Most leaders think accountability problems stem from a lack of training, effort, or commitment. But what if the real issue is confidence?
In this week’s TGIM, Roxanne Emmerich reveals why many accountability initiatives fail and shares a practical framework for creating lasting behavior change that directly impacts profitability.
Key discoveries include:
– Why the victim mindset, distraction, and outdated role expectations undermine accountability in nearly every organization
– How confidence—not knowledge—is often the true barrier preventing employees from executing at higher levels
– A three-step process to create momentum, build capability, and sustain performance improvements that move the profit needle
When leaders focus on building confidence through structured wins instead of simply demanding better results, accountability becomes a natural outcome rather than a constant struggle.
Discover how to create a culture where team members take ownership, execute with confidence, and contribute at a higher level.
Watch now.
Do you believe hard work should be rewarded with financial gain? What if you could get more accountability from your team members for the things that move your profit needle? Are you the kind of leader who has been preaching from the mountaintop to your team that they need to get it together on accountability?
Do you feel like you might be mocked as the village idiot soon because it’s just not working? Then you’re going to love this because you can break that pattern. No more getting angry or looking silly when your requests are unmet.
Maybe you are one who has already made good progress with your team on accountability, in which case you’re going to enjoy knowing that there’s always more progress to be made faster by implementing these ideas.
Or perhaps you want to get your organization to the top five percent of performance and keep it there. If so, great, because I’ll give you a proven formula that has helped hundreds of organizations dramatically increase the profit per full-time equivalent.
There are three big issues that make a great argument for bringing an even higher level of accountability into your organization.
First, psychologists tell us that out of all the archetypes, the victim archetype is the one humans most often play out. While blame, excuses, and pretending not to know are not very attractive in adults, that doesn’t mean you don’t see people do it every single day.
Second, we live in a distracted world where it’s getting worse every day. Joe Dispenza, PhD, and author of Evolve Your Brain, says that the younger generation in the workplace has altered brain chemistry due to video games and rapid screen changes on television. It’s extremely difficult for them to focus on what matters at work. Alignment with outcomes can therefore be a struggle.
Third, most people are busy doing the job the person who had it before them was doing without the benefit of knowing what a high performer would be doing instead. Even if they are accountable, they’re still doing the wrong things.
Every business out there struggles with these same challenges. So let’s get to work.
I’m now going to give you three steps that will help you create some fast breakthroughs around accountability in a matter of a few weeks.
Step one: Unlike so many well-intentioned attempts to set clear goals and strategies and then rally team members to follow them, you have to realize that the core issue isn’t always that they don’t know what to do; it’s that they don’t believe that they can do it.
You have to acknowledge that or you can’t possibly get traction.
Step two: Understand that confidence is built by small successes planned on an ever-accelerating path to improvement. You used to be a person who couldn’t tie your own shoes. It was an overwhelming challenge at one time. That is what you face with every stage of heightened responsibility that you ask of your team members.
Step three: Plan a sequence of rollouts of ever more challenging skills. Along with that, once a rollout moves a needle, you need a system to keep that needle up so you don’t have a series of “this too shall pass” initiatives.
Three steps. Straightforward.
Number one, realize that it isn’t a training issue but a confidence issue.
Two, be aware that many of your requests for change seem overwhelming based on current confidence levels.
And three, plan your sequences to create a pattern of home-run needle movements and an ever-increasing set of advancements of skill demonstrations—the kind of skills that move the profit needle.
By doing this, you can begin to get people far more focused and elegant in their execution of the advancement behaviors that tie them to top ten percent profitability activities.
Make sure you tune in to our next session to discover how to better help your people understand how they each tie to profit.