#16: Stop Enabling: The Best Way to Foster Accountability

Hi, I'm Sy Wakeman, and you're listening to No Ego, a podcast where we teach you how to ditch the drama, end entitlement, and drive big results in your workplace and your world place. In this episode of the podcast, I wanted to share with you my response to a frequently asked question when I'm out on the road speaking about my newest book, No Ego. Now I'm usually at the point where I've let people know that their ego's not their amigo. I've taught them that a human being can't vent and self-reflect at the same time, and so the wonderful ego bypass is a question or a tool for self-reflection. reflection, and that we really as leaders want to eliminate emotional waste to using good mental processes, using self-reflection to bypass the ego and move from venting. And the reason we want to do this is that self-reflection is the foundation of accountability, and accountability is death to the ego. So when I get that presented, people get very curious about accountability, and we tend to have a really open, cool dialogue about that. And so I'll ask people, you know, how do How do you see accountability? How do you know it when you see it? How would you define it? And I find, first of all, that most people, when they think about accountability, although it's a, you know, often used term, it's not a well-understood competency. And a lot of people really focus when it comes to accountability on how we need to hold people accountable or whose butt's on the line or all about ownership. Well, I know from my research on accountability that ownership is almost a secondary after-the-fact look at how we got the results that we got. That it's not really the driver. It's not really the first factor in accountability. And so I'll start to talk to folks that accountability really starts with buy-in. And that's not something I as a leader can do for you. I can't buy you in. That would be transactional. It's not sustainable. Anything I could use to give you incentive to do what I want you to do really is not going to last long-term. I will have to keep upping the ante. It is not transformational, it's transactional. And I talk to people that accountability really starts with commitment and that buy-in is a verb and that that's something that one can only do for themselves, that they've got to buy themselves in. And that starts to raise some eyebrows. And then people start to say, yeah, but, you know, I need people to do what I want them to do. And I need to hold them accountable. And, and I start to say, you know, I don't know that you can hold somebody accountable. And things get confusing. And, and it finally comes down to this core question. People go, Cy, just tell me how I can make someone, you know, be compliant, or how I can make somebody do what I want them to do. And I go, aha, that's the core question. And I disappoint them because I say, you know, you can't make anybody do anything. You're not that powerful. And the role of a leader is not about making people do things. A role of a leader is about introducing people to reality. The role of a leader is to stop bending reality so that people get really good information. People make great decisions when they have good information. Good information comes from reality. There's 2 ways that reality and the information it provides to us gets corrupted. One is through an individual's ego. That's their own filter that they use and corrupt reality by adding narrative or story or victim-mindedness. The other way that reality gets corrupted is that we leaders buffer reality From— we buffer people from our reality or their reality. We coddle them or we bend reality in their favor. So let's say that the market needs us to quickly change the way we do work. We are the ones who buffer that reality by saying, well, it seems you're struggling, so let's slow change down, as if that were even an option. And so we start to buffer reality. So when people ask me, how do I make somebody do something? They're surprised when I say, you can't. And then I tell them, but it's not hopeless. It's counterintuitive. You can't make people do things. You can't really hold others accountable. But what you can do is you can stop enabling people. So I can't make you do something, but I can stop enabling you. And enabling is when I do just that distortion from reality. I protect you from a natural consequence. I, I save you, or I— I buffer you from what your reality could be. So let's take a basic example. I have a child that calls me up and says, Mom, I left my backpack at home. Now, enabling is for me to stop what I'm doing and run home and get the backpack and take that to my kid at school. Now, that might seem like good mothering, but here's why it's enabling. One, I'm at work doing my work, and I brought my backpack, so I'm not the one without a backpack. Secondly, If getting a backpack that I forgot is as simple as making a phone call to my mom, who takes a half hour out of her day for me not taking a few minutes out of my day, I'm working harder at that child's success than they are. Now, before you get up in arms, sometimes people make mistakes. I get that. I'm talking about enabling. If I were going to parent my child in a way that fostered their accountability, my response would not be, "Let me go get your backpack and bring it to you." My response would be. Bummer. So what's your plan to get through school successfully today without your backpack? Bummer. What's your plan to get through today successfully without your backpack? Now I am a present wonderful parent while the child figures out what they're going to do without their backpack. And it may be that they're going to suffer a consequence. They may say, if I don't have my assignment in today, which is in my backpack, I'll have to go to Thursday school after school. I'll have to stay after school on Thursday. And then my response is, okay, so how are you going to let your coach know that you won't be at practice Thursday because you didn't bring your backpack and you need to stay after school as a consequence? See, every parent wants to jump in and save their kid from Thursday school because they don't want them to miss practice because if they miss practice, they won't be able to play in the game and— The enabling continues. Now, I'm not some ogre as a parent, but what I know is a couple of things. One, that child will remember their backpack most keenly the day after they forgot it and no one rescued them. Now, it's not life or death. It's not career-ending. It's not end of the world. It's just a backpack. 2, since I have 8 sons, I know that if I got into the business of running after everyone's backpack, I would probably need to get a professional Uber driver that that all they did was run forgotten sports equipment and backpacks to and from school. The ability to let someone experience their own natural consequence from their own behavior at age-appropriate times is a profound ingredient in fostering accountability. Now let's take that out of parenting and let's take a look at leadership. I'm not sure that most of us really realize how often we enable people and buffer them from their own consequences or their own reality. Think of all the times where someone did not have the discipline to badge themselves in and out, and so their timesheet isn't accurate. And they're not having discipline to remember to badge in and out now becomes your Sunday night where you're fixing everybody's timesheets to make sure that they get paid. You're spending an hour on their lack of discipline, and they've spent very little time on their own lack of discipline. I hope you can start to see where this starts to cost shift, where you start to work harder at their success than they do. And it's enabling— it's beyond managers being helpful. It's rescuing. It's fixing. Another example I'll give you to help maybe clarify this is when I was a young administrator, I was given a position where I had the opportunity to lead a group of primary care clinics, physician clinics. And we had implemented a new electronic health record. And it was really exciting to have a lot of our patients' information in an electronic system. Because not only could we serve them better for a variety of reasons, having all of their information in one place, but we could really start to not just treat them better, we could proactively help them manage some of their health conditions better. And our system saw a huge opportunity opportunity to help patients with diabetic conditions. And given this access we now had to data, to their data, we could proactively call people to get them in for their appointments on a more routine basis. We could call them to make sure they connected with community services that they're eligible for. We could educate them over the phone. We had a way now of being able to see all that data and reach out to our patients in a preventative and proactive way. And so, we decided we'd really focus on this, and as a system, we initiated the Diabetes Initiative. And what that entailed, in part, was that the nurses in the clinic, after they finished up the patients for the day, they would call 10 to 20 patients and talk to them about how they could continue to improve their health and make sure that they were getting in to see the physician as needed. And we were starting to see some really great results from this. Many of the nurses did this joyfully. They were very personally accountable, personally motivated. They did it because it was purpose-driven work and they really cared about their patients. There was one nurse, however, I'll call her Edna, who just simply refused to make the calls. And when I went to talk to her about what was happening and encourage her to step up to the expectations at hand and do this outbound calling, She was very resistant. She said, you know, I am not a telemarketer. I've talked to my physician and he says I don't have to make these calls. And as I was listening to her, I thought, oh my gosh, this is so easily solvable. One, she has a misunderstanding. She really believes that the physician that she tends to work with most often is her supervisor and directs her work. And so I really naively, naively thought, I'll just clean this up. I will let her know that, you know, on the org chart, I'm her supervisor, so I direct her work. So I would encourage her not to listen to the physician who's telling her what she has to do and doesn't have to do. And that I'll be more clear that I'm her supervisor and that that's really coming from me. And I really thought that will be clear. She'll know it's expectations. She'll step up. Well, she didn't. And she continued to resist this initiative. So I continued to just move through our Our performance management process with her and do everything from first the arm around suggestion inquiry to the a bit more heightened conversation about expectations to, you know, what we're going to do next because it's such an important part of our system. Now, while I did that, I was also communicating with all of the physicians. The diabetic initiative was a large an important part of our strategy for improving the health in our communities. So it was something I reported on to the Chief Medical Officer, and I'm a very transparent person. So I went to the physicians and I said, I just want to let you know, I'm presenting tomorrow to Steve, our Chief Medical Officer, on how we're doing with the diabetic initiative. And I just want to put up for you what I'll be showing him so that you know, everything that I know. And I'll call him Dr. Smith. His name was at the bottom of the list. And I said, you know, most of you and your teams of nurses are really doing a great job. You're very compliant with this. It's making a difference. Things are good. And Dr. Smith, your compliance level and the nurse that works for you is actually at zero. And that's disappointing. My hope is that you have some plans in place to make that different, to get 100% compliant. And as I talked to him about his plan, he was pretty adamant that he was not going to be compliant. He didn't agree with it. He didn't think it was the right thing to do. And so he had no intention of complying. And I'm not his boss, and so I left it there and I went on and prepared for my meeting the next morning. Well, on my way in to meet with our Chief Medical Officer, Steve, my phone started to ring. Sure enough, it was Dr. Smith. And I didn't take the call because I was heading into the meeting. I presented the information. And just as I head to the physicians and I showed Steve where we're at with the initiative. And then I left the meeting and I called Dr. Smith back and said, you know, hey, glad that you called. How can I help? And he was a little frazzled. He said, you know, did you really have a meeting with Steve this morning? And I said, absolutely I did. I just got done with it. And he said, well, did you present the information on the diabetic initiative? I said, you know, I did. And he said, well, did you show the slide where I was at the bottom of the pack, where I was at zero? And I said, yeah, I did. I showed exactly the same slide that I showed you last night. He said, well, did you mention though, that I see the most patients in the clinic of any physician? And I said, you know, we weren't talking about throughput. So I didn't bring that up. And I'm not sure that's accurate. But no, I didn't put that in this particular conversation. He said, well, did you tell him that I have the highest acuity level of my patients? They're the sickest patients, sicker than most other people have in the clinic. And I said, well, no, we weren't talking about acuity levels. We were talking about the diabetic initiative, and then I figured it out. How I was different from any other leader that Dr. Smith had had in the past was that other leaders always put a little asterisk by his name. So whenever he wasn't compliant with something, they said, oh, don't worry about that. Remember, asterisk, he sees the most patients. Don't worry that he's not compliant with our biggest initiative. our main play in the market this quarter. Just remember that asterisk. He has some of the highest acuity levels. See, what I found out is that many people enabled Dr. Smith through the use of what I would call the asterisk. We make excuses for people all the time. You know, they're really not great with internal clients. however, asterisk, they're really good at coding. Or, well, he or she doesn't get along well with their colleagues, asterisk, they're a super great nurse. And I started to find this phenomenon, this asterisk phenomenon, where we are enabling folks by protecting them from their reality, by putting in information that supposedly offsets the deficit or the behavior we want them to improve, the very thing that's not working So well for them. And it was an amazing discovery. And I started to discover all the ways that we enabled other folks. So after I told Steve, nope, I didn't add any of those in, he kind of panicked. He said, oh my gosh, I bet Steve was mad. After I told Dr. Smith this, he said, oh, I bet Steve was mad. And I said, you know, he looked mad. And Dr. Smith said, I better call Steve. And I said, you know, he said he'd be calling you. Now, I wasn't able to have any heightened urgency from Dr. Smith. And yet when I stepped out of his relationship with his superior and his reality, the urgency was there. This is important to remember because I didn't go report him or retaliate against him. I simply just stopped protecting him. And so what I want you to do is do some thinking as a leader about how often you focus on how can I make somebody do something? And instead, I want you to focus on what can I do to find the ways I'm enabling folks and just simply stop enabling so they have a more direct relationship with reality. When I was a therapist, I worked with parents and they many times would have a child that was using chemicals. That was one of the reasons they came to me. And they'd be so frustrated that this child had, you know, purchased marijuana. And then say, oh my gosh, well, where did they get the money? And you'd be surprised to know that many parents said, well, I gave it to him. I'm like, what? Like, well, I gave it to him for gas. He needs gas. And I said, but he spent it on marijuana. I know. I said, so what are you gonna do? Well, he needs gas to go to school. And so people would continue to give their kids gas to drive to school, knowing they spend it on marijuana, and then being upset that the kid didn't stop using, and not realizing they're enabling in that process. Now, most of you aren't dealing with kids with addictions or employees with addictions, but I really want you to take the time today to just think about this concept that's counterintuitive, not how you can make people do something, but how you can stop enabling them and protecting them from their reality. Because here's the deal, when people are introduced to the reality, reality is really the best motivator you can have. Now, I don't know if people will change, but I know they won't change when they don't have a direct relationship with reality. So what I was able to do for Dr. Smith that day is get out of the way of his relationship with the reality of what it's like to be out of compliance in a system that values the diabetic initiative, especially when there's no one there to buffer for you and put an asterisk by your name. So leaders, I want you to be thinking about accountability and about calling people up to greatness. And one of the best ways that you can do that is to remove the asterisks by people's names and help them understand the true consequences of their behavior. I hope this is a helpful tip or concept, and I really look forward to having you join me in many, many more episodes of this podcast. If you're loving it, make sure not only that you're subscribed, but please spread the word. Tell your friends. And if you haven't listened to some of the early episodes, get back there and listen to them. I think you'll really Love the information that I've included. As you go about the world out there, you guys keep ditching the drama, and I look forward to our next podcast. Thank you so much for joining the episode today. If you're loving this podcast, just make sure that you check me out on Facebook and Instagram, and especially YouTube.