New Leadership Mindset and Practices Create a Strong, Healthy Accountability Culture
Problem
The company’s revenues and performance suffered dramatically during the last U.S. recession. It suffered from operational breakdowns, missed deadlines, a strong “crisis mentality” and poor performance.
In addition, the leadership team was stuck in old negative beliefs about accountability and needed a new healthy accountability framework that would align with their people-oriented culture based on respect, empowerment and trust.
Solution
Through interviews and a questionnaire, the first step was to uncover the beliefs, capabilities and processes preventing the company from adopting a strong accountability mindset and behaviors.
The second phase involved a series of group leadership discussions to probe deeper into their negative perceptions and ineffective behaviors around accountability and to explore new healthy accountability models aligned with the company’s culture.
Results
This project opened the doors to a new accountability mindset and practices necessary to ignite company growth. According to the CEO, one of the biggest AHA’s for the leadership team was the fact that this 50 year old family-owned company was still unconsciously operating as a “family first” business. And for them to build a strong accountability culture, they needed to operate as a “business first” business, not a “family first” business. Other benefits included:
- Identifying company norms and behaviors to drive strong accountability.
- Resolving values conflicts between their core values of respect and trust with their negative concepts of accountability, resulting in an increase of organizational performance.
- Eliminating the company’s tendency to avoid conflict while utilizing new communication and inter-personal tools to resolve conflict, learn from it and transform it to a deeper understanding.
- Developing clear measurable expectations that empowered employees to take ownership of their role and results.
