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Adam and Eve by Titian

The comedian Flip Wilson had a famous bit with the punch line “the devil made me do it.”  It’s funny because we know it’s often human nature to avoid accountability for our actions.  The tendency is as old as mankind itself.   We see it even with Adam and Eve.  Genesis 3:11-13: And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”  The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”  Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”  The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”   So Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the snake and they all got kicked out of the garden.

Given this powerful human tendency, it takes real work to instill a culture of accountability within an organization. Accountability means taking responsibility for actions and outcomes both good and bad, for you and for your organization.  The military states it best with the Unit Commander principle:  The commander is responsible for everything his unit does or fails to do.

That high degree of accountability is lacking in many of our organizations.  In fact, some organizations have a culture of unaccountability.  More time is spent on the politics of blame shifting and organizational positioning than is actually spent on getting the job done.  If you are part of such an organization, your career prospects might actually be harmed from being accountable and pushing accountability.

Assuming that is not the case, how do you ensure accountability in an organization?

• Accountability starts at the top of the organization.  The executive and management team must lead by example.  They need to adhere to the Unit Commander Principle and hold their reports to that same standard.
• There should be clear lines of authority and areas of responsibility. This avoids the “whose ball is it” syndrome.  Even in complex or “matrixed” organizations areas of responsibility can be designated.
• Rewards and consequences for both accomplishment and failure must be appropriate and timely.  If there is no consequence for failure, then there is less motivation to succeed.  If consequences are too severe you’ll create a culture of fear and failures will be hidden or more energy will again get spent a shifting blame or refusing assignments.

Building a culture of accountability is consistent with building a high-performance organization and should bring tangible performance improvements over time,

As either a consultant,  a partner, a customer, or a supplier, I’ve worked with over one hundred Fortune 1000 companies and numerous smaller organizations.  A common theme across almost all of those organizations is poorly run meetings.  It is the rare company, that is consistently good at this most basic of functions.  Most of us would agree we spend too much of our time in bad meetings.   We all know what they look like:  disorganized, too long, and filled with someone droning on and on about an irrelevant tangent while everyone else in the room is checking e-mail, Facebook,  or reading blogs (OK if you’re reading this blog).  It’s a shame because running effective meetings is not hard to do.  It just takes a little discipline and following some simple rules.  As we enter 2011, let’s make a business New Year’s resolution: No More Crappy Meetings:

Secret to Effective Meetings

There are several essential guidelines for running effective meetings.

1. Know when to hold and not hold meetings

2. Have a clearly defined purpose

3. Have clearly defined attendance

4. Establish a set of meeting norms

5. Work from a well prepared agenda

6. Keep good minutes and records

7. Designate clearly defined meeting roles

8. Utilize discussion skills

How to keep meetings interesting

The guidelines for effective meetings go a long way towards keeping meetings interesting. If you only hold a meeting when it is necessary; only invite the correct attendees; and have a well defined agenda, then you won’t have folks asking “why are we here?”  Make sure you “keep on task” with the meeting topic and agenda.  If you allow the meeting to head off on a tangent it will likely be both boring and not effective.   Make sure you start and end the meeting on time.  Don’t “re-cap” a portion of the meeting for latecomers.  Few things are as a boring as a meeting that starts 10 minutes late, runs for 10 more minutes and then spends another 10 minutes “catching-up” late attendees.  One of the most effective ways of keeping a meeting interesting is to be very action oriented.  If you assign tasks to meeting attendees throughout the meeting you will keep their attention and have an action plan to get work done after the meeting

Avoid these meeting killers

1. Holding a meeting just for the sake of holding a meeting

2. Inviting random participants to the meeting

3. Meeting without and agenda or clear purpose

4. Starting late and ending late

5. Starting the meeting over for late attendees

6. Walking out of the meeting without clear actions or any records.

Source: Elf on The Shelf

With Christmas upon us, many of us use the “Santa Clause is watching” technique to motivate our children.  The folks at “Elf on the Shelf” took that up a notch:

“My earliest memories of this charming tradition began when my brother and I asked the all-too-familiar question, “How does Santa really know if we are being ‘naughty or nice?’” The answer came in the form of a small pixie elf. Our mother told us how special this elf was. We learned the elf acted as Santa’s eyes and ears, reported our behavior to St. Nick himself, and was our very own friend from the North Pole. Each year the elf returned to perform its assigned task.

Unwittingly, the tradition provided an added benefit. It helped the children to better control themselves. All it took was a gentle reminder that “the elf is watching,” for errant behavior to be quickly modified.”

The Elf on the Shelf appears to be a powerful motivator, so how can we apply that to organizational effectiveness.

The Elf does a number of things right:

• Monitors performance: “the elf is watching”
• Provides reporting: “tells Santa Clause”
• Has a performance standard: “Naughty or Nice”
• Has a reward structure:  “toys or a lump of coal”
• Works in “matrixed” organizations “children are NOT direct reports of Santa Clause”

Not bad for an 18” stuffed doll, but not adequate for true performance improvement.  The Elf falls short in a number of ways:

• “Naughty or Nice” is an inadequate set of performance goals.  It is too vague, too subjective, and not readily measurable.  The Elf would be well served to follow the SMART format (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely)
• Like the lazy manager, the Elf is only measuring performance around review time (i.e. Christmas) and giving feedback only once a year.  Best practice is to have regular monitoring and feedback
• The Elf appears to only monitor those things he can see from his own shelf which limits the ability to monitor cross-functional or cross-organizational goals

Best practices for individual and organizational performance require more.   For individuals to perform well they must:

• Be Capable
• Have clearly defined job roles
• Know what is expected of them
• Have the knowledge and skills to perform the job
• Have the tools to do the job
• Receive feedback on their performance

For best organizational performance, individual performance needs to be strategically aligned across the organization, but that requires many more elves and many more shelves.

Strategic Alignment Model

Source: Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia “Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients.”  It aims at continuous process improvement through the classic feedback model of “Design, Model, Execute, Monitor, and Optimize.  In the past, BPM was a slow and cumbersome process.  Many of us can remember long days in conference rooms with sheets of butcher paper tacked to the wall with post-its moving back and forth.  Once a process was mapped out and finalized it took additional manual effort to put it into execution. Those actions have become much easier with BPM software.

A comprehensive Business Process Management platform gives you the ability to collectively define your business processes, deploy those processes as applications accessible via the Web. The processes can be integrated with existing software systems.  Managers have the real-time visibility they need to monitor, analyze, control and improve the execution of those processes in real time, increasing operational responsiveness.

The ability to deploy applications via the web means you can automate almost any workflow.  We have found BPMS useful to our clients as a way to build case management and call center support platforms. Our  Case Management tool on BPM is called RapidCase.  Although we have helped clients implement “off the shelf” solutions, we see superior value in those built on BPM.  We have found a BPM based solution to be more adaptable to changing environments and easier to customize to our clients’s needs.

There is an added bonus to BPM as a call center platform.  You can leverage ROI across the organization. A BPM solution will work to automate your call center capabilities AND any other workflows you choose.  This way multiple departments can leverage the BPM platform and garner returns.  Forrester calls BPM “the next big thing. “  We use Progress/Savvion as our BPM platform.  We found it to be both a powerful and easy to use tool and Forrester has rated them a leader in that space.

We have recently been working on a warranty claims process using a BPM engine. This “Non-Call Center” application is well suited for workflow automation and is a good example of field service BPMS application.  Others that come to mind are reverse logistics/returns processing  and engineering change control.

Austhor: Michael Fritsch

Mike Fritsch is President and COO of Confoe.  He has helped numerous clients initiate and improve call center and case management solutions.

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