Accountability with Nathan Tebedo

Hey, everybody. Coach Nathan Thibodeau with Contractor Coach Pro here bringing you some more practical, actionable content that you can take and apply to your business today. The subject we're talking about is accountability. I know for some of us that's a bit of a four letter word because some people in our past may have used that word to try and micromanage us or be tyrannical over us with it. Well, the idea of accountability is to not do either of those things. What we recognize at Contractor Coach Pro is that accountability is the link between a leader's care and love for their people and their people's ability to reach their goals and be good at their jobs. Well, let's face it, we all want to be good at our jobs, but in order to do that, we have to know if we're actually hitting the mark and doing what's asked and required of us and if we're doing it well. Now times are changing. It is pretty common and has been pretty common that we would be congregated in an office somewhere. And in those certain situations you can actually do something of a informal accountability. You can just walk into somebody's office or walk up to their desk and check in on them and see how they're doing, ask them about a specific issue or see how they feel about the things that they have going on in their work life. Well, as you know, that's becoming less and less common right now. With most of us beginning to work remotely or out in the field, some of us working at home and then some of us in the office. Our ability to do that is starting to go away. But our people still need to be held accountable so that they can be successful at their jobs. And how do we know that they're doing that? Well, I've broken this into five different sections and we're going to go over each one of those. The first section is documentation. If you've ever been in a he said, she said conversation with somebody, it's because whatever was talked about or whatever was agreed to, air quotes, was not ever written down. Because of that, now we're relying on people's generally flawed memory as to what was discussed or agreed upon. So we need to document what we expect and create this accountability plan for folks. First things first, get a document. It could be a digital document, it could be a paper document, whatever it needs to be. And we need to start by understanding what is the position in our company that we're going to create some accountability for. Then we need to list on this document the duties and responsibilities of that position. Now I say them separately because I think they actually have a little bit of a different definition to them. A duty is a task or an action that needs to be accomplished consistently and regularly. It's something that we expect people to be doing constantly over the course of them doing what they're supposed to be doing. Phone calls and certain types of sales at door knocking, production work, accounts, receivables. There are duties associated with these things. Responsibilities are more like who's expected to take care of a particular thing when it arises. But we don't expect that thing to arise all that often. An example of that might be maybe some inter office conflict, or maybe we have an issue with a customer. We don't expect these things to happen all the time, but somebody is responsible for making sure that those things are taken care of. So make a list of the duties and the responsibilities on this document. The next thing we need to do is we need to list the prioritization of those duties and those responsibilities. Some of you know that sometimes this task or this duty and this task or this responsibility kind of need to happen pretty much at the same time. Well, which one takes precedence? I'll give you kind of a silly example. If somebody has it as one of their duties to generate and send out invoices on work that we've completed, that's critical work to be done that is vital to our company. But if they also have it as one of their responsibilities to answer the phone when somebody calls our company, they need to understand that if you're working on an invoice, stop working on the invoice and pick up the phone. Some of you might be thinking that's kind of ridiculous. But some of you are probably thinking, I've actually had that conversation with somebody. So list of duties and responsibilities and then the priority that each one of those has, the next component is the standard. What is the bar to which these people should be reaching for with their duties and responsibilities? In other words, how, how many calls are we expecting somebody to make if they're in production? How many jobs or projects do we expect to get started or finished? If you're in sales, how many sales do we expect out of somebody over a given period of time? If you're in marketing, how many leads do we expect marketing to create over what period of time? What's the standard that we can point to and say, well, we either didn't hit it or we did hit it, or we exceeded it. What is that standard? And then hand in Hand with that standard is the timeframe over which we expect somebody to hit that standard. So if somebody's in customer service and we expect them to make 25 customer service calls, is that over the course of a week? So it doesn't matter when they make the calls, or do we expect them to make five calls per day? Do we expect production to do eight jobs a month? Or are we okay. Or are we going to narrow that down and say we want at least two jobs done per week? So what is the time frame in which we're going to establish these things? Okay, now all of these things should be on that document. List of duties and responsibilities, the priority they fall in, the standard that they're expected to reach and the timeframe in which they're expected to reach it on that document. Clear and understandable. Because now we need to communicate that with the person who holds that position, which is what we're going to be talking about next. The communication portion of this is not particularly complicated, but there are some good tips and tricks that we should do and there's some things that we should keep in mind while doing this. The last thing that we want to do is just create this document out of our own head and then just slap it down in front of somebody and say, now you're doing this. Now get out of here. We want to have a conversation about this thing, especially if this person has been with us for a little while and this is a totally new thing. So I generally recommend doing this in a one on one setting. It just, it gives people a little bit more comfort if they may not necessarily understand it. So the way I would probably start this is I would send them a copy of this document before we had a conversation about it. That will give them time to read it, understand it, come up with any questions. They might have, come up with some of their own ideas. They should have their own opinion about these things because like I said, we want to have a conversation. And conversations are two way, not one way. So then when we go to sit down with them, our communication should be open, should honest. It should be a safe place. There could be some things on here that that person didn't realize they were supposed to be doing. I'm sure some of you have probably had that kind of conversation before. We want to answer their questions and we want to hear their concerns. They might disagree with some of this stuff. They might have a better idea of what kind of things we should be tracking. So we want to do this because we want to be on the Same page. This communicates to them that we care about them being successful at their job just like they do. It also will make the document better. If they've got some ideas that we didn't have, let's use them. That's kind of that last component is we should be very receptive to their ideas because they deal with a lot of these things day in and day out and they may have some ways to make it better. The other thing is, is that if we're able to implement some of their ideas or their input, it creates buy in from them because it was their idea. We all love running with the things that are our idea, so give them a chance to put some of their own out there that we can use. Now, if you have a large group of people who all have the same exact responsibilities or job description, you probably could roll this out to the entire group and actually have a group discussion. That could be super productive because a lot of minds together thinking on something can come up with some really good stuff. So I wouldn't have any problem with rolling that out to that group and having that conversation amongst us all. I would say though that some people don't feel comfortable bringing up issues or disagreements in a group setting. So at least make a one on one conversation, something that's available in case somebody does want to hash something out behind some closed doors. So after we get this document all tweaked and it's the way it should be, and everybody agrees to it, let's print it. And then everybody signs it. The manager signs it, and the person who this is a plan for also signs it. It's just symbolic that we had the conversation. There isn't any confusion. We know what's going on and we're both committed to these things. Then everybody gets a copy. You take your copy, or the manager takes their copy and goes and puts it in the file or wherever it goes. And then this person can take their copy and don't be surprised if they leave it out for a while. There may be some things on there that they have to do or that they want to keep reminding themselves about. Especially if it involves implementing a new tool or a new system of some kind. Which kind of brings us to our next thing. Tracking. Tracking can be tricky, but that doesn't mean it's any less critical. We need to have a place where we can go to see if people are objectively accomplishing the things that they've been set forward to do. This helps us because we can know whether or not they're doing great or whether or not there may be some places that they need help or that we should focus some attention resources. Not everybody in our company has a job that fits neatly into a particular number. So how do we figure that out? Well, I think it comes down to two basic questions. The first question is what is that position's job? Or why did we hire that person in the first place? What is the goal of their position or role in the company? Why are they there? The second question is where is the evidence of them accomplishing that goal? Where would we go to see that they're doing these things? Now? For some places in our company, it's easy. Our production people, we can go look at their work on a project and see the completed windows or siding or whatever it may be for our salespeople. We should be tracking the number of closings that they have or we can look at the list of jobs that they have in the pre production queue. But what if it's somebody like an admin assistant or a customer service person, somebody who works in the office that doesn't necessarily have dollars or project numbers tied to what they do? Well, once again, why did we hire that person? Were we expecting their work in our company to result in happier customers which would give us more reviews or more referrals? Were we expecting them to take some things off of some people's plate to increase the velocity of our jobs inside of our business, Meaning how quickly job goes from start to finish? Were we expecting them to help with our cash flow in knowing when jobs were completed and when invoicing and collections needed to happen, those could be some results of the role that we hired this person to accomplish. So where would we find some of that stuff? Well, if we know what we're trying, what they're trying to accomplish and what that looks like now, we need to know where we would look. So it could be your CRM. Does your CRM have a place that could track customer communication? The calls that they make or the emails that they send? It could be a task manager like Asana or Slack or Mondays. It could be as simple as a spreadsheet. If we don't have a tool that fits neatly into what they do, maybe we can create a basic spreadsheet that they enter their efforts into every single day and we can go look at that. If they're involved with our social media, maybe it's the number of social media posts or the engagement that we get from them. It could be our online review number, seeing that go up or having A standard for that. If they're working with our accounts receivables, a lot of that information probably sits right inside of QuickBooks. So once we understand what tool we're going to use, they need to have access and they need to know how to use it. Then we need to pay attention to it and review it. So that's what we're going to talk about next. Reviews are one of the critically missed components of establishing our accountability strategy. And not just in our industry. I've noticed it's in many industries the reviews are not conducted very well or not conducted at all. But here's the thing. When we get this data from people's actions, conducting their duties and responsibilities, what do we do with that data and how do we use it to help people grow and become better at their jobs? Reviews is where that happens. There's a few components to doing proper reviews that we should keep in mind. First thing we want to think about is the frequency of the reviews for people who do marketing and sales. Those people are responsible for generating leads and sales which drive revenue for our business. And, and that's the fuel that feeds everything inside of our company. Oftentimes those people get a review once a month because we want to keep a tight eye on making sure that that continues to go well. People in the administrative side or maybe low level management, sometimes we need a lot of data to understand whether or not somebody is trending one particular way or another with their responsibilities and their goals, so those people could get a review once a quarter. Now, upper level management and leadership oftentimes see reviews biannually or annually. Now, in actually conducting the review, there's some key places that we need to actually track and have involved when we talk to the person that we're reviewing. The first component would be the actual hard numbers, the numbers that they're responsible for, that we figured out when we established duties and responsibilities, priorities, standards and tracking. We want to know, are they actually missing the bar, are they hitting the bar of the standard, are they exceeding the bar, what is the trend of that? So we want to talk to them about whether they hit it, they didn't hit it, and where they're at. And it's really helpful to be able to look at the data from their previous review to be able to see did this thing actually improve, did it decline, did it stay the same? Or where are we at in that? The next component of the review should involve some kind of a discussion. We should have a conversation and a dialogue with this person so that we Know where their head is at as well. You can do this by asking questions like, where do you think you're doing well? Or where do you think you're strong in your responsibilities? And where do you think you could use some help? Or you might be struggling or need some clarity? And then we can give our opinion to those questions as well to see where we are with this person and if we're thinking the same things with their responsibilities and in their job. The last thing that you should do, and leaders and managers, you need to put on your adult pants for this one. We should give them an opportunity to give us a bit of a review or feedback. How are we doing in our job? What places are they struggling with us and our leadership and our management? This is really critical. You might already have an idea as to some of the things that they're going to say. You may not. And sometimes what they say can be a little difficult to take. But we should want to get better too. And it tells the other person that we value their opinion and that we want to serve them better by knowing where we can improve. The last thing is actually a result of some of our clients and their questions about their culture in their company. We get asked, how do we enforce or instill or make sure that our culture is something that's occurring inside the business? Well, the best place to do that is in your reviews. So I would include some place in the review where we talk about the company purpose or the company mission of what we're trying to accomplish and the company core values. We want to know how well this person is embodying our culture. Are they growing to become more like a part of the team and homogeneous to our culture? Or is this person still kind of rubbing against the grain? Because here's the thing. We've all seen those people who tend to hit their numbers and they're doing well metrically, but they're constantly rowing in the other direction against people, and it causes friction and strife. So we need that person to grow inside of our culture. Or maybe they're not really our kind of people. Now, once you've gone through these three different areas, you. You've probably established some places where some growth needs to happen. So the last component of this review would be creating an improvement plan. Now, all of us have probably tried to improve ourselves at one point or another, and if you take on too much, then you find yourself not able to do very much at all. So I would probably start with 1, 2, maybe 3 different areas of improvement at the end of the review based on what we discovered in the first three things. Try not to pile too much on, but these are places we'd like to see them grow and have a plan on how to do that before we get to our next review so we can see if these things have increased and gotten better. All right, there's one more key component to this thing, and we're going to talk about that next. All right, everybody. The last thing that I have is really something that's a little bit more like a pro tip. The reason why I call this a pro tip is because great bosses, great managers, and great leaders use this method to help improve their people on the fly. And it's going to do some really great things for you. It's called inspecting what you expect. Some people might refer to it as spot checking. The idea is randomly, quote, unquote, randomly throughout the week or throughout the days and the months. We're going to go in and we're going to check on our people's performance and how they're doing. So this might mean logging into that spreadsheet that we built, looking at somebody's task manager, checking on their calendar. We might even call a couple customers here and there to see how their experience has gone with our people. This is going to do some really great things for you. Number one, it'll allow you to see whether or not people are using these tools and assets that we built for them. Number two, you'll probably notice some areas where maybe we just need to make some micro adjustments, some small tweaks to the way that they're doing things that'll help them to be better at their jobs. We don't want to just let a bad trend continue to go and then address it at a review because it might be a bigger deal then than it could have been back here. The last thing that it'll do for you that might be the coolest is you'll probably notice your people excelling and doing really well at a couple of particular things. Now you have an opportunity to engage them and thank them, compliment them, give them a high five for the great work that they're doing. Your people will now know that you're paying attention. You're paying attention to their job, to their performance, and to the effort that they're putting in. They don't have a thankless or unnoticed job. Okay, so put some reminders on your phone, put it on the calendar, wherever you need to do to remind you to go do some spot checking, inspect what you expect, and then use that to be a top performer so that we can improve ourselves, our team and our company.