Author Archives: Dave Arella

Accountability (2 of 3): How is it Achieved?

Posted on August 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

This is the second in a series of 3 articles dealing with Accountability. The first article Accountability: What Does it Really Mean I noted how the real meaning of accountability has been hijacked and replaced with a simplistic emphasis on recording delivery dates, and I proposed that real accountability has more to do with the quality of the dialog between people.

This article keys in on this dialog and lays out four specific tactics for how accountability is actually achieved.

While most everyone acknowledges that accountability is a good thing and want more of it, most people really do not know how to get more. All too often we fool ourselves into thinking we have more of it by emphasizing the other roots of the word – counting and accounting – which leads one to pursuit of monitored assigned due dates.

Below are recommendations for building real accountability:

Begin a conversation, not a delegation. The proper start to a conversation that results in real accountability is a request (e.g. Can you get this done by June 1^st?). The requestor / manager assumes the persona of a customer instead of “lord and master”. The requester begins with a different tone of voice, and acknowledges that the performer is already working on other tasks. The phrase “Will you please…” gets someone ready for a response; the phrase “You need to…” raises hackles. Having started the conversation with a question, instead of a statement, the requester must then wait for an answer before proceeding. A measure of control is relinquished over to the performer. It’s a dialog after all, not a monologue.

Acknowledge mutual dependency and build partnership. There is no accountability without negotiation. The performer must answer including sharing their capabilities and concerns regarding the request. Commitments that evidence real accountability involve a level of disclosure, and indeed intimacy, that is typically not present when just assigning tasks. Most managers assign tasks and expect accountability to follow along as part and parcel of the assignment. In effect, they are saying “I am assigning you this task and am holding you (the performer) accountable for getting it done on time”. This is a one-way statement, not a dialog. The performer has not actually “answered”. The performer has made no personal, nor public ownership of the task. The manager has created a workflow / action and expects tacit acknowledgement and agreement. In a subtle sense, the accountability for completion of the task still rests with the manager who then must spend his time closely following up the assignment. In order to accept accountability, the performer must be afforded the opportunity to negotiate, or even to decline, the request.

Shift accountability squarely to the performer. The result of a proper dialog should be an explicit agreement, a specific commitment by the performer to satisfy the requester’s concern by a certain due date. In so doing, the performer [willingly] takes on the accountability for timely and successful delivery of the request. And having done so, it is now the performer’s responsibility, not the manager’s, to closely track and follow up the task. The ownership of the task has shifted to the performer. Of course, the manager / requester is still concerned with an on-time delivery, but rather than relying on frequent reviews of task due dates and the weekly “how’s it going” query of each performer, the manager now relies on the performer’s ownership of the task to prompt update reports. If the delivery is on track, the manager need not ask. If the delivery is threatened, the manager relies on prompt notice of a problem by the responsible performer. The key is to shift the dialog from the requestor saying “I am holding you accountable” to the performer saying “you can count on me”. Underpinning all of this is the notion of trust, which leads to the next practice.

Provide metrics that support reputation and trust building. Accountability and trust go hand in hand. Trust is the soft underbelly of accountability. [Note: See the related article on Trust.] The greater the amount of trust, the greater is the shift of accountability to the performer. Requestors who have low trust that the task will be delivered on time spend a considerable amount of time monitoring and following up many times during delivery. Those with a high level of trust will spend relatively little time following up, and will instead rely on the trusted performer to alert them if and when concerns arise. There is also a virtuous cycle of trust – those you trust are monitored less closely, their confidence builds, they feel more empowered, they perform better and earn more trust.

Trust is built up over time. Repeated performance builds a reputation. Both the requestor and the performer need to have specific historical records that are shared so that trust can be built and maintained using actual documented records. The record keeping that is most helpful is historical delivery patterns such as percent of on-time deliveries over the past year. Reports like this are surprisingly rare in today’s performance conscious work world.

The next article in this series talks about how accountability is actually shared between the requester and the performer.

Accountability (1 of 3): What Does It Really Mean?

Posted on August 1, 2010 | 2 comments

This is the first in a series of 3 articles dealing with Accountability: What Does It Really Mean, How Accountability is Achieved, and finally Understanding How Accountability is Shared.

Accountability Defined: It is about dialog, not due dates

Accountability is a funny word. Though everyone thinks accountability is a good thing and wants to have more of it, few people really understand what it is and how to improve or implement accountability. The word has an appealing, high-minded ring to it, but its meaning is imprecise and not well understood.

Interestingly, the dictionary defines accountability as “the state of being answerable: obliged to report, explain, or justify something.” It is mostly about the dialog between two people and less about being responsible for completing a delivery.

Accountability fundamentally applies to a conversation between a customer or requester and a performer whom they have requested a service from. The customer desires to “hold the performer accountable” for completing the delivery. In most business relationships, however, this sense of accountability is actually implicit and weak. Executives and managers make requests of their staff and colleagues and want to hold them accountable for satisfactory delivery. But the conversation surrounding the request is vague and (deliberately) imprecise. If queried, each party to the conversation would probably concur that a measure of accountability was present in their relationship though neither directly spoke or committed to a timetable or the output / results. The performer wants to preserve as much “wiggle room” for the satisfactory delivery as possible, and the requester does not feel comfortable pressing for a formal commitment.

Thereafter the notion of accountability devolves into an accounting exercise. Software solutions that purport to address/improve accountability are merely systems for entering and reporting on due dates.
Most people think of managing accountability as a monitoring and enforcement approach “I will keep good track of all the assignments I have made to other people so I can hold them accountable later”. There are three fundamental concerns with this notion of accountability.

• First, it has a very top-down, autocratic approach where the emphasis is rooted in a heavy “did you do it?” question. Enforcement is implied and the underlying punitive nature is undeniable. This is obviously not the mood one would wish to create with a partner or collaborator. Small wonder then that neither the performer nor the customer really wants to explicitly talk in these terms. Moreover, the relationship being built between the two parties in this way is not felt as at all egalitarian; one is up and one is down. This mood certainly goes against the grain of the sensibilities prevalent in the modern work force.

• Secondly, this approach is one-sided. The customer is the one keeping track. There is no explicit response from the performer, “no catching the ball”, as it were, that has been tossed to them. The manager does all the checking and following up. The actual burden of managing the accountability is on the customer / requester.

• Lastly and most importantly there is little evidence that such accounting actually leads to improved performance. Just monitoring due dates does not increase on-time deliveries.

A better notion of accountability draws from its actual definition around the term “answerable”. What is important is the “answer” from the performer. The quality of the dialog between the parties is WAY more important than recording the assigned due date.

This dialog starts with an explicit request that needs to be met with an explicit response. A conversation ensues and a specific agreement about expected results and due date is crafted. [Note: The explicit nature of this conversation presumes that all parties have sufficient courage to engage honestly with each other. Courage is an essential aspect to requesting and negotiating. Honesty should not be taken for granted. The need for interpersonal courage will be discussed in a future blog.] However, the conversation does not stop there and “wait” for the due date to arrive. On the contrary, the conversation, thus started, continues throughout the delivery period during which both parties stay in close touch about progress toward the due date. Having responded directly to the request and committed to the outcome, the performer has, in fact, taken on the accountability for delivery.

The implicit dialog of the manager saying “I am counting on you to deliver …” has been replaced with the performer saying “You can count on me…”. The performer has “caught the ball” and is obliged to keep the customer up-to-date on any news or concerns that might threaten the completion of the request. The burden of accountability has shifted to the performer which is where it really belongs. This shift has a profound effect on improving organization performance.

In the next article, I will continue this discussion with some specific tactics for how to build accountability that leads to improved performance.

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Posted in Accountability, Commitment Based Management, Managed Conversations

My Workflow Journey: From Apple to 4 Spires

Posted on July 25, 2010 | Leave a comment

As I begin this dialog of blog entries presenting my observations, ideas and suggestions, it is appropriate to provide readers with a view into my background, credentials, biases, and predilections. For over two decades I have been intrigued with the power software applications can have to significantly improve organization performance and employee engagement.

Prior to starting my 8 year career at Apple in 1983 and getting immersed in the more technical side of systems development I worked in the “softer” sciences of human interaction as an Organization Development consultant. I led training groups, coached executives, and facilitated off-site retreats for management groups – the traditional OD interventions intended to improve organization performance. I was generally disappointed with the results, however, because once the “high” of the event faded, most participants would invariably return to their previous behavior. The intended changes did not stick. Disillusioned, I moved away from this field of work.

Apple HR Systems, Technology, and Innovations Group

In 1986 I was the founding Manager of Apple’s HR Systems, Technology and Innovation Group; the group that did the seminal work on the electronic office. At that time, Apple was the only company in the world that had a personal computer on every employee’s desk, and that infrastructure was the basis for our Group’s development of the first generation of electronic forms and workflow management solutions for an organization of 5,000 employees.

Over a 4 year period my team designed, developed, and implemented a series of first-ever applications that enabled:

Managers to write, edit, and compile online performance reviews,
Managers to recommend and approve staff salary increases and bonuses,
Recruiters and managers to scan, track, and retrieve resumes,
Employees to evaluate, price, and select their flexible benefits, and
Managers to directly update employee records using a workflow approval process and electronic signatures.

The computer on every employee’s desk was a Macintosh, and having “grown up” with the Mac User Interface Guidelines as a standard, the solutions that we developed demanded a very high level of user interactivity in order to satisfy user expectations and ensure adoption. This audience really understood what a superior Graphic User Interface (GUI) looked like; just saying it was “user-friendly and intuitive” was not enough.

The applications this team developed at Apple were way ahead of their time. It was over five years before other companies, even those as innovative as Lotus Development Corp, deployed similar networked solutions for their employees, and it was fully 10 years before similar intranet solutions were coming on the scene at technology leading companies like Dell Computer. I know this because both Lotus and Dell were customers of mine at the time.

During this period, I developed an insight that has guided me ever since: A well crafted and thought-out software application can be a transformational Organization Development (OD) intervention with sticking power.

Apple to 4 Spires – Software Solutions focused on User Interactions

Software developers and architects design their applications to capture, manipulate, organize, and report on data. The paradigms and characteristics of the user’s behavior in an organizational context, however, are not often explicitly considered.

In addition to designs that elegantly and efficiently capture and report on data, I approach software design with the concerns of what behaviors and practices are being introduced and reinforced on the part of users. I am concerned that design requirements also consider questions such as:

What are the organizational implications of enabling certain actions and preventing others?
What practice of interaction between people is the software instantiating?
What mood does the software create for its users?

My career has been focused around and dedicated to developing work management solutions for business that address these concerns and that strive to enhance organization performance. 4 Spires was founded to continue this legacy with a vision to create business applications that enhance the way work gets done through collaborative efforts by facilitating collaboration, commitments, and trust-building as means to substantially improve organization performance.

This Blog series will orient on my observations and recommendations about the role well-designed software can play in achieving these outcomes. Beyond just using software to help get things done, the topics covered will include workplace trust, requestor and performer accountability, performance metrics, user adoption, social networking, managing remote workers, and the sensibilities of the modern work force among others.

I look forward to participating with readers in this dialog.

Welcome to Conversations about Commitments

Posted on July 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

As the CEO of 4 Spires, Inc, a leading provider of internet-based solutions that help to establish, make, and keep person-to-person commitments I will be using this blog to stimulate conversations that examine how work gets done in our modern world. As you read further, you will see that I have some strong feelings about doing my small part to change that world by improving the way we communicate with each other about taking collaborative action.

A few years ago, I was introduced to a relatively new work management concept called “commitment-based management“. The theory underlying this concept has been around for over 2 decades, but it has only recently begun to enter the mainstream of modern management practice.

The core idea is simple – people accomplish more of those tasks to which they are committed. Mounting case study evidence shows organizations that adopt commitment-based management practices achieve astounding and rapid improvements in virtually all measures of performance including reduced cycle times, reduced costs, increased sales, improved project success rates, as well as improved morale and employee engagement.

The rigorous use of a simple conversation-based-commitment model clarifies ownership, makes it clear who owns the next act, and enables tracking the agreements that have been made from the perspective of both the requestor and the performer. The idea is generic and universal with applications across virtually all business sectors and sizes. Though the idea and concept is simple, in practice it has profound implications which I will be trying to illuminate in this series of articles.

The name for this blog was carefully chosen – reversing the word order imparts a key message. Commitments are about conversations. All collaborative action is fundamentally based on a conversation between a requester and a performer. The structure, the quality, and the mood of the parties engaged have a lot to do with crafting effective commitments.

The practice is simple – the two parties engage in an explicit conversation in which a clear commitment to deliver is negotiated, agreed, and completed. The idea is, in fact, obvious, but careful observation shows that this rarely occurs. Our common work norms do not support making real commitments and most task-related conversations are fractured and incomplete. Requests are poorly formed, tasks are assigned without obtaining real agreements from performers, deliveries are made haphazardly, and there is rarely a clear statement of satisfaction by the requester. The result is missed deadlines, wasted effort, and low trust.

Beyond the evidence, the idea immediately resonated with me, and having spent now 25 years developing workflow management software applications, I began thinking about how software could support the practices and behaviors of making and keeping commitments. The result of 3 years of ruminations is 4 Spires, Inc. which was founded in 2007 with a vision to create business software applications that change the way work gets done through collaborative efforts. We are interested in promoting new practices where two people engage in a closed-loop conversation about their commitments to each other.

In future articles I will attempt to engage with readers in related topics on accountability, trust, collaboration, execution, workforce analytics, organization development, the new workforce, and performance management. I look forward to your participation in these conversations.