Hold Them (And Yourself) Accountable

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Accountability, The Key to Performance and Productivity

Competencies: accountability, leadership, managing self, ethics,

Who benefits: executives and senior managers primarily, any employee secondarily

Consultant Usage: especially useful for external consultants working at the organizational level, useful for internal HRD consultants

What’s it about? Two of my favorite guys are back and they are smokin’ hot!  The guys are Connor and Smith.  They are the wizards of accountability and oh my gushiness do we need more of that on this planet.

If you are not acquainted with them (and I “should” on you), they have been around since the early 90’s with what I consider to be one of the 2 or 3 best books of that decade, The Oz Principle: Getting Results through Individual and Organizational Accountability.  I will boldly state had that book been on every business person’s desk … and the principles were enforced by their organization, we would not have had the recession of 2008.  Wall Street, financial institutions, Enron’s of the business world, even the US Congress would have performed in ways not imagined.

The Oz Principle was the first in a series of books on accountability in the workplace.  The emphasis in this first book was holding people personally accountable for their performance.  The second in the series was Journey to the Emerald City: Achieve a Competitive Edge by Creating a Culture of Accountability put greater emphasize on accountability at the organizational level.

A more recent book looks at accountability at all levels: “The economy crashes, the government misfires, businesses fail, leaders don’t lead, managers don’t manage, and the people we count on for the results that affect our own performance don’t follow through, leaving us asking, ‘How did that happen?'” .  The book was the aptly named How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way.

Now comes their just released Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results.  Somewhat like the movies, this one is actually a remake of Journey to the Emerald City, but with a whole new cast.

The book is a guide book, a “how-to” book, a best practices book.  It outlines a detailed model toward attaining universal accountability within an organization.  It doesn’t have much theory and it is heavy on case studies and organizational stories.  It assumes that the reader is interested in changing the corporate culture to one “where people embrace their accountability toward one another and toward the organization”. 

The authors write “Unfortunately, in many organizations, accountability has become something that happens to you when things go wrong.  That kind of accountability never works…real accountability … makes things go right.”  And that, my friends, excites me.

This is the kind of book we all need to read once in a while to remind ourselves that a better workplace, better relationships, even a better world is possible … but it doesn’t come free and it does come with accountability.

Catch you later.
[tags] accountability, leadership, managing self, ethics, oz principle, culture, culture change, envisia, envisia learning, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.