CANDID
Every month, Grant Greeff shares his professional learnings, experiences, and ideas about business, leadership & culture through a South African lens.
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CANDID
2. Misaligned teams misapply these two common terms
In this episode, we talk about a 3-step process to align your team.
Aligned teams know the difference between accountability and responsibility. Words have meaning, and meaning conveys a narrative for every team member. It's critical for everyone to know the distinction between being accountable for an objective or outcome versus being responsible for a task or process.
Welcome to the second episode of Candid. In this episode, I'm going to be discussing how misalign teams normally and most certainly misapply two common terms. So if you think about the, the world of business, a lot of people use a lot of different terminology and what that. From my experience, what tends to happen is that people then interchange words and the the two words that I often find people are interchanging as if they mean the same thing or are basically similar, is that of accountability and responsibility. So people will often share, for example, you're responsible for this, or, yeah, you're accountable for this, but they'll use it in the wrong context, in my opinion. For today, what I'd really like to share is the distinction, the distinction between accountability and responsibility, and therefore how then to align teams using a three-step process that I've done in, uh, my current, um, company, which is Search Keys, Africa, as well as, uh, previous companies that I've worked at as well. So if we go to the distinguishing side of, uh, accountability and responsibility. I think it's important also, just to note that what was the catalyst for me paying attention to the meaning of words, um, in the professional setting as well as actually privately is a book that I read in 2017 called BR Guest, and it's authored by Teddy Kinney. And in that book it describes very practically the Disney culture. And the one particular lesson out of that book that, uh, Disney really pays attention to as a consequence of Walt Disney is that of the meaning of words. By way of example, they don't call their employees employees, they call them cast members. They don't call the, the operational team in terms of at the parks and so on, um, ops team members or anything like that. They call them. Or they call that particular landscape, uh, the, the, the onstage team and then the backstage team is the support team. So just by changing the, the words or paying attention to the meaning of words that you choose to assign to specific situations really does have an impact to the narrative of how people buy into vision and how they actually understand what is expected of them in terms of clarity as well. So, Back to the distinguishing side of things. If we look at the Latin, uh, word where accountability comes from, um, and excuse my pronunciation, but it's compe. And so compe means to account and or to count. And so in terms of a, like a business setting, when you are accountable, it means that you are 100, you are taking 100% ownership of the desired outcome that you're expecting. And just to be consistent going forward, when I say the desired outcome or output, I'm going to always now just refer to objective. So the business objective. So you're taking a hundred percent ownership of the, of the objective of the business or within your particular department. That's what it means to be accountable. And then if we look at responsibility on what it is to be responsible. Uh, it comes also from the Latin, uh, word, which is a response excluding an E. And, um, that funnily enough is me. The meaning is to respond. And if you think about it, we can only respond to a situation, right? That we understand. So something may happen and then we need to respond accordingly. And so, The, the act of taking responsibility is the act of fulfilling inputs to achieve that output, that objective. So inputs in business would be processes, tasks, uh, procedures, anything that we need to complete that gets us further or more in line with achieving that objective that ultimately you're accountable for, that someone will be accountable for then. So just by way of a final distinction is the only one person can be accountable, but many people can be responsible for tasks, um, that, that, that are directly related to the, the, the objective. So only one person can be accountable and therefore this is why you see so, so much misalignment within teams is because there are so many people that are sharing. The, the, the, um, the ownership over a particular objective that needs to be achieved or worked towards. And so because of that, then you have multiple people that are set to be accountable for one objective. And when you have multiple people accountable for one objective, that's when most alignment happens. Because at the end of the day, if people are, are, um, unsure of who the actual person is, that is accountable, that needs to take 100% ownership then. What tends to happen is no one then takes ownership of that objective, especially when of course, things go go wrong, which we know happens in business. So that's just really important to note. And then practically, let's jump into the how to align teams with the understanding of now there is a distinction between being accountable and being responsible. So to start off with step number one, what I would recommend. Is creating what I call lanes or swimming lanes of accountability. And so when you create lanes of accountability, those lanes, um, can only enable one person to own that particular objective. And so, as an example, my role at Sirkin Africa, I'm a, I'm the Chief Revenue Officer and, uh, What, what that means in terms of accountability is I'm accountable for marketing, sales, and customer success in the business. Right? And at the end of the day, even though I'm solely accountable, uh, for ultimately generating revenue in the business, I still have a lot of team members that are responsible for spec specific tasks, processes, and procedures within their specific roles. But if we don't achieve our revenue targets, or if we do not grow revenue in our business, I'm the one that has to account to the team, right? In this case would be to our Manco and our exco. And that really is, um, clear then for everyone to know who, or yeah, who is the person where the buck stops and in a more, uh, less appropriate way, uh, whose head is on the chopping block if something were to go wrong. All right. So that's step number one is create those lanes of accountability. And so you could do it in your business, you can do it in your team, and then what you do is you, you like state, like what's, what the objectives are that you're trying to achieve. And then you start like putting people there. And then sometimes you've got a couple of people that are in one lane and then you get to a point where you have to then start going, okay, but who is gonna take full accountability for this? And then where should we delegate responsibilities, uh, to, uh, to other people as well? So step number two, then, after creating those lanes of accountability, I'd highly recommend, uh, establishing and implementing the O K R framework. And if you don't know or haven't heard of the O K R framework, it stands for objectives and key results. And, uh, please let me know if you'd actually like me to do a full episode on OKRs, because it, yeah, you can go very, very detailed into, Exactly what, uh, the practicalities of implementing and, and, and, and maintaining OKRs within a business. But when you are able to introduce and then then maintain OKRs within a business, it creates a tremendous amount of clarity. Because just to quickly explain, you have an objective, which is normally directional and infinite. So an objective can be, for example, an our outcome would be to sustainably increase the revenue year on year. So it's not quantitative. More of the times, it's qu qualitative in nature, but, but it's directional. All right? And then attached to every objective, in my view, should be a maximum of three key results. And so a key result is finite and it's measurable, or in other words, quantitative. So in this case, taking the example with the objective of, uh, sustainably increasing revenue year on year. One key result could be for me, it could be that, um, achieve 24% revenue growth for the X Division. And in this case we, we do Google ads, so to say, for the Google Ads division, achieve 24% growth by or in this financial period. So if you think about the smart, uh, framework in terms of make it specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and, and, and it has to include time. That's also how you can set in your key results. And so that really is what I would recommend and like I say, is I'll, I'll talk about that in possibly another, another full, um, episode cuz it's quite a, quite a deep dive. But if you've established OKRs, then everyone has a maximum of three objectives each, right? Depending on their level within the business and in those object objectives, right? They're accountable for those objectives. But multiple people can be responsible for achieving the key results linked to those objectives. Uh, and that's really, really helpful because then everyone knows, um, where they should be pushing or pulling and, and as a consequence with more clarity becomes more, uh, alignment. And therefore expectations are very clear, um, for everyone. And then lastly, the third, um, step here is, Now that you've established OKRs for at an organizational level, and then you can go to the departmental level, and then at an individual level within each department, the key result that you, that you identify, that you describe, they need to have priority actions or activities. For example, maybe five to 10 priority actions or activities. That will move you or the team members closer toward achieving that key result. Okay. And so in terms of that, uh, a key, uh, a key result, like I mentioned earlier, the key result could be achieve 24% revenue growth for the ads division by or in this financial period. The priority actions then to list in relation to what actions and activities I need to do. Um, to, to push toward that particular key result being achieved or to increase the likelihood of that key result being achieved would be something like launch the new CRM system to monitor sales conversions. Alright, that's an activity I need to launch it and let's stay to, let's stay to date by the, the, the 31st of the month. Another. Action that I need to prioritize would be something like host a bi-weekly meeting with the team to understand what is happening with their portfolio of clients so that we can possibly introduce the problems and the, and the pain points as well as the interests into how we then sell, as well as even market our offering to, to other customers or to potential customers. So at the end of the day, like if I wanna just give a recap quickly, I think that in order to to move misaligned teams to a far more aligned position, we need to take care of the use of words and make sure that we understand the meaning so we don't interchange between them. And in this case, I would recommend making sure that you don't misapply accountability versus responsibility, understanding that. In order to be accountable, it's only one person that's accountable for an objective, but multiple people can be responsible for the tasks, um, activities and so on that that can move toward, um, toward achieving that, that specific objective. And then in terms of the how, in terms of how to actually create that alignment, I'd recommend establishing lanes of accountability, assigning of course, that to individual people. And you can start at the organizational level. Then number two is implementing OKRs, and then number three is link to the key results for each objective. Make sure that you list priority actions and activities required so that everyone knows what they should be actually focusing on on a day-to-day, week to week basis. Hope that you enjoyed this episode and, uh, we've got some exciting future episodes coming with different angles as well. So please feel free to share your, your feedback, um, and I'll see you in the next episode. Cheer.