequence. A better understanding of consequences does not lead to better actions. Leaders need to shift their attention to the actions that are being taken. What are we learning from both our failures, and more importantly our successes as defined by team results. Specifically try to understand what actions work and in what situations they work in.
To re-iterate, focusing too heavily on individual results will likely lead to poorer team performance. It might be nice to have a record breaking individual on your team, but if the rest of the team is struggling, then that individual is not really benefitting you.
Sacrificing some individual performance to help others on the team is likely to have a much bigger impact on how the team performs. Recognizing how the actions of each team member contributes to team results creates a situation where individuals take ownership for team results while recognizing how each member of the team helps each other succeed.
No one’s success is truly independent. There is some dependency for all of us no matter what we do. This is even more evident when we are working as part of a team. When a leader recognizes this and then acts accordingly, they will have taken a critical step in creating accountability within their team.
Murray Lynn is a leadership and change management consultant who helps organizations improve performance by helping leaders become more effective in their roles. murraylynnconsulting.com.
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