Confronting the Accountability & Responsibility Crisis in Small Business Teams

All right, team, welcome back. This is bonus episode number three of the Biggest Bummers, and this is a juicy one. We're going to talk about accountability.

And lack of it. Lack of ownership, lack of accountability. Now, the solution to people having a lack of accountability and ownership is.

Not yours.

The way that you handle people in your business who lack accountability and ownership is yours. Does that make sense? So we can't make people think or feel differently than they do. That's up to them. But what we can do is, is be consistent with what we do when people don't accept accountability and ownership for the agreements that they made to work with us. But I want to start this at a more macro level, and this is not something you and I are going to solve today, but I want to speak to it because I do think it's a validating conversation to have for all of us. I've been working, obviously for a long time, and I've been leading people for a very long time. My first leadership position was in the.

Winter of 1996. So it was a very long time ago. That makes it almost 30 years ago. Right.

So.

Lack of ownership and responsibility and accountability has always existed. And it has always existed from my perspective in people that I was shocked.

Would be that way. The first employee I had to.

Deal with who was difficult and was somebody who was coming back from a medical leave, I was a brand new manager. I had no training. I had this very sweet HR rep who was responsive and helpful. But my boss at the time was the reason why this person went out on medical leave. Because the boss, I had stressed her out so bad that she took leave. That's. That was her claim. So when she came back to work, she and I had to meet and we had to set her goals now that she was back. And I sat down with her and I was so nervous. I was 26 years old and she was at least 46 years old.

And so I was all prepared, per my HR person, like, how to do this conversation. And I had the goals written out. And I. So I said, okay, well, what I want to do today with you, you know, Jenny, whatever is go over, you know, welcome you back and make sure you're really clear about what your goals are going forward. And so, you know, there were probably. It was just a. They were mostly sort of activities leading to an outcome. That's kind of what the structure was. So I. We went through like, it was a sales position. So these many phone calls, this many appointments, you know, this was sort of her work.

And she looked at me and she said, those goals are not in my job description.

And I, I didn't know what to say.

I'm like, but goals aren't in your job description. Your job description is your overall duty duties. The goals are what we create so that you can deliver.

On the role that you're in. Right.

I was gobsmacked. I, first of all, I did. I was so unprepared for that. She, she literally opened up a folder and handed me her job description and said, these goals are not in my job description.

So she was playing gotcha with me and she got me because I was so unprepared.

But what I was.

Really unprepared for was a woman 20 years my senior.

Fighting to not be held accountable.

Literally, and advocating on her own behalf to not have to achieve goals.

I'll never forget it. It was, I mean, if you, if you'd been in the room, like, my face got flush. My heart was racing. She knew she had me. I was so on my heels and it was such a contentious experience. And I, I just kept thinking, why? I'm a brand new manager. I want you to be successful. If you're successful, you make more money. Like, why wouldn't you want this? I don't understand why intentionally put your dig your heels in to not have to do your job.

I had another person that worked for me, and this is now later when I was at a senior director role, so that I had director and I had associate director and manager. Like, there were quite a few levels. There was this guy, though, who was at a frontline position, and he was probably about 28, 29 years old. And he, he wasn't a hard worker, let's just say that. But his wife got pregnant and so we all knew his wife was going to have a baby. And he was quite excited about this baby, but the guy could just never get this. He never was. He was always mediocre, like almost enough to not stay, but quite like he could eat, get out. And then she had the baby.

And he could not perform.

And it wasn't because he was incapable, because he did perform. And the one thing that was part of our work that we had that we knew, like in a sales position, filling the pipeline is, you know, half the battle. And how do you fill the pipeline? Phone calls. And nobody. There's no constraints on phone calls. It's putting the airpod on the air, you know, the microphone collar thing on your head and punching numbers.

It wasn't hard, right? You could, you could Hit. If there was one goal you could hit every day, it was your phone call goal. You could for sure make 80 phone calls every day.

This guy wouldn't do it. He made 20, 21, 28, 10.

He got fired.

And all of us were like, how does this guy get fired? He has an infant at home with a wife who doesn't work.

And so I'm telling you, these two. These two are the two that I. I have a lot of these stories. I have more than I probably should ever share, but these are the two that I like. And that. That was in the 90s, y', all, so. No, that one was in the 2000s. Sorry. But it doesn't matter, because these people have always existed, okay? Always.

So before we go down this slippery slope of, like, nobody wants to be held accountable anymore, nobody accepts ownership anymore. I. I think it's always been the case. What has happened, however, that I believe to be true, is more and more and more tolerance of poor results. We can add in remote work.

Less management layers or people, less management development.

More laws, litigiousness of our society. There's a lot of stuff in here. But what I know for sure.

Is that there are, because I coach people every day and I talk to people every day, and I know just from the people I talk to how many people are not being held accountable because who. Because the leader is uncomfortable addressing it.

And so what happens is, if. If for those of us who do hold people accountable, when the person who has worked somewhere else and didn't do their job, but they got a job with me and they were never held accountable, they come work for me, guess what? I am. I'm the. I'm creating a toxic work environment, right? Because I'm simply holding you to the agreement that you made when you said yes to the job, when you said, yes, I will work for you for $50,000 a year and deliver.

And then when I actually dare to say, hey.

These were the agreements you made, you're not meeting your agreements.

They absolutely become crazy, furious.

Heartbroken, emotionally unstable, stressed out, what. You name it, they. Because you've simply held them to an agreement they made. So our job in this process is to make sure that we are so clear about those agreements. Because if we're holding people to expectations that are in our mind, but we haven't spoken them, that isn't going to work.

But it is a part of my personal mission is to at least help all y' all who listen to me, help you build up the courage to be consistent, not in how much you wish people would accept ownership and stop blaming and take accountability and responsibility. But for what you do, when you have someone on the team who does not accept responsibility and accountability and ownership and blame.

For as long as you tolerate it, you are absolutely building another human being on the planet who will be completely incapable of accepting feedback and accountability in the future. So those of us who have avoided those difficult people, the ones we don't know how to say it, the ones that we're just keeping right now because it's so hard to fill the position, it's fine. It's like it's a guy that I used to work with, he always used to say, bad breath is better than no breath. And I'm like, no, I disagree with you. I will take, I will take it all day. No breath. I would rather be the only person in this office working her fucking ass off than have to have five people here who don't do their job.

I have a personal mission to help all of you within earshot. Say no more. Because if all of us say no more, eventually we could change the planet.

I watched this as a very side note, but I'm going to share it with you because I haven't been able to find the video. I watched a video and it's. It was very short, but it was a woman holding a baby. It was a, it was like a house. You know, somebody had a cam in their house, right? So it was a woman holding a baby and her partner, her male partner came into the room. They were in a bedroom and the baby was crying. And that was very evident. And he was annoyed and that was very evident. And so he literally raised his hand to her like he was going to hit her, the woman, and she flinched.

And then they were. You couldn't hear them. It was just a video. And then they had more of an exchange. And then he did, he slapped her on the face.

And while I know this has nothing to do with employees, I want to emphasize the same is true. If, if all of us.

Galvanized.

And supported people to never ever tolerate anything like that ever again.

We could change the world.

Now the problem is that young woman probably had no resources, right? Like I imagine all of the things that would have contributed to that. But, but when we. That's a, that's a violence example.

But when you're a woman who runs her own company that you created out of your own frickin brain that all your money is in, you are assuming all the risk for this business, this is your livelihood.

And you say to me, I can't talk to John about this because it's really hard to fill the job. And I know he kind of tries me nuts. He blames everybody all the time, and he's just not really getting his job done. But it's just going to be so hard to replace him.

No.

A hundred percent, no. Learn how to hold people to their expectations, to the mutual expectations that you have set. And if they don't meet them, do not tolerate it anymore. Learn how to do that.

It is the greatest gift you will be able to give yourself is to have the courage to stop tolerating.

People in your life who do not accept accountability, responsibility, and ownership for themselves.

But you have to learn because we are not taught. We are taught to tolerate. We are taught to accept. We are taught to believe we're the problem. We're too. We're too difficult. We're too demanding. Our expectations are too high. We're too nitpicky. We're too micromanaging. No, the only time I would ever say that you are too nitpicky and you're too demanding is if you have not been clear in advance of what your expectations are. But if you are clear and you expect impeccable results.

And then you tolerate.

Mediocre results.

Then of course they're going to be shocked when all of a sudden your expectations are so high.

You teach people this stuff, y'. All.

Your queendom deserves you to be exceptional.

At leading and holding people accountable. And you know, that's why I do what I do. If you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, and that's why, if you haven't done it yet, you need to work with me because we're going to work through your specific issues. The very first lesson in Lead for Women is team triage, team audit, team design, and the re offer. We're going to look at everybody on the team and figure out what's going on and why and what do you need to do that you haven't done yet to set the table for these agreements so that we can start to have people on the team that will deliver? And I have been doing this so long. It works like this is not like. Like this works.

Just have to get in here with me. So get your name on the invitation list. Go to the visionary CEO forward slash. Next step, add your name to the invitation list. Tomorrow morning, we're going to be sending out a really cool invitation for advanced registration for the Lead for Women that's starting on October 9th. We will meet every Wednesday at 11am Pacific.

We're going to skip the week of Thanksgiving so we finish on, like, the 4th of December.

And I know that our work together could radically change your experience as a business owner and as a woman. Why wouldn't you give that gift to yourself? You don't have to be suffering so much.

At least we could giggle a little bit about the cray cray that you're dealing with every day. So go to the visionary CEO. Next step, get your name on the invitation list if you haven't done that yet, because a really cool invitation is coming out tomorrow. It's going to be literally a 50% savings on lean for Women. Literally.

I don't want you to miss that. But you have to be on the list. Not everybody's going to get this. You're not going to see it on social media. You're not going to get it if you're on my private subscriber list. You have to be on the Lead for Women invitation list. And if you're not, it's okay. You just won't get it. All right, friend, I'll talk to you tomorrow.