Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris Lorenzo, and welcome to this week's
Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking Your Leadership and
leave us a review on iTunes. On this Thoughtful Thursday, we're going to
be going over the last of the final of our four part series on overcoming
the dysfunctions of a low performing team. On the last episode on Monday,
we talked about avoidance of accountability as one of the reasons why a team might
be might not be high performing, and the listener feedback that we got was
pretty overwhelming along the exact same lines, which was, I am holding my
people accountable, but no one sees it because I can't just publicly call out
Lorenzo. You did a terrible job. Get better, you know, amongst
Lorenzo's peers, that has to be a kind of a private conversation. And
so there's this opinion that there isn't accountability, and and but I know that
there is. And you know, the first thing I think when I hear
that is maybe, but a lot of times that isn't necessarily case. Like
I I have been in situations where I'd like to think there's accountability, um,
but there really isn't um. But I've also been in situations where you
know, the wheels of justice move slowly, So there's this, uh,
this kind of nuance here where if you want to maintain the trust on the
team and you want people to believe that there is accountability, but they don't
necessarily you know, see it, you know, in front of everybody.
It's a tough one. You know, it's definitely a tough one. Again,
I think it's it's one of those things that when you have, you
know, a high performing team or you're trying to get through the dysfunction of
a low performing team, can be really really important. People have to know
that, like if I'm going to put forth my best effort or I'm really
going to commit to this, and if I'm really going to to believe that
we can do this collectively, I have to know that every person next to
me m is doing a good job or a great job, or they're just
as committed. And that's kind of like the feeling that needs to happen in
a in an average maybe forming team or that type. Like I think that's
space sometimes is created for those that are not performing to kind of stick around
and to to not you know, be so involved in what everybody else is
doing. But in this context, it's so important from a leadership standpoint that
you are establishing this that that this is something that not only people you know,
that they don't necessarily hear, but that they feel that they feel there's
an element of accountability that happens, and there's a lot of ways that can
be measured and when it comes to like things like turnover and stuff like that
kind of on the one side of the spectrum, but also like in the
essence of just communication and the consistency of communication or a message to not just
that individual, but to the team collectively. Like, is the same thing
that I'm telling Chris behind closed doors when he and I are talking, the
same thing that I'm saying out loud in public, and that kind of shows
this consistency of like, oh, well, he told me that behind those
doors, which means that he's saying this out loud, that this is something
that we're all working on. He's probably saying those same things to other individuals
behind closed doors. And again, so like, these are things that I
think are just needed to help make sure that people feel that there is a
sense of accountability going on amongst the team, right. I want to make
it clear though, I do think that there is a there's an I think
if you're on a high performing team, or you have a personal commitment to
the work, you don't get to drop that personal commitment the moment you get
the impression that someone else on the team is not just as committed as you.
There's this there has to be this kind of assumption that accountability is happening
unless there's literally no change over a very long period of time. And when
I say a long period of time, I mean like months and months and
months, not days or weeks, because again, this moves slowly. People
have the you want to give people the grace to get better when they are
not high performing, and and when when I've been on teams where people just
have this general impression that they're the only ones doing good work and no one
else is that they're their coworkers aren't aren't doing good work. It really is.
They don't really care whether or not their co workers are doing great work.
They care whether their coworkers are doing great work and not being held accountable
for it. And so if someone next to me is not doing work as
good as I am, but they're being held accountable for it. I'm very
It's very easy to let that one go because you assume that over time they'll
either get better or they will go away. But there's this this kind of
assumption, or this this feeling that that leads to like a feeling of a
lack of fairness when you feel like you are putting in more work and more
effort to a team and someone else is kind of just coming along for the
ride. It goes back to the you know, high school groups, where
you have a group project, there's five people on it. There's always one
person who has no problem doing a out of the work on their own.
That's just who they are, and there's always one person who just wants to
do as little as possible and they are both happy in their roles. Most
people fall into the middle group, which is I want to do good work,
but I have a really difficult time motivating myself to do good work if
I'm around people who aren't also there with me. I think there's a lot
of people who fall into that, And so what I want to ask you,
Lorenzo, is how have you done this. How have you managed to
get people to maintain a level of commitment to good work in the face of
peers and co workers who are not when you know that it's what they're doing.
Is not as simple as oh, you're you're fired. They it will
take time months maybe to get them up to speed or to get them out,
but you need to maintain that level of commitment high performance in the meantime.
So I want to ask you that first, I want to get to
word from more sponsors. All right, Lorenzo, So there's always going to
be people who will they have that internal commitment to doing great work regardless of
what their peers are doing, and there will always be people who are just
trying to do as little as possible. The bulk of the people need to
believe there's accountability. They need to feel that accountability. They need to feel
their team members are doing good work. How do you maintain that when you
can't necessarily stand somebody up in front of you and say you need to do
better. Yeah, it's a great question. I think for me, there's
two big elements to this. I think sometimes you have to publicize the pain
points. And here's what I mean by that, if I know that there
are people that may be lacking and like, let's make it easy. Let's
say something like maybe it's attendance or something like they're just not coming to work
and that's causing maybe some additional work that has to be done by other people.
Right, I think getting in front, in front of the team and
saying like, hey, I'm aware that we have some you know, concerns
around attendance and people being here. That's something that I know causes all of
you additional work and can be you know, kind of a negative drag on
what we're working to do. So first and foremost, I want to thank
everybody who's been able to you know, consistently be here on time and get
the work done. And you know that we want to have conversations to understand.
First we want to we want to make sure that if there's anything that
our people need, that our team needs, that we can provide them with
whatever that might be to help them, because sometimes we all know there are
times when you can't come to work because there's outside forces that are that you
have to deal with, and we want to make sure that they're there.
But we also want to understand that because we know how being here such an
important part of what we do and that we all need each other to be
here when we're expected to be here. So I just wanted to make you
all aware that's something that we're aware of that I'm working on as your leader.
So publicize it. Let people know. Hey, I know that we've
had some some you know, some some deltas in our collective performance, you
know, as a team, like collectively, we're not where we want to
be. I know that there are some people on our team that are maybe
exceeding where we want to be, but I know we have some opportunities.
So like, we just want to call that out. You know, what
we want to do in leadership, it's close that gap. That may require
some training, that may require some perspective, that may require some follow up.
And what I'm going to ask of you is to help one another because
you may be finding some success in something and I may have a conversation with
one of your peers that may be struggling, and I might send them to
come talk to you to get help to get better. So that's gonna be
my ask of you. We're gonna have these conversations, but I'm gonna ask
you of this. So again I'm publicizing the things that we're going to have
around accountability to both give people to heads up, to let people know that
this is kind of something we're gonna talk about, but also to ask for
their help and support in understanding that there may be some issues here that are
not just as simple as somebody doesn't want to do a good job and we
need to have the conversation. And then I think after you maybe publicize some
of these pain points to make it clear that this is what you're gonna do.
Um, there's you know, you have a calendar, you have meetings,
you have you have people that you're gonna spend time with. You're gonna
whether they're not in their cubicle, but they're in your office. People know
that they're not in their cubicle, that they're in your office. Whether you're
walking somebody through and say hey, like let's go have of our touch base
and let's you know, walk through, um, you know, wherever we're
working and go sit down over here somewhere where we have privacy. But also
it's in public. Yeah, you know, like it's not it's not to
the point of sitting down with somebody in an office to give them some formal
documentation around their employment. I just want to talk to you a little bit
about what's going on in your life and how can we help you. And
I've noticed that you maybe your your attendance has been this, is this accurate?
Is everything? Okay? Is the anything that you need? Even though
we are we're having a private conversation, we could do that in a place
where people could potentially see us having a conversation. And I think these are
also ways that you can help the team understand that we're going to have these
conversations and that it's it's it's you know, it's not in such a way
that it's it's all hidden and it's all private. The conversation might be in
private, um, but the fact that we're having the conversation doesn't necessarily have
to be in private. And we're not announcing to the team like, Hey,
everybody, I'm gonna go spend time with Chris right now talking about his
horrible attendance. I'm not doing that, right, I'm just saying, hey,
Chris, let's go grab some time together. And we just happen to
be walking by people. We just happen to be having that in an open
space area or a cafeteria or somewhere where we could be seen and people can
connect whatever dots they want to connect. They can be like, well,
dang, Lorenzo was just talking about attendance, and I know that Chris sometimes
is not here when he's supposed to be here, And now Lorenzo and Chris
are having a conversation in the cafeteria. It might be about attendance. I
don't know, right, but like, these are ways that are are helpful
in establishing and creating a culture of accountability. When you're not going to go
out there to your point earlier and just call somebody out in public. That's
not the right thing to do. But there are definitely ways that you can
show people that these conversations are definitely happening right right. And you know,
there's an old adage I heard once that people have this kind of tendency to
believe that things are about them, whatever's happening, that they're the center of
their own world and things are about them. If you're calling out something to
a team about whatever the pain points are, generalize terms and not making about
one person. The people who are having that issue, they believe they're the
ones being spoken to in that moment. Even if you're not necessarily saying their
names, they believe they are, especially if you are if you are saying
it to them personally in one on ones, both before or after that kind
of general conversation to make sure they know it. But yeah, there's just
kind of like bringing it out there as a as a whole, talking about
it amongst the group and letting them know what the expectations are. It's it's
it's really really easy for the people who are having those issues to understand that,
Okay, this person serious about it, that the leader is serious about
whatever this thing is. And you know, attendance is an easy one.
But there's a lot of things that can be done that way. There are
a lot of things you can you can talk about with your group as opposed
to, you know, just having these one on one things that and honestly,
you should anyway, because the expectations that you set privately should be the
same expectations you set publicly. There should be no different between how you set
up things as a leader to your group, to your all your people together
versus the individual expectations. If it's something They're going to be held accountable for
absolutely and with that it brings us to the end of this episode. This
is hack your leadership, Lorenzo and I'm Chris and have a great day.