A spoken presentation by Adam Markel about accountability in teams. He reframes accountability as a non-judgmental, supportive practice rooted in care (described as 'love') and illustrated with anecdotes (baseball, UPS drivers, lifeguards). Emphasis is on collective responsibility—"leading from any seat"—and on using feedback (strengths, weaknesses, blind spots) via a practical, military-derived framework for difficult performance conversations.
Chapters
It's a conversation. It's about accountability. Yes, but what's different about that conversation than many of the accountability conversations that we're familiar with? Thank you. There's no judgment there. What does that team want to do? That's it. They've got one goal as a team, and that goal is to what? What's the goal of these companies? All the companies that are here? What's your one goal? To win. To win. And so that conversation is actually about accountability. That's rooted in something other than judgment. Anybody want to guess what that is? It's gonna sound funny in a business context. That conversation's rooted in love. That's what's happening out there. Everybody's on that mound because they have one goal in mind. They want to see that guy succeed, because when that person succeeds, the team succeeds. And that's what it's all about. There's no politics on that mound. There's no judgment. There's simply love and support. Yes. It's a different way to look at accountability. This is the way we often see it. Isn't that true? Who's responsible? Who's responsible? And in baseball, I'll give you a different team. I moved to the west coast, so this is one of the three games the Padres won that season. And look at where that ball is. You see where the ball is? I love this picture. They're all going to. It's someone else's job to catch that ball. Not my job. Someone else's job to pick up that paper in the hallway. It's a janitor's job. I used to walk past paper in the hall. I'd go into my leadership team meetings, and I'd say, who's responsible for picking this up? And somebody smart would say, the janitor. That's why we have a janitor. Comes in at night, takes care of it. I'd say so. Is anybody in this room beneath picking up this paper in our beautiful hallway? The context is about impeccability. You see the event that was put on for you here this week, it was all about impeccability. All the little details, from the LED screens to the way they took care of you last night, every detail was meticulously planned for and executed. Yes. You didn't walk around, see paper on the ground, did you? Because nobody was concerned about whether it's the janitor's job to pick that paper up or not. They want to win a game. This is the game they're winning. Does that make sense? Nobody's pointing who's responsible look. UPS is a great example. I love it as a company because even though they have rules for everything, how you put your key in the ignition, the clothing you wear, how you close and open the door, but they also give their drivers this authority, this autonomy to just make sure they deliver a package. So when Hurricane Andrew hit, they were delivering packages to people in their cars because they couldn't be in their homes. That's a picture of us on the. On the beach. I wanted to just show you one picture, at least with my hair. Okay. I had hair once upon a time. We were posing for this picture. And what you know, when you look at it, is that the guy on this that's standing up, he was looking at our water because nobody remember our mantra. Nobody goes down in our water. So he was watching. We were posing. I'll tell you something. When we sat on that stand, we couldn't have an ego because sometimes some other lifeguard would run a rescue right in front of you. It could have been. You were just dazed up there, you know, like you got baked by the sun. The glare could have been in your eyes, whatever. You were having a conversation. You got lost, somebody's drowning right in front of you, and another lifeguard come run that rescue now. Yeah. Is that embarrassing? It is. Maybe. Maybe that guy was a little more paranoid than you were. But it didn't matter because the mantra was, nobody goes down on our watch. We had each other's backs. It's a certain kind of a leadership context. Does that make sense? It's about leading from any seat or leading from any position on the field. And I think that's really important to bring back to your teams to look at how it is that you can model that for your teams. The other thing I think is really important when it comes to accountability and creating high performance results is we have to get feedback. We have to know our strengths. We have to know our weaknesses. We have to know our blind spots. I've been using this with leadership teams for a long time. It came from the military. I didn't invent it. I just changed it a bit so I could use it with the teams that I work with. And I want to give it to you. I want to give it to you to try out for yourself. You can use it in any situation where you don't know how to hold someone accountable. You have to have a difficult conversation about performance.
