EP 90 | How to Hold Your Team Accountable

most business owners aren't willing to actually go through the process. Right? It's not that you don't know how to hold somebody accountable. It's that you're not running your business from a place of a solid foundation to where you could run the process through, have the person turn out that they can't be held accountable, that they're not willing to do what it takes, and then you have to fire them because

your business isn't run in that way. So I want to unpack all of that because this idea of accountability is fairly straightforward. So we'll just handle those pieces and then get into more of the structure of what do you do to run a business so that the business is culture is a culture of accountability, which ultimately means how do you train team members as quickly as possible and create a training culture? That's a better question. So

let's just dive in. When it comes to holding your team accountable and doing resets with your team, first of all, you have to make sure that you are clear about what the expectation was to begin with. Now, the more senior the person is, the less clear you have to

be about the expectation. And I've seen this bite me in the ass a handful of times, but for the most part, you as a business owner, as a leader, will shift what your expectations of your team are as your business grows because you're growing and you're not doing the same things that you once were, which means that

you're holding other people accountable to doing those things. And in a perfect world, when you realize, Oh, it's no longer my responsibility to solve this problem, you would sit down with your team member, you would share with them in a one on one. Hey, moving forward, when you have questions about this, instead of you coming to me for final approval, you are now the approver and I'm going to watch how you approve these things for a handful of times just to make sure there's quality assurance.

But after you've given me confidence through you making this decision over a handful of times, then moving forward, this will be your decision and you will be the person in the process documentation that people know to go to in order to make this decision. This is ideal seen. This is like, man, the most organized business on the face of the planet would do it this way. However, what actually tends to happen is you have this expectation. You may or may not communicate the expectation to your

team member. You get frustrated when the expectation is not met. The team member feels overwhelmed, doesn't want to push back on you because you're now frustrated at them for not reading your mind. And they either figure it out, become more engaged, lean in and chalk this up to I'm going to learn from this experience or they start to become disengaged. Start sabotaging your business and you have to

terminate them or they leave. So this idea of setting expectations is like, Man, if you could get good at this as a business owner. You will have an easier ride over the course of the time that you're growing your business. I'm not saying it's going to be lined with lollipops and freaking rows, but it's going to be easier. So first things first. How do you know and decide which things you should be doing versus which things your team members should be doing at any given point in organization?

I think of Cardinal Ventures today. I know what my job is. I know based on my job description, I know what my team's jobs are based on their job descriptions, and I know what areas I'm pushing team members on.

And so as I'm holding people accountable to the things that they are responsible for doing, in nine out of ten instances, I've shared with them that it's my expectation that they are hitting the target, that they are completing the tasks that they are doing, the thing that they're supposed to do, which this comes from proper job description, documentation, proper clarity around what the objective of a role is,

and then bonus points. But the reality is you should really start here is having metrics associated with the responsibilities for every single role. Because when you have metrics that are associated with targets, right, the metric is just the number of the thing. How many sales call somebody makes the time in which you take somebody to close the books.

Like all of those things are just metrics. But the target would be, Hey, you're going to make 150 calls or you're going to close the books within eight business days of the month, right? Those would be targets. So when you are clear on the metrics and then the targets, then you can just coach people on, hey, you either hit the target or you didn't hit the target because you have tracking of your metrics. And you clearly explained

that this was the expectation on the front end. So these little things that people don't do, instead of you being frustrated that they aren't doing them and holding on to that frustration for weeks on end, I would highly recommend that in the moment you coach them on the issue. Like I had a situation that happened just a few days ago where somebody came into my office. I was doing something else that was related to my job and they came in and gave me a bunch of problems

and didn't have any solutions for the problems. And we're just like giving me a freaking update on all the problems. And my response back was, What do you want me to do with this information? And they said, Oh, I'm just giving you an update. And I said, I don't need an update. Give me the solution at the end of the day so that I know what I can actually do because I can't do anything with this information. And the team member just kept like pushing back, kept

going through the whole rigmarole. I'm like, Listen. There are two other department heads that are involved with this process. I am not the decision maker on this. You guys are the decision makers who are going to put the proposal together and then you're going to come back to me and I'm going to approve the proposal, but I am not the person that is going to get in

the weeds to solve this problem. Now, six months ago, I might have been the person to help get in the weeds with this particular set of problems because I had a different role. There was different expectations of what I was responsible for. But this was a chance for me to reset expectations with a team member. And there was also another team member in my office who was helping me do what I'm supposed to be doing that overheard this whole conversation. And. This reset, this accountability and

like shift in what you're telling somebody to do. These are the moments that most people are unwilling to actually have the conversation around. I'm not going to wait to get mad at this person later. I'm not going to think less of this person. I'm just going to say, hey, wait a second, dude, this is your job is not my job. Go do your job. D y j Do

your job and I'm gonna do mine. So your ability to just handle situations like this in the moment now, in a perfectly documented organization, you might create a process around this. This is not something that happens enough in our organization to where I'd need to have a process documented around it. But this reset. It's good to be a game changer because I just know that now this won't happen in the future. And if it does happen in the future, I'm just going to go back to, hey,

this is not my this is not my problem. And your strength as a leader will come in moments like this, because the reality is you could likely solve the problem. I could have solved the problem. I could have spent 15 minutes coming up with a solution, emailing a couple of people, letting them know this was a solution. But the more I have to do that, the less I'm training my team members to be responsible for the things that they could be responsible for. Now they not. They

aren't yet. Maybe he didn't know yet that he was responsible for this. But regardless, you should never have somebody just come into your office and put a bunch of problems at your door. I like to think of this when I think about one on one as any interaction with a with a team member, as your team members have this monkey, there's like this monkeys creating all this

problems for them. They're like crawling all over them. They're throwing shit places like the monkey is the problems that all team members have with the work that they're doing. And as the the boss, as the leader, you could put yourself in a position where you are the person that they go to with the monkey and they just drop the monkey off in your office and then they leave and they go home and have a nice dinner with their families. And now you're dealing with this frickin monkey.

And if you do this across all ten, 12, 15 of your direct reports, then you're the one who's dealing with these fricking monkeys who are throwing shit all over your office, ripping up papers and causing havoc, and you haven't actually taught your team how to handle the monkeys because they are not your monkeys. Those are your team members, monkeys. And again, even though you might be the best freaking zookeeper on the face of the planet, you need to

teach your team how to be a zookeeper. You need to teach your team how to handle those things so that as your business grows, your team members responsibility, your team members thought process, your team members ability to handle things grow as well. And so. This is this is the part one of accountability. It's getting clear on who makes a decision. At what point do they make the

decision and who is the approver of that decision. The more you train somebody to come to you with solutions, they give you 2 to 3, You tell them two out of the three are terrible and you tell them why. And then the one that they came up with that was great. You tell them this is the one and

this is the reason why. So you're constantly using opportunities that people come to you with problems as a way to train them to be a solution oriented, but b give you transparency into your thinking so that they can start to think like that as well without actually needing you to be involved. So if this whole process happens and you're giving visibility into how you think and you're training your team members and they still aren't. Being accountable

to whatever the thing is you're implementing. You have to move into performance improvement like you have to go to, Hey, I told you this was the expectation. You're now coming to me a second time. This is the second time we've had this conversation. If we have to have this conversation a third time, we're gonna have to have a reset. Because I can't have this conversation three times. I can't have it 50 times. I can't have it a hundred times. I need you to learn and to execute on what

we're talking about. And if you can't do that, you're not the right person for the role. Most of you will not do that because you can't actually follow through on that. Because you don't know how to train a new person. You don't know how to find new team members in order to help you get them in their business. But that is the correct response when somebody is showing that they are not accountable to the things that you are actually following up on and wanting them to be

accountable to. So we just go straight into performance improvement. And when that person does correct their performance, if they do correct it, you acknowledge that because you want them to do the right thing. The idea behind performance improvement is not that you just fire somebody. Like that's that's

not performance improvement. That is I'm so pissed off because this person has made this mistake so many times that I'm just going to get rid of them and slap on a performance improvement plan for the documentation sake, but not really because I'm trying to help them improve their performance. That's just total BS. Don't do that. The first time it happens, address it. The second time it happens, address it the third time. You're going through the correct process

and documenting it because you want them to improve. But if they're not going to improve, as soon as you go into that phase, you have to post that position and you should be transparent with the person that you're posting that position. Hey, I know that we've now had two conversations about this. This is now a reset and we're moving into a verbal warning. So because of that, because there's been three instances where I've had to follow up and you've now put into question that you're the

right person for this role. I need to start looking in order to protect our organization so that we can service our clients to the highest level possible. It's not emotional. It's a business decision, But you make it emotional when you don't follow up and you create all the emotion around how long it's been, how many times they've done this, because you're not doing it on the first on the first offense, you're doing it too late in the process.

And so I'm a huge proponent of not just like hitting people with a stick, but also like, hey, here's a carrot for this particular behavior. I'm going to reward you for doing the right things. I'm you should absolutely be acknowledging your team when they do the right things and they make the changes that you want them to make. But most business owners that I work with don't have the acknowledgement problem. They're bigger. Problem is they're just letting

people run amok. And so they have a culture of a lack of accountability. So they don't know at what point is going to be the turning point where I no longer accept this. Because if you're no longer accepting the lack of accountability that's in your culture, it's likely not one person, it's likely a bunch of people, maybe even the whole team. And so then you're sitting here thinking, Man,

how do I maintain my revenue? How do I maintain my current profitability, much less frickin grow if I know that I'm about to blow my whole team out because none of them are accountable? Well, first step is acknowledging the situation that you're in. Second step You have to

become a coaching and training organization. As soon as you make the decision to become a training and coaching organization, you start pivoting these team members into documenting what they are currently doing, the value that they're currently adding into their role, their current process, their current system, their current interactions, so that at least you have a base, you have a foundation for how you're going to potentially promote them,

that's an option. And that's probably the vein that I would pitch this in to a new team. Hey guys, you can't achieve your goals and you can't grow in this organization unless we're clear on what's currently going on. So for the next quarter, a new initiative that we're rolling out is called Process Documentation. Ooh, So fun, so exciting. And the lazy way to do this is have people record loom videos of what they're doing in their processes

and then convert them to like actual standard operating procedures. Ideally, you have a loom video and a standard operating procedure, but you go roll by, roll and say, okay, great, where are you spending the majority of your time? These are the areas. Okay, now I use this list of where they're spending their time as a list of processes that need to be created. And then over the course of the next three months, every single role has processes

documented for how they contribute. And if they don't create the processes, then you already know that they're going to be somebody who's going to try to hold things against you inside your organization, which means that you need to double down on them recording what they're doing and documenting processes because you're going to need to train the new

person on how to do it. It's also going to give you visibility into where people are wasting time, where they're duplicating activities, where there's just efficiencies that can be created. So this process becomes very simple. Once you make the decision, we're going to become a coaching and development and training organization and you don't have to fire everybody immediately. That's the good news. Most people want to have this conversation

with them. They freak out because they're like, I can't hold my team accountable because I have to fire everybody. You don't have to fire everybody, but you have to put a time frame in place. Give yourself 90 days, 90 days. Every role gets documented to the best of your ability, which will then allow you to sleep at night knowing that Joe and Sarah don't have all the keys of information. And like the dead bodies, you know,

all the analogies that I'm mixing into. One, the keys to the kingdom and all the dead bodies aren't stuck in their heads if they decided to leave anyway. So once you've taken that step, then the new person who comes in, if you have to get rid of the old person, has a framework for how they would be trained. And then you introduce that person to this new culture of accountability where you follow up on the things that

you ask of them. If they are doing their onboarding training and you're saying, Hey, give me three recommendations on how we could make this process better, then you're reading. What were their three recommendations? And you're teaching them, Oh, man, these two recommendations totally suck. We would never do this. This is why. But this recommendation is a really good one.

Let's update the process tracker. So you're bringing it back to how are we updating the current work, assuming that the way that it's being done right now is not optimized because there's no way it could be optimized if you already have a culture of lack of accountability? And what I mean by that is of all the processes that you're going to have your team members create, we're starting this from a place of, hey, our our culture is not accountable. So just knowing that they're not accountable,

I know that there is waste in that organization. I know that there is fluff time being spent. I know that there's like just areas of opportunity. There's no way that you have high performers in your organization who are the best of the best, who also aren't accountable. High performers do not exist in environments that aren't accountable. And so I just know by the fact that you're asking this question and interested in this podcast that you don't have the best of the best. You are now trying

to hire the best of the best. Remember, we've documented what the first person was doing. You've now brought in somebody new. They're looking at what the first person was doing. That is probably at 70%, maybe 80%, if you're lucky, of what that role could look like. Optimized. So your training in with this new high performer that you've brought in, hey, we're going to look at these processes, We're going to

ensure that they're optimized. You're going to first learn how it's done, but then you're going to give recommendations and we're going to test into those those recommendations if they're good and see if the metric improves and if the metric improves and you're able to hit targets, therefore we're going to increase the target. You have opportunity to be leadership here. ET cetera. ET cetera. So this is really how you create accountability in your culture. The accountability is

is not. The the culture and the lack of accountability in it is the overarching problem. But the solution is becoming a training and development organization because your organization, in order for it to grow, has to constantly be updating its existing base, its existing process documentation so that you're not held captive by team members who are unwilling to be accountable so that when they do something the first time, that isn't the right thing, you're able to say, Hey,

this isn't the right thing. If you're going to do this again, we're going to have to go through this process. That in and of itself should fix the accountability, and it's actually fixing for you as the business owner, your ability to hold people accountable. Because at the end of the day, it's all about you. It's about your unwillingness to hold somebody accountable. It's not actually holding somebody accountable. That's difficult. It's your unwillingness to because you know what

the fallout is. So you actually have to build a business around what the fallout could look like. And the fallout is coaching, development, training and ensuring that your organization is really set up to where it can scale. And it's not command dependent on any person. No business can be command dependent and actually achieve scale or else it's dependent, right? You can't scale and have every single role be in everybody's heads. You can't you can't sell a business like that.

You can't open multiple locations like that because other people would need to be trained. And if a high performer is in an existing role, no high performer wants to stay in the same role forever. So at some point it's in their best interest to document these things so they can train somebody else so that they can elevate into this next role. So, ladies and gentlemen, that is how you fix your accountability issue. If you enjoyed this podcast,

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