Picture this: your team views you as a living god, and the project they are working on is the single most important achievement of their life. Falling short might disrupt the cosmic order. No pressure.
So how do you create a space where people are less afraid of taking risks, so they learn faster and innovate more effectively?
The answer starts with how you frame failure.
Let’s go back 4,600 years.
Innovating through trial-and-error
That was exactly Pharaoh Sneferu’s challenge in 2600 BC. A few decades earlier, Pharaoh Djoser had built the first stepped pyramid in Egypt. Sneferu’s vision was to turn this concept into a smooth-sided, geometrically perfect pyramid. Easier said than done.
His first attempt – the Meidum pyramid – revealed serious structural limitations. Insights from this failure were integrated into a second attempt – now called the Bent Pyramid – that helped Egyptian engineers find the right angle of inclination through trial and error. All these insights led to the third and final, successful attempt: the Red Pyramid, the first smooth-sided pyramid in history.
After Sneferu’s death, his son Khufu built on all of that hard work and innovative spirit to create something bigger: the great pyramid of Giza. And because life is unfair sometimes, the world has only remembered the name of the son – and forgot the dad.
Few CEOs successfully create a safe space
Most CEOs understand how important it is for their team to learn from their failures. As Stanford professor Bob Sutton put it: “failure sucks, but instructs.”
And yet just 26% of leaders manage to create a culture where it is safe to experiment, acknowledge failure, or ask for help. Consequently, valuable lessons get lost and innovation slows down.
Many CEOs fail at creating a safe space for several reasons, including:
- Some fear that accepting failure will create an “anything goes” atmosphere, according to researcher Amy Edmondson in The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.
- Others play the blame game or act out of deep-rooted habits. As Edmondson puts it in this HBR article, “Every child learns at some point that admitting failure means taking the blame” – a failure-intolerant mindset that lives in many organizations unfortunately.
- Most leaders never practice reframing failure objectively often enough to make it a habit.
I would love to tell you that, knowing that, I am good at creating a safe space for my team when they fail. I am not. Like many leaders I react rationally when a mistake happens – except when it pushes one of my hot buttons. Typical example: a mistake that risks affecting relationships with customers. Then my response can be much more impulsive and emotional – and my reaction triggers the blame game among my team that drives me crazy. Not helpful at all.
In other words: your mindset – and your ability to help your team reframe their failures – directly shapes how fast they learn and improve.
Reframing failures
A study of the 1992 Summer Olympics found that athletes who won a bronze medal appeared happier and less likely to feel the sting of failure (“I made it to the podium!”), than athletes who received a silver medal (“I could have been first if only I had done this or this differently”). This difference in mindset directly shapes how much they learn and how fast they progress, as Stanford professor Carol Dweck explains in this video.
As Roger Federer put it at his Dartmouth commencement speech, “You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments:” negative energy is wasted energy. The best athletes in the world are not the best because they win every point – but because they have learned to deal with losing, move on, adapt, and work smarter.
How low is your flotation line?
Here is a practical exercise from Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers that I use with my clients to help them reframe failure: defining your flotation line.
Imagine that your business is a boat, and each failure makes a hole in the hull. If the failure is above the waterline – it is not fun, but not a disaster. Failures below the waterline are a different story – they would sink your boat. Without a defined waterline, your team assumes it is very high – and plays it safe accordingly. In reality, your waterline is much lower than they – and probably you – think.
Here is what to do:
1. Take 10 minutes to define your waterline:
- Which failures are below the waterline – and would sink your boat? Most CEOs realize that this list is far smaller than they anticipated.
- Which failures are above the waterline – acceptable, as long as people learn from them.
2. Communicate your conclusions to your team – so they feel more comfortable taking risks and failing.
3. One last reminder: most people have an aversion for failure. Nobody on your team will poke so many holes above the waterline that your boat disintegrates. Your job is to tell them it is safe to try.
There is one more distinction worth making. Above the waterline, not all failures are equal: an intelligent failure – a deliberate bet that did not pay off but taught your team something useful – deserves a different response than an avoidable mistake born of inattention or a known risk ignored. Celebrate the first. Fix the second. Confusing the two is how “psychological safety” turns into “anything goes.”
Conclusion
Sneferu never saw the Great Pyramid. But without his failures – and his willingness to keep trying – it would never have been built. We will never know how he created the safe space for his team to admit their mistakes, learn from each failure, and keep going. But modern research gives us a pretty good answer.
Your job as CEO is not to eliminate failure. It is to define the waterline, communicate it clearly, and make it safe for your team to take the kind of risks that move the needle – the ones where the potential learning outweighs the cost of being wrong.
When they feel that safety, they take smarter risks, learn faster, and innovate more effectively.
So here is the question worth sitting with this week: does your team know where your waterline is – or are they playing it safe because they are not sure?
Take 10 minutes this week and define it. Then tell them.
I work with CEOs of founder-led and family-owned companies with 30 to 300 employees who are frustrated by the way their business is growing. Often, as the business grew, their team gradually started playing it safer and safer – typically a sign that their company has outgrown its management approach. I know the feeling: I have been in their shoes, running a business that we turned around from declining sales to double-digit growth.
My passion is to help leadership teams define an actionable growth strategy, build a culture of accountability, and become more effective leaders. I work with clients across the US and Europe.
If you too want to grow faster and with less pain, contact me now to discuss your growth roadblocks and explore whether I can help:
“My company has lots of potential, but I just feel my employees are not engaged. If I don’t push, nothing seems to happen. I’m working night and day and we’re still missing 40% of our targets. I once dreamed of being a firefighter, I guess that dream has come true. All I do is put out fires, I have no time to focus on my business.”
Sound familiar? CEOs and leadership teams can change this picture, it’s all about accountability. Creating a fierce culture of accountability starts with the CEO and leadership team.
Why is accountability important?
Accountability is about owning a problem. You want employees to behave as if they own the piece of business that they are running. When you are accountable for a specific result, you will do whatever it takes to achieve it – and you would like your team to perform this way as well.
Carlos Brito, the CEO of brewing company AB Inbev, summarizes his views on accountability in these words: “We always compare that to a rental car: you drive a rental car in a different way than your own car. With a rental car someone else will live with the consequences of your driving. With your car, you know that it will be yours the next days, months, and years, and you know that you will be living with the consequences of your driving. Employees who behave like owners are here for the long term, and they will live with the consequences of their decisions – good or bad – and that builds a great company.”
Why am I having accountability issues?
Accountability issues are very common among growing companies. When you founded your company, you were personally accountable for everything. As your company grew you started delegating the responsibilities for some results – e.g. production, customer service, or sales. However, you may not have created the communication channels required to hold your teams accountable. Why would you? You didn’t need any of this yourself, and yet you grew your business successfully. Why would these smart managers need anything different?
For one, your employees are not you. If they were, they would not be working for you: they would start their own business. Second, your company is now more complex than we you started: it has more people involved, and all these people now need to be on the same page. Third, when you started your company with a few employees, you could be on top of each of them and had short communication lines: you knew what everybody was doing, all the time. Now that your company has more employees it is impossible for you to manage them the same way: this would soak up all your time. This is exactly why you need to put a system in place that will achieve what you want (ie create accountability), without you spending all your time on it.
In the book “Creating a Culture of Accountability” Gravitas Impact business coach Mark Green describes ways to increase your team’s accountability. This article outlines five of them
1. Lead by example
Like many aspects related to company culture, accountability starts with you and your leadership team. In order to create a culture of accountability you have to model the behaviors that you want to see in your organization. When it comes to accountability the rule is simple: when you make a commitment as a leader, you have to keep it. If you don’t, why should anyone else be interested in doing so? You can’t complain that employees miss their deadlines if you are occasionally late as well. As a CEO “all eyes and ears within your business are focused on you. What you say and what you do are invisibly and constantly observed, scrutinized and evaluated as your managers and employees are looking for clues as to how they should behave,” explains Mark Green.
Leading by example is not only about you sticking to your commitments, but also about your expectations from your team – and your behavior when your managers don’t meet your expectations. If your team members notice that there are no consequences for missing targets, why would they try their best? Similarly, if you tolerate one of your team members to produce poor results, why would other team members feel pressured to produce quality? When you hold your team to a higher standards, you are sending a strong signal across the organization.
2. Have the right people on the right seat
Without the right people on the right seat, nothing of what you can do will significantly increase accountability. The key question is: would you enthusiastically rehire everybody on your team? I advise my clients to assess employees on two dimensions; performance and adherence to company values. You will find more information on how to use this tool in this article.
Once you have the right people on your team you need to clarify their area of accountability. This is less obvious than it looks. The key question is: Who is accountable for each of the key functions in your company? As Mark Green explains “the exercise often reveals that there isn’t a single individual accountable for each function. When more than one person is “accountable”, nobody is accountable. It is easy to make assumptions that things will get done, but when there is not a designated person to account for a particular result, chances are, it is not going to happen. In this kind of environment, it is also easy to point fingers – Bob thought Mary would handle it, and vice versa. Other times, you’ll discover that a particular role hasn’t been filled by anyone at all; it is just implied that it will somehow be handled. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t!”
3. Clarify priorities
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” wrote best-selling author Stephen Covey. “Individuals or organizations with too many priorities have no priorities and risk spinning their wheels and accomplishing nothing of significance,” says Verne Harnish in his book “Scaling Up.” Focus on a small number of priorities that will have the biggest impact on your goals, make sure that everyone on your leadership team is aligned on them – and communicate them broadly.
When employees understand where your organization is going and which role they play in it, they work less selfishly and they tend to make better business decisions on behalf of the company – simply because they can see the impact of their decisions and how they impact overall results.
4. Define clear action plans and metrics
Once you have identified who on the leadership team is accountable for each function and what your top priorities are, the next step is for each of your leaders to answer Mark Green’s key question: “What are the 3 most important results the company expects you deliver in exchange for paying your salary – and how should these results be measured? This step determines the results and metrics for each of your leadership functions. As we all know, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you want to increase the speed and quality of a particular service you offer, you should establish specific metrics to gauge those factors and identify metrics and targets for them. You may determine if you reach or surpass a target for three months in a row, you have achieved that objective.” Pick specific metrics, make sure that your leadership team is on the same page and that everybody aims for the clearly defined results – so that the rest of your organization can follow your lead.
Similarly, once you have defined top quarterly priorities, the question becomes: what do you and your team need to do in each of the next 13 weeks in order to achieve priorities? There are only 13 weeks in a quarter – if you do NOT view your quarter as a 13-week race, you will lose weeks and time which you will NOT get back. A weekly plan clarifies what can be expected every week, in order to meet expectations at the end of the quarter. It also makes it much easier for your leadership team to hold people accountable to their own 13-week plan.
5. Establish a metronome-like meeting rhythm
Just as a metronome calls time and sets tempo in a musical performance, so do a small set of consistently executed meetings to hold you and your team accountable, and keep everyone on the same page. The essential regular meetings are:
- Daily huddles (no more than 10 to 15 minutes) to evaluate progress on the very short-term priorities and identify any blocking issues.
- Weekly huddles (no more than 90 minutes) to review the status of the 13-week plan and course-correct if needed.
- Monthly and quarterly meetings to review progress on the priorities, take corrective actions when needed, and identify new priorities for the upcoming quarter.
I often notice that the most impactful meetings to drive accountability are the daily and weekly huddles: they create peer pressure and hence take the heat off your shoulders as the leader. They also improve communication: You won’t need to have the same water-cooler conversation three of four times, as is the case when you rely on chance hallway meetings for communication. And finally they enable collective intelligence to solve problems.
Conclusion
In the end, how much difference do these tools make on accountability? Pretty big, as this example from another Gravitas Impact business coach, Glen Dall, demonstrates in Mark Green’s book “Creating a Culture of Accountability”: “I worked with the CEO of a multi-location dental practice. The CEO had started with one practice that they grew very successfully – and then began expanding. At one point employee turnover rates increased to 200%. The leadership team would plan and set goals, but frequently failed to achieve them. The growth rate was declining. The CEO felt over-extended, frustrated and stressed.”
With the leadership team Glen Dall leveraged these tools to have the right people on the right seat, set priorities and targets, as well as establish a proven system to follow up on them. The result? “After our first 6 months of working together, the CEO told me, “You should be proud of how far you’ve brought the team. I feel that we have accomplished more in the past 6 months than we were able in the last 7 years.” That is the power of accountability.”
As a business growth coach, I work with founders of mid-market companies who are frustrated because their business is not growing the way they want; my passion is to help them identify and remove the growth roadblocks they have been hitting so they can grow faster and with less pain. Often their roadblocks include a lack of accountability: they have no system in place to regularly follow up on their team’s many commitments, or their teams don’t have clear priorities and metrics. I would like to learn about your growth roadblocks; contact me to discuss at Xavier@AmbroseGrowth.com.
What about you? How accountable is your team? How has Covid impacted accountability? Over the past couple of years, how many quarters has your company reached and missed their targets? What were the consequences of hitting targets, and what were the consequences of missing them? Do you have clear metrics and regular meetings in place to follow up on each of your priorities?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments section.