I believe hard work should be rewarded with financial gains.

In this first video and the rest of this five-part series on accountability, I’m going to share with you how to get more accountability from your team members for the things that move the profit needle.

If you’re the kind of leader who has been preaching from the mountain top to your team that they need to “get it together” on accountability, but you feel like you might be mocked as the village idiot soon because it’s not working, you’re going to love this because you CAN break that pattern. No more getting angry or looking silly when your requests are unmet.

Or maybe you are one who has already made good progress with your team on accountability, in which case you’re going to enjoy knowing that there is always more progress to be made faster by implementing these ideas.

Or perhaps you want to get your bank to the top 5% of performers AND keep it there. If so, you won’t want to miss any of this series because I’ll give you a proven formula that has helped banks dramatically increase the profit per Full-Time Equivalent.

There are three big issues that make a great argument for bringing an even higher level of accountability into your organization:

• First, psychologists tell us that out of all the archetypes, the victim archetype is the one humans most often play out. Blame, excuses and pretending not to know is not very attractive in adults—but that doesn’t mean you don’t see people do it every day.
• Second, we live in a distracted world, and it’s getting worse every day. Joe Dispenza, PhD and author of Evolve Your Brain, says that the younger generation in the workplace has an altered brain chemistry due to video games and rapid screen changes on television. It’s extremely difficult for them to focus on what matters at work. Alignment with outcomes can, therefore, be a struggle.
• Third, most people are busy doing the job the person who had it before them was doing WITHOUT the benefit of knowing what high performance really looks like. EVEN if they ARE accountable, they’re still doing the wrong things.

You probably know, EVERY financial institution is struggling with these same challenges.

So let’s get to work. I’m now going to give you three steps that will help you create some fast breakthroughs around accountability in the next few weeks: 

• Step 1: UNLIKE so many well-intentioned attempts to set clear goals and strategies and then RALLY team members to follow them, you have to realize that the “core” issue isn’t always that they don’t know WHAT to do—it’s that they don’t BELIEVE they CAN do it. You have to acknowledge that or you can’t possibly get traction.
• Step 2: Understand that confidence is built by small successes planned in an ever-accelerating path to improvement. You used to be a person who couldn’t tie your own shoes. It was an overwhelming challenge at one time. THAT is what you face with every stage of heightened responsibility you ask of your team members.
• Step 3: Plan a sequence of “roll outs” of even more challenging skills. Along with that, once a roll out moves a needle, you need a system to KEEP that needle up so you don’t have a series of “this too shall pass” initiatives.

Three steps, straightforward:

1. Realize that it isn’t a “training issue” but a confidence issue.
2. Then be aware that many of your requests for change seem overwhelming based on their current level of confidence.
3. Finally, plan your sequencing to create a pattern of homerun needle movements on an ever-increasing set of advancements of skill demonstrations—the kind of skills that move the profit needle.

By doing this, you can begin to get people far more focused and elegant at their execution on the advancement behaviors that tie them to top 10% of profitability activities.

The next session is an important one. Make sure you tune in to learn how to better help your people understand how they each tie to profit.

– Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.