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Katie and Carol talk about Tip 16 from Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership.

In this episode Katie and Carol give you practical tips for dealing with the crucial topic and skill of accountability.

Tip #16 Hold people accountable.

This sounds good. Looking for techniques to drive this baby home?

When people have actions that they are supposed to be following up on, the starting point is setting expectations. Give a shot at implementing these techniques:

• Track action items when they emerge, whether you are in a meeting or project discussion.
• Use accountability partners (pairs of action-doers that can use each other for reporting out)
• Have effective meetings where you broadcast the action items, person responsible, and deadline in various forums, such as minutes or online dashboards. The more visibility, the better.
• Clearly use “sponsor” or other term identifying a single point of contact for an action and have that person’s name directly associated with the task.
• Use standing agenda items that review who is doing what, so that it becomes expected that the responsible person will be answerable to the group. A standing agenda item is one that is automatically included on an agenda. This forces the topic and people begin to expect a discussion on it.

By the way, the prerequisite of acting accountable is knowing what is expected of you. That’s a topic for another day!

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Hello and welcome to the Skirt Strategies podcast, the podcast to help you get the support, validation, and skills you need to accomplish your goals and really succeed in a male-dominated world, all without having to give up your incredible female strengths.

Katie: Welcome to the Skirt Strategies podcast, an episode with me, Katie.

Carol: And me Carol.

Katie: And Carol and I are presenting to you tips for women in leadership, for you feminine leaders out there. Let me rephrase that – for you women that are in positions of influence that want to use your natural female capabilities. And this is a deep dive into accountability, one of those great leadership skills.

Carol: So this is Tip Number 16: Hold people accountable.

Katie: Each of these tips that you are hearing in these podcasts come from the book, Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership, available on Amazon, and in Kindle format.

Carol: And now in podcast format. Of course we are only on Tip Number 16 and we have 249 of these to go, so it’s going to be a while.

Katie: It’ll be like the U.S. mail, it will never end. Actually the U.S. mail might end.

Carol: Yeah, why the U.S. mail?

Katie: Well it was an old line from Newman from the Seinfeld Show. They said, “Newman, why are you always so uptight and kind of crazy?” And he said, “because the mail. It never ends.”  He was a mail carrier.

Okay, Tip Number 16: Hold people accountable. We are going to get tactical on this one because people are always looking for great techniques for accountability.

In the values class that I’ve been developing most recently with my friend Jan Maples, we identify personal values and my of the people that are on the first series, the go round of the class have as one of their five top values, personal values, accountability. They see accountability as a must-have for their character.

Carol: For leaders.

Katie: Uh-huh, in their leadership world.

Carol: I really can’t imagine leadership without accountability.

Katie: Without accountability? Yes that’s right. And for some of us it’s more on the front burner than others so just a word about values. If it’s not one of your top five it doesn’t mean you don’t hold people accountable or behave in an accountable way it just means you have other things, because there can be a host of values. We won’t even go into those but some ideas.

So here’s some thoughts and I want to hear from you too, Carol, and we’ll just kind of go through them one at a time, again tactical.

When I see accountability falter it’s often somebody is not doing what they said they were going to do.

Carol: That would be unaccountable.

Katie: And maybe they don’t do it because nobody’s holding their feet to the fire. Ideally in a pure world, everyone is doing what they say they’ll do.

Carol: Right and they feel responsible for what they said they would do, right?

Katie: Yes, but what if they don’t? So one way of managing it is to be very astute with your action items. When action items emerge that is somebody needs to do something whether you are in a meeting, whether you’re in a stand up discussion, whether you are on a phone call, when you hear an action item, track it.

Carol: You know we started doing this and it may be from my work with you I don’t remember where it came from but in board meetings and executive meetings, we basically, we make sure to track action items so every time something comes up and somebody says, “I’ll get that done,” I point at whoever’s taking minutes or if it’s me, I ask somebody to record the action item so we make sure that that gets recorded and the next time at the next meeting it gets brought up, did that get done?

Katie: This is also a communication skill because if you and I are in the very casual conversation, and you say, “Well let me follow through on that.” I need to lean into it just a little bit.

Carol: What do you mean by that?

Katie: So use my friend Cheryl’s term, I’m going to lean into it and say, “Okay, so what are you going to do with that?” And make you articulate or ask you to articulate.

Carol: What exactly does that mean to you?

Katie: And if you say, “Well, I’m going to go find – if you asking for personalized manila envelopes because we need it for X, Y and Z project, and you say, “Oh I’ll look into that.” Then I’ll say, “What is it that you are going to do.” And you might say, “Well I’m going to call Vista Print and see whether they can make that.” And I might even force it farther and say, “When do you want to have that done by?”

And now we’ve got you, the who, you just said the what, I don’t care about the how, but we have the when. And I don’t need the why either.

Carol: And I may even have – something that we built around that which is an agenda basically for our committee meetings – that’s all we do is we track who’s going to do what, when, and we come back to that every time we meet, especially if it’s an event that needs people tracking things. We come back to that every time so even if you’re doing it the day before the meeting, you’re getting it done before the meeting because it’s going to come up. So that’s a great way to do it as well.

Katie: It’s interesting. In those meeting where you are just going through getting stuff done, those feel so productive. They are a little bit dangerous and this is part of another tip down the road but those meetings also eventually probably ought to have a little bit around the how are we interacting together but that’s not the accountability part. The accountability part is very actionable.

So track action items when they emerge. Have a system, maybe it’s an online system, maybe it’s a common doc, maybe it’s a Google doc –

Carol: Outlook has a – you can assign people tasks.

Katie: Or you can use a share point if you are in the big enough organization where you use a share point and you have a project for it. So that’s one idea.

How about having a person holding you accountable as in an accountability partner?

Carol: Interest. I don’t know that I’ve ever done that before.

Katie: You haven’t?

Carol: No I have a lot of people in my life who will hold me accountable to the action items that I’m looking at on a constant basis but I’ve not had a partner do that with me ever.

Katie: In the values based leadership that Jan and I are in the middle of right now it’s a series of seven half days a week apart and the attendees each have an accountability partner so what’s great about this section is the accountability partner is somebody outside their industry because it’s a public workshop that we are doing right now and so we have a host of different industries. It’s kind of fun.

So the accountability partners have gotten to know somebody else from the community, they are from the same city but a different business and they’ve kind of forged a relationship. Internal to an organization you can do the exact same thing.

Who is going to hold you to it and that doesn’t look like badgering but I guess it could.

Carol: You know I have to tell you what keeps coming into my mind is a young gentleman I work with who has just made his way to vice president of a company and the way he did it is pretty transparent but he just doesn’t let those to-do’s go, he does them now.

If somebody says, “Oh gosh I wonder what it cost to get transportation from here to there?” He’s on the phone within seconds finding out what it cost so that we can keep the conversation going. It’s a little disturbing because a lot of times he’s on the phone when we want to keep the conversation going but then again, he comes back with the information. It’s done. I do believe that that’s how he got to where he’s at now. It’s because he just gets it done.

Katie: I’ve always been interested in the concept of having a meeting where you don’t just talk about planning the do, you actually do the do.

Carol: And that’s what he did.

Katie: I think you could do that if you were having a project and you had a lot of little logistical things, if you said let’s take a ten minute recess, everybody go work on this, go find out the information, come right back, consider yourself still in the meeting, don’t get lost at your desk or with other things, go do those action items. That could be really powerful. I’ve suggested that to clients before but I’ve never seen anybody actually do it.

Carol: I think that would take meetings to the next level. We’ve all been in those incessant meetings, going on and on and nothing ever gets done. You come back and it’s at the same place it was because nobody did anything between time because they all forgot what they were supposed to do, and so now you are talking about the same things again. I think that’s brilliant.

Katie: And it gets everybody accountable right off the bat because you know you are going to presenting in ten minutes.

I also find I hold myself accountable by doing what your friend does. Maybe not in the meeting but if it’s something that I know is going to be of complete un-interest to me in 24 hours and it’s a little to-do, I will try to get it off my list really quick. But that’s a discipline. So much of this is self-management.

Carol: It is and just another tip. I put things in my calendar that are to-do’s, you know, tasks. I immediately if not sooner get that task in my calendar or else I will forgot it until the meeting the next time. It’s not that I’m un-focused. It’s not that I don’t hold myself accountable, I just – I’m in a lot of meetings and I don’t always remember so if I can get that into my calendar immediately I’ll get it done.

Katie: Good idea. I have a running to-do list in my calendar and right now it’s kind of long but I’m not going to lose sleep over it.

Another idea, another tip for holding others or yourself accountable, broadcast the action items and the keep word here is broadcast — the person responsible, the deadline in various forms such as minutes or online dashboards. The more visibility something has the better. If we see our name in lights as doing X, Y, and Z it’s a little more exposing.

Carol: I just had a thought that maybe sending things out as an attachment isn’t as formidable as sending out, here’s the to-do list in the email so nobody can –

Katie: I do that. So the attachment is the formal minutes but I will cut and paste the actual to-do’s, highlight in red, put the person’s name, so in the text of the email I can scan real quickly and look for my name. It works very well. And people like things simpler and to the point and put a name on it.

Carol: Yeah, don’t make me open another attachment on the computer, and then print it out, and then forgot about it on the pile on my desk.

Katie: Another tip, clearly use a sponsor or other term identifying a single point of contact for an action and have that person’s name directly associated with the task. So this is kind of a follow onto the broadcast: not only make it clear, make it broadcast. Make it well seen but also have that person as the owner of it.

There’s a little bit of terminology, motivation here is if I’m called a sponsor of something I take a little bit more ownership for it.

At Cumbberland we used to have these various workshops. We used to have a workshop dean. So the person what was the workshop dean got paid a little more when he or she did the workshop but also was responsible for babying the content of that and making sure that, when we needed to adjust the content or the materials that he or she was the one that had to do it.

Isn’t that funny how you can give somebody a title and – I was never a dean. I was very young at the time.

My favorite: a standing agenda item that you know is going to come up and is expected to come up. So this is an argument – there’s a little argument for not having the same agenda all the time but there’s a little bit of an argument for on a Monday staff meeting or a Monday project meeting or bimonthly, whatever, we have a regular agenda that we follow or do you have one that’s just dependent on what’s going on?

Either way, always have one piece in there that’s a review of the action items. And the review of the action items doesn’t look like the boss saying, “Okay Jim was going to go do this and Nancy was going to go do this.” It’s that person, Jim or Nancy, having part of the air time presenting it.

Carol: So it’s not me just going through the action items. So if their name is in front of that, as the sponsor, they are the one’s reporting on it.

Katie: Yes. You might have a little presentation or might just have a verbal. Is there anything wrong with getting something done ten minutes before the meeting?

Carol: I don’t think so. As long as you are getting it done, you’re getting it done. It depends on the time. I’m thinking of some things that need to be done before the meeting actually happens.

Katie: I use a concept that I call a forcing function.

Carol: I love Katie’s forcing functions. It’s given me a great thing to hold onto in accountability.

Katie: I wonder if part of it comes from being in a corporate environment taking so flipping long for anything to happen and somebody won’t commit to – let’s for example, I have a couple of Ebooks that I am planning on publishing. If I have a PR campaign scheduled to begin in August, and there are some wheels that are in action, I better have that damn thing done.

Carol: And you’ve already said you are putting it out in September so you’ve got –

Katie: And that is so motivational to me because now I really, really want to have it done and I’ve made lots of commitments and I want to hold myself accountable. So a forcing function does that.

Carol: We get stuff done because we put forcing functions out there. We’re going to do a podcast every week.

Katie: That’s a forcing function. Good example.

Carol: I just want to go on a bit more about forcing functions. If you have that something looming out there that you are not getting done week after week, you’re just not getting it done because it is looming my thought and my feeling is always do that first because then it’s not looming anymore but if it’s still looming, try to figure out what the forcing function could be to get it done.

Katie: Good idea. Like what? Could it be, “I’ve told somebody I’d come report on it?”

Carol: Right. I’m going to have that report done by such and such. Put it in an email. Put it in writing and then it has to be done. Let’s set up an appointment so I can report out to you.

Katie: Good, yes, setting an appointment for that. Then you have to go through the pain of rescheduling the appointment if you didn’t get it done. Sometimes that pain is more than –

Carol: — than you are willing to face so you might as well get it done.

Katie: Do you look at some to-do’s that are dreaded to-do’s and you over think them?

Carol: Uh-huh. I think we lose accountability sometimes by believing that a task is – this is one of my – we call it a cognitive distortion. I’m good at tackling it. The cognitive distortion being things are more difficult to get done that they really are so my distortion is I oversimplify. Do you see the counter action?

Like writing a book and publishing it in September. That can sound very looming, right? Well you and I have already published one book and I published the first version of that before and I know that it’s not untackleable, it’s not something you do if half a day but it’s it’s not untackleable.

Carol: Making up words again. I thought I was the only one who could do that.

Katie: And so I put it in terms of really simple, like step way back from it. When we look back on publishing that book, it wasn’t that hard at all.

Carol: Oh it took time. That’s what it took.

Katie: It took time.

Carol: I believe we had a forcing function around that too.

Katie: Yeah I think we did. So I look forward at the next book that I’m writing about transitions and change and I’m not looking at it as a looming thing that I might try to avoid. I’m looking at it as I’m over simplifying it. I step way back and see it as a very general fuzzy thing and I know how to go about it. That’s what works for me.

Now for others it might be, they want to write an outline of whatever their activity is. Maybe that’s their forcing function, and maybe getting 2 or 3 of the first steps done is what gets them moving toward holding themselves accountable.

I bet that most people have the biggest issue with holding somebody else accountable. We think we have a behavioral problems with others we work with.

Carol: Yeah I mean I can see where – I have high expectations of people around me and they seem to match them depending on my expectations.

Katie: So are you really clear about the expectations? My guess is you are.

Carol: I would think I’m fairly clear. I think they would say because pretty much I’m saying, “Here’s the project. Here’s the end-goal. Get there.”

Katie: Good luck.

Carol: Use me if you need me and here are all of the resources you can use as well.

Katie: Good.

Carol: We don’t have a ton of resources. We are a small office so it’s a matter of sometimes deadlines get pushed because we’ve got our own jobs to do and then we’re taking on a project.

Katie: Well that’s good.

Carol: It is but I guess I could be clearer in my expectations of that as well.

Katie: Well if you are not having the assignment-missers.

Carol: I wouldn’t say I’m not because I do give everybody the excuse that they’ve got their own job and now this new project. So we have some assignments missed.

Katie: So it’s kind of a typical behavior that people struggle with is the assignment-misser – the person that can’t get something done. And I go back on those situations too. You almost have to become their psychologist and figure out, what is it that is holding them back? Why aren’t they getting the message? And you’ve got to check yourself. They could be a lemon.

Carol: They could not be right for the job.

Katie: That could be but you also have to eliminate a lot of other things first. Do they not know where to start? Do they not have the capability to put something together like we think they did? Is there some sort of mental block? Do they not have the resources? All those sorts of things and as a leader walk them through that and try to dissect it. So knowing what’s expected of you is pretty darned important.

Carol: And being clear.

Katie: And being clear.

Carol: So if you have people who report to you and you are clear about your expectation and you are clear about your deadlines, which I have said I am not, I need to be clearer about my deadlines and then if the deadline is not met, what’s happening? How do I need to move this forward? How do I need to bring you with me?

Katie: Change one word that you just said. Instead of, “I need to be clear about my deadlines. I will be clear about my deadlines.”

Carol: I will be clear about deadlines.

Katie: And now you are going to speak it into existence.

Carol: It’s already happening. I can feel it.

Katie: For those of you who can’t see, we have some crystals here in the studio and there are powerful auras coming out of them.

Carol: All right, what else?

Katie: Well I’d love to hear from our listeners. We’ve got a spot on the website. Now if you are listening to us through iTunes you won’t see it but at SkirtStrategies.com/podcast or if you can’t remember that you can go to SkirtStrategiespodcast.com and it will forward right to the spot where we’ve got the series of published podcasts. There’s an option there that we’ve added recently for giving us audio feedback or questions or hints or maybe even some tips for how to hold people accountable.

Carol: We’d love to hear from you and if we use your recording, we will send you a signed copy of our fabulous book.

Katie:  An autographed copy, which makes it priceless. There is also a place on each of the postings of the podcasts, the ones at Skirt Strategies, it’s a blog page. So you can always add a blog comment that’s –

Carol: Oh you know what we really need? We need people to tweet out these podcasts. So go on the website or just tweet from iTunes – I think you can do that and just tell other people how wonderful we are because we’ve got quite a few listeners but not more than we can handle.

Katie: That’s a good way of putting it. We really need more.

Carol: So please take some time. It really does help us keep our message out there and keep our message going. The other thing I think some people don’t know is that we do have a paid subscription. It’s all of $8 a month. You get a Monday morning deep dive into a topic, and it’s usually a topic like holding people accountable but you’ll get a deep dive into that topic with a work page –

Katie: One page .pdf, it’s either a work assignment, a self-assessment, or a few questions, and a short podcast, less than ten minutes that goes along with it, so you can either listen or you can read, or you can do both.

And I will say that I don’t know if I’d even call it a deep dive. I think that over the course of a month because we focus on one area in a month, I’d say by the end of the month it’s a deep dive but we have tiny trainings, big results – that’s our byline, tiny trainings, big results, so these weekly assignments are very, very manageable.

Carol: And at $8 a month really, you buy a latte that cost you more than that.

(Music plays)

That’s it for this episode of the Skirt Strategies podcast. Thank you for joining us and please be sure to leave a question or comment at Skirtstrategies.com. Remember that success comes when you lead using your natural female strengths.

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