The Accountability Challenge

The Accountability Challenge – The Making or Breaking of Caribbean Corporations By Francis Wade

High-Stake Interventions These materials may not be reproduced, publicly displayed, or used to create derivate products in any form without prior written permission from: Framework Consulting Inc. 3389 Sheridan Street, #434 Hollywood, FL 33021 954-323-2552 www.fwconsulting.com

Š 2005 Framework Consulting, Inc. All rights reserved

The Accountability Challenge

Caribbean managers have inherited a history that is unique. While the territories that are English speaking have a common language, common sports, overlapping tastes in music and shared institutions such as the University of the West Indies, the legacy that most prevails upon the workplace is that of chattel slavery (and its cousin, indentured labour.)

This was the major force that brought the vast majority of the region’s ancestors to their respective countries.

While the legacy of slavery can be seen to have multiple effects on today’s workplace, Framework Consulting has been focused on understanding a single effect – the inability of executives and managers to create workplaces of high accountability. From our work with companies in Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica we have observed that in spite of some cultural differences, there are also some striking similarities.

What are these similarities? We have found that executives and managers are persistently complaining that employees refuse to take responsibility. Also, managers do not know what to do about the problem, or how to intervene in a way that will do anything more than make the problem worse. Lastly, they stop looking for solutions, and therefore stunt their own skill development, long before the supply of possible answers is depleted.

This paper addresses these similarities, and offers a partial solution.

A Lack of Accountability The first key similarity that we have noticed is in the kinds of complaints that executives and managers have about the people that are working for them at ALL levels in the company. While most companies have people who are very well-trained (in the technical skills needed for the job,) managers observe that at some point in an employee’s working career they “learn” how to stop taking initiative. A young employee who is recently hired very quickly resorts to a mode of doing “just what I was told to do” and retreats behind that excuse at the first opportunity.

Employees resist being accountable, even when it appears that being accountable is in their best … at some point in an interest. They are quite comfortable in “delegating employee’s working career upwards” – putting the burden of decision making, they “learn” how to stop accountability and risk, squarely on the shoulders taking initiative of the manager. This behavior is widespread, and leaves the manager with the overwhelming sense that important decisions must be made by them, and them alone.

The effect is debilitating. Decisions are made slowly. Simple customer complaints are resolved only after a manager is involved. Even the smallest expenditure must be

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The Accountability Challenge

approved, as only the manager can be trusted to handle purchases. Customers quickly learn that they need to “know somebody” on the inside, as there is no way they would be caught dead dealing with a front-line employee that they don’t know – unless they are forced to.

Employees position themselves as “victims” and managers as “villains.” This positioning prevents managers from doing the job of making the difference that they are really being paid to make. Management becomes something (or someone) to resist, and leadership turns into a role to deride.

This workplace habit probably has its genesis in slavery, where this attitude was a useful one when …some 40% of employees it came to a slave’s primary goal in life: staying were “doing as little as alive while doing as little as possible. Translated possible to keep their jobs.” into modern terms, it means: keep the job and the paycheck as long as can,, but do as little as possible to prevent being fired. A workplace survey in the U.S. showed that some 40% of employee were “doing as little as possible to keep their jobs.” Our experience tells us that in some Caribbean companies, that number may run as high as 60%.

Not Knowing How to Create Accountability The second key similarity is related to the first. Managers do not know what to do about the problem of lack of accountability.

The first option that managers consider is a version of what can be called “Getting on Bad” with the employees they are attempting to transform. Force, combined with fear, is used to get people moving into action. By “showing them that you mean business” and “getting raw,” managers find that they are able to make things happen, at least for a while. This is not as one-sided as it sounds. Expatriate managers to the Caribbean have reported to us that they are quite surprised to discover that some employees seem to welcome this approach … and will only respond to it.

That this is the first technique used is not a surprise, as it closely echoes the approach used by slave masters during the 300 year history of slavery. Force was used in much the same way to generate a fear of further punishment. One of the cruel practices of slavery was to publicly flog a disobedient slave while forcing other slaves to watch, especially the younger ones. This was a way to get people to do what you could not get them to do by any other known method..

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The Accountability Challenge

At the same time, we’ve observed that some managers use milder variations of violent and forceful action, including manipulation, bribery and cajoling. While these techniques do not generally involve or engage the same level of fear, they also do damage to the working environment.

At the other extreme, this history of violence is so very alive for some managers that they resolve to do nothing rather than to risk a confrontation that may be seen as an attack.

They will do anything to avoid a conflict, and prefer to leave an employee in the dark, and to have the organization’s results falter. This avoidance leads to a lack of productivity, which too many good managers attempt to overcome by just putting in more and more hours and effort. Others just keep poor performers in place, and work hard to create ways to work around the person. The result is a sense of overwhelm on the part of the manager.

These two options – violence, or withdrawal – seem to the manager to be the only ones available, and while this does not stop the manager from complaining to his or her peers, friends, family, it does not translate into effective action.

It is as if the manager becomes trapped in the role of a benevolent dictator, very much in keeping with the preferred style of the slave masters of old.

A Lack of Skill Development The third similarity comes from the manager believing that they are stuck in a bad situation, with no good options. Either they become a tyrant, or they find a way to avoid the situation indefinitely, or they fire the employee. They believe that they are powerless, and a victim of their employee’s bad attitude.

Our observation, however, is that when compared with the best managers that we have seen around the world, the average Caribbean manager is also relatively unskilled, and not engaged in the ongoing development of their skills.

In other words, they have stopped looking for better and more successful techniques for intervening in their employees’ performance. Most often, they do not have managers with whom they work that have developed superior skills for creating successful interventions. They have often not seen a clear and workable alternative to force or withdrawal, and if they do happen to see effective skills in action, they chalk it up to the manager’s personality, disposition or experience (none of which they can possess in short order.)

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The Accountability Challenge

What they miss is that conducting successful confrontations is a matter of skill

Sometimes, even when a firm such as ours is brought in to assist, as a group they start out agreeing that the problem lies with the employees, and the solution is available only to the gifted few. They themselves have nothing to do with the lack of accountability they experience.

What they miss is that conducting successful confrontations is a matter of skill, much in the same way that executing a square cut or dribbling a hockey ball with a curved hockey stick are also skills. They cannot see that these skills can be learned, practiced, perfected and taught to others – even by them.

They also miss out on a basic truth: accountability is not taught or created directly. It is impossible to coach someone effectively by telling them to “be more accountable.”

Instead, our experience shows that companies that experience high accountability have managers who are very skilled at conducting critical confrontations around performance.

Want more accountability? Look to see what confrontations are being avoided at all levels, in every direction – downwards, upwards and between peers.

When managers do realize that a culture of accountability can be created, starting with them learning new skills, then the real work of transforming the organization can actually start. Managers can learn how to use the best methods available to successfully conduct confrontations that are necessary, but produce … our experience shows that positive results.

companies that experience high accountability have managers who are very skilled at conducting critical confrontations around performance.

Here at Framework, our research has turned up effective principles and methods that allow a manager to directly observe his or her own inability to confront. Through the use of video taped feedback and customized cases, managers receive group input from their peers and trained facilitators on how well they do in producing a result in a fictions, but critical role-play.

They can compare, for the first time, their performance in these difficult conversations against the ideal, as defined by state-of-the art techniques of listening, observing and giving feedback. They can then try out alternative approaches, informed by the principles they are learning, and receive coaching on how well the new approaches work.

In a safe environment that is experimental, the learning is rapid. Managers leave the course armed with a new skill that they have just begun to practice, and are able to

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The Accountability Challenge

confront any kind of behaviour they deem sub-par or unacceptable. With these new skills, they have empowered themselves to create cultures of accountability within their organizations. It represents a start in overcoming the influence of hundreds of years of resistant work habits learned by Caribbean people to survive the horrors of slavery.

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