How WORLD CLASS Leaders Hold Employees Accountable

Summary

• Always think of yourself as the Chief Accountability Officer (CAO), not just CEO, to emphasize the importance of accountability in the company.
• Realize that accountability means holding people responsible for their duties and being the most potent source of accountability within the enterprise.
• Recognize that performance varies and use that to establish where each person or department stands on a spectrum from low to high performance.
• Address the five main excuses that prevent holding people accountable: not wanting to babysit, assuming they're adults who should know better, deferring due to age or experience difference, mislabeling the culture as high performance, and citing lack of time.
• Understand that you need to invest time in holding everyone accountable, especially your leadership team—they require as much oversight as frontline staff.
• Learn there are two kinds of accountability: tactical and developmental.
• Implement tactical accountability, which pertains to concrete tasks and rules such as punctuality, appearance, and meeting etiquette.
• Apply developmental accountability to foster career growth by openly discussing with employees where they are and where they need to be.
• Balance the two types of accountability, giving more weight to developmental accountability (80%) compared to tactical (20%).
• Don't let self-defeating thoughts hinder the accountability process; it's an essential aspect of your role.
• Analyze your calendar to ensure it reflects the time spent coaching and holding people accountable, with a focus on the mix of tactical and developmental conversations.
• Always work towards meaningful discussions that drive progress based on both the job responsibilities and career path goals of team members.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest thinking of yourself as the Chief Accountability Officer. It means to be responsible for everyone’s success at work. Keep track of how each person is doing, from not so great to really great. Don’t ignore problems or think it's not your job to help them. You need to spend time with each person, even the leaders, to make sure they do their best.

First, focus on easy rules like being on time, dressing right, and respecting meeting rules. Then, help your team get better at their jobs and reach their big goals. Talk about this stuff a lot, like 80% of the time. Only talk about the easy rules 20% of the time. This way, everyone gets better together.

Don’t let yourself think you shouldn’t do this. It’s your job! Check your planner to make sure you’re spending time helping people a lot. Make sure your chats with them help them do better right now and in the future.

Here’s a little plan:

1. Every week, make sure to check in with your team.
2. For easy rules, tell them once and remind them if they forget.
3. For big goals, talk often and help them see how to get there.
4. Think about everyone's work and how they can improve.
5. Listen and talk to your team to see what they need to do their best.

By doing these things, you're not just being a boss, you’re helping everyone to grow and making your business stronger.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"I don't think about it as CEO, I actually go to CAO"

– Leila Hormozi

"Performance is always on a spectrum"

– Leila Hormozi

"I'm accountable to revenue, to margin, to top line, to all the departments that I employ"

– Leila Hormozi

"I'm not doing a good enough job holding them tactically accountable"

– Leila Hormozi

"You always want to tell people it's a scale of one to a hundred"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

in this video today what i want to share with you is how to solve the problem of not knowing what to do uh as a ceo of your business as an entrepreneur as a business owner and this is something that i have come across many times for myself and this is uh this principle has just kind of been a guiding north star for me to figure out if i'm doing what i should actually be doing and what the job of the ceo actually is because i think that at least for me i know that it's it's ambiguous it's like ceo what does that even mean and i've met so many different ceos and they all do different things some of them are really product focused some of them can write code some of them come from i.t systems and some of them are really marketing sales heavy right and so it's this ambiguous title and i think it carries a lot of weight and people constantly are saying like well what should i be doing right because there's no one to tell you what to do when you're at the top and so this is what i have come to and what's helped me and i hope it helps you too so the the first thing that i have started off with is think i don't think about it as ceo okay i actually go to okay and what i mean by c-a-o and this is just something i've done to help me really understand or embody this principle is just chief accountability officer and so when i think of chief of accountability officer i think of i'm not only accountable to protecting the business protecting the employees protecting the clients i'm also the one who holds everybody accountable to doing those things as well right i'm accountable to revenue to margin to top line to all the departments that i employ all the people i employ and all the clients right and so i think that it has to start the top you have to be the absolute most potent source of accountability in the company now going with that you might say well what is it to hold someone accountable that would be to hold someone responsible for the things that they are in charge of right and so i think of accountability responsibility as two things that are interchangeable um i think that accountability is more the act of holding someone to it though right and so someone can have responsibilities and they might not have accountability because nobody's holding them to those responsibilities it's a small nuance and so when i say that your chief accountability officer this is what i mean by that is performance is always on a spectrum right and so say you've got really low performance over here say you've got high performance over here right with every metric that the company is responsible for as well as every employee you always want to say where are they in the spectrum right are they at 80 performance are they at you know 50 performance are they at 10 performance right and so i think that most people most ceos do a good job saying where the business stands in terms of these metrics because they're kind of irrefutable like you can't say like we have the goal of hitting this as our top line or as our margin and then we're here like it's kind of like it's just staring you in the face there's really nothing you can do to avoid it versus with people this is where i see it fall short right which is ceos not holding their teams and departments accountable right and so that's the part that i think is missing in terms of the role of the ceo and that making this switch right here they're calling it cao has helped me a lot because then i just think to myself am i holding these people accountable right and so what i've what i've come to realize is there's a few reasons why we don't do this okay um the first reason for this is just all the junk we have in our head which is basically um all the things i haven't covered in myself over the last few years which is i had a lot of really poor beliefs especially about employees and how i was supposed to hold them accountable a lot of those beliefs sounded like one a big one was i shouldn't have to babysit them right so i'm gonna write these down so the first one would be i don't have to babysit them right and i think a lot of people feel this way you don't want to be the babysitter of people on your team right i think that the second one um is that we're all adults here right you're like you're adults you should know if you're doing your job or not like why should i have to hold grown adults accountable right a third one that i've uncovered is you've got people who are older than you so you're like why should i be telling you what to do you're older or you're more experienced so like how who am i to tell you what to do i literally hired you because i have no freaking clue what i'm doing and then another one is just like this is a high performance culture you know they just can't keep up with this and this is a fantastic excuse for people um they're like this culture is high performance they're just not a high performance player and i'm like looking at their track record i actually think they are and i've dealt with this myself where it just means that you're not holding people accountable or providing enough transparency and then the last one and the probably the biggest one that i'm sure all of you can relate to because this is the one i use the biggest excuse of is time right and so we tend to think like i shouldn't have to take this much time to hold someone accountable or manage them particularly when you're looking at you know for myself i know it's for an executive team i'm like should i really have to take this much time to handle uh in many cases older more experienced high performance adults should i actually have to take the time to to hold them accountable and the answer is yes um and i think that a lot of people and i know myself this was a huge one for me is that i didn't realize that i need to hold them just as accountable as anybody else on the team yes they have they can do more they have more capabilities and they have more runway right just like of course because they're coming into a leadership position but that doesn't mean that you can hold them any less accountable and it's it's really interesting because if you start holding them accountable as if they were someone on the front line i think that you will see that they will succeed much faster and they will have like way higher performance than if you were to not do that because i've made this mistake before uh thinking that just because someone's more experienced et cetera that you know i should have spent so much time i shouldn't have to feel like i'm babysitting them they're a grown adult like almost even feeling weird telling them what to do like well they definitely know what their job is more than i do like i've never done that before like for me exam an example would be like anything with like systems uh technology or finance like i've never done any of it so for me i'm like why should i tell them what i think they should be doing but the reality is someone has to and if you holistically know your business and you know what needs to get done then you are chief accountability officer and your job is to tell them these things here's what i've uncovered is that um in in the last couple of years when i've come to realize that there's two things that i can do to hold someone accountable and this helps me kind of break it down in my brain okay there's two different types of accountability and i think that often as a ceo or cao we tend to steer towards one or the other and i think they're both extremely useful okay and so the first one is tactical accountability okay i heard this from somebody somewhere the tactical versus the next one i'm gonna tell you i don't remember who it was so i can't give credit um tactical accountability what is that tactical accountability is holding someone accountable to tactical tasks it is as simple as it sounds it is that easy um and so this might look like things like uh being on time uh how you fill out reports uh language dress code there are a lot of things that can be tactical accountability so i'll give you the first example of when i realized that i need to do a better job of this is i came to um it was about i want to say it was about two and a half three years ago now and i got on a meeting and i remember this is gonna sound so bad i just thought everyone looked pretty bad um i was like man like i don't think anyone did their hair she looks like she rolled out of bed i don't even know if that's like a is that a work shirt is that a white beater like i don't know what it is and i realized i was like man if everyone's doing something is it everybody or is it me and i was like okay it's me um i'm not doing a good enough job holding them tactically accountable and so that was when i implemented a new dress code and i said hey here's what's okay here's what's not okay you can wear business casual you can wear work shirts you cannot wear you know wife beaters you can't look like you rolled out of bed your background can't be a pile of laundry right things like that and as simple as it sounds nobody has showed up that way since then i think that a lot of the times what happens is we just feel a little bit too nervous to hold people tactically accountable we feel like oh i just don't want to be nitpicking i don't want them to think i'm like you know i stick up my butt like you just get all these defeating thoughts in your head when the reality is most times they just don't know right and that's how you help people grow that's how you strengthen a culture is a tactical accountability right even just a simple thing as um oftentimes especially if you're a virtual company there's people that are on meetings right and you always know there's one person you can just tell they're typing the entire time tactile accountability would be like hey i know that you've got a lot of work to do but i would really appreciate if you showed this meeting not typing because that's really not okay for our company that simple i've done that probably three times same with if someone's cameras off i'm like hey sorry at this company we always have cameras on never had their camera off again right and if they did like you know they would have another conversation that's the tactical side of accountability now there's the other side of accountability which is going to be developmental and so developmental accountability is essentially holding someone accountable to their career development and this is my favorite kind of accountability because i think this is the fun stuff um but the reason it's the fun stuff is because it used to be the stuff that was really hard for me right because this is essentially telling someone this is where they are they're here and then they need to be here and this has a lot more to do with uh character traits habits that they formed ways that they operate within a team right and so if you're thinking about developmental accountability i'm thinking of okay there's performance reviews and there's one-on-ones those are the two major times that you can hold someone developmentally accountable the way i say is if they're surprised on a performance review and if that's the only time you're holding them developmentally accountable i don't think that's the right way to do it i just think that you're like i think of opportunity right opportunity loss which is like you could have had all that time in your one-on-ones holding them accountable and they could have been growing that entire time but instead you're waiting until every six months when you do a performance review right why because you probably don't like having hard conversations because it is hard to master the art of um getting someone to grow not out of fear but out of desire and that is what developmental accountability really is and i think that that's why that's the one that where most people struggle i'll tell you story which is um i had a a leader in the company and she is a fantastic she was a fantastic manager this was about a year ago and i remember constantly thinking to myself you know i really just wish she had more leadership ability and i felt like the reason that she wasn't able to take on more from me and that she wasn't able to foster more within her in the company was that and one day as i was thinking about it i realized i was like i've been having so many thoughts about her career development i just realized she's not even part of this conversation and so i got together with her and i was like listen you're a fantastic manager you've got it down you have so much potential like if you want to like take it to the next level if you want to really be able to offload me for me to offload things to you etc then here's what i want to see like i need you to step into that leadership persona of yourself and it's so funny because sometimes i think we're really scared to have these conversations because we're afraid they're not going to meet what we say and lo and behold i mean it was like bam a complete turnaround within a quarter and by the next quarter people were telling me how much they'd realized that she developed and changed and so that really blew my mind because i had felt for a while like a lot of those conversations just fall on deaf ears right like okay well i know how much goes into behavior change for myself so like for someone else to do it i'm like how am i gonna on earth you know be able to accomplish that but it is accomplishable and i think that if you're able to create the right balance between these two then that is when you really hit the sweet spot which is uh if you're looking at tactical versus developmental i think this is about 20 it's really little stuff and it's very frequent versus this i think it's 80 and that's the need of everything that you're talking about because if you're thinking about it what most leaders do and this is a tendency that i used to have is that i used to go to this because it's safe it's like it's not fun but it's safe because it's like it's the rule it's what we said it's the core tenant right versus this is not safe because it's unknown territory and it's often a place that we have to go and we have to tell someone what their deficits are in order to tell them how we need to have them improve because we're holding them accountable to not only their job but what they've said they want right and so if somebody tells you what they want in their career right that you are holding them developmentally accountable right to achieving that and that is what that really looks like and if you think about it that way then you're actually just doing them a big favor right and so not doing that is actually a disservice to them and that's not being a chief accountability officer thinking about it one accountability is a spectrum right and so you remember that spectrum that i showed you you always want to tell people it's a scale of one to a hundred right where are you at like in terms of expectations for the role are you at eighty percent of the role are you at ninety percent of the role are you at ten percent of the role right and then the second piece with that is not letting your thoughts get in the way we have all these self-defeating thoughts about why we don't need to hold people accountable they're grown adults i should have to babysit them it takes too much time it's all this like head junk just to avoid the fact that we should be doing it it's work that we need to do right as ceos and then the last piece is making sure that you get the balance between tactical and developmental accountability uh tactical being the little small stuff developmental being focused on their career path so i hope that was helpful for you that is what has helped me kind of compartmentalize this in my mind and focus on what i need to be doing with my day right and so if you think about how to apply this tactically i would think of this which is what does your calendar look like and then when you look at your calendar say it's conversational right so you're like i am layla i am coaching people i am holding them accountable i'm having a lot of one-on-ones i have a lot of meetings i'm not doing the work myself okay that's one step but what do those meetings look like is the next step which is what's the mix of tactical versus developmental and are the conversations that you're having meaningful and driving the ball forward every week by holding them accountable to not only the tactical duties of their job but the developmental goals that they have based on their career path so i hope that was useful if it was hit the subscribe button i will see you on the next one