Front line employees
Have you ever received a complaint about your employees?
Your customers have definite performance expectations of your employees. If your employees are not meeting those expectations, there is a performance gap between what your customer is expecting and what he or she is experiencing. That gap may be costing you both future and current customers as well as diminishing the integrity of your brand!
Teams
Have you ever sat through a meeting that seems to go absolutely nowhere? Or, have you ever sat through a meeting where you thought you understood what was happening only to realize later that the communication was so poor that you have no idea what you are doing?
Organizational leaders assign teams for the purpose of completing specific tasks. Often the team's members are the best of the best! However, even the best may lack the skills necessary to function in a team setting. Further, team members may head in multiple directions failing to meet delivery schedules and benchmarks. When team members are no longer hitting these baseline expectations, inefficiencies begin to occur.
For most managers, uniting a team with such inefficiencies is a formidable task. The net result is the loss of time and resources.
Vision and Mission
Have you ever received incredibly poor service or paid for a terrible experience? While you were receiving that service, or having that experience did you notice the company's vision or mission statement posted on the wall?
How was that company doing in executing its vision and mission? Can they see the gaps between what they have posted on their walls and what is actually happening? Probably not!
The purpose of creating a "Vision" is to develop an idealized goal or outcome of an endeavor, a person, an organization, or even an entire country. "Mission" is the day-to-day action required to create or move towards the vision. It is important to understand that a "vision" is either attainable with considerable effort, or it is so idealistic it may never be attained but rather strived for.
Too often organizations confuse Vision and Mission. Further, they do not focus on the behaviors and mindset necessary to obtain their vision through missions. Unfortunately, for most organizations vision and mission are just statements on the wall and are rarely understood, much less internalized and acted upon, by those claiming to subscribe to them.
Accountability
Has someone ever promised you something and failed to deliver?
Has anyone ever left you hanging?
Have you ever heard, "It's not my fault", "I can't control that", or "It's not my job"?
Failure to create a culture of accountability within an organization leads to the ideas above. These may seem like small principles, but they lead to bigger issues, especially if people are choosing not to hold each other accountable.
When accountability is absent people do not deliver, they leave each other hanging, they do not own their behaviors, even for their individual job performance. In fact, they often become the victim of others because it is much easier to blame!
Zero accountability is the new American way of thinking. Too often organizations cannot move forward, improve, or grow because no one will take ownership and responsibility for what they are doing or how they are behaving! As a result the organization suffers, deadlines come and go, customers are unhappy, employees are wasting time and much more! Ultimately, your consumers hold you accountable and the organization suffers.
