Accelerating Performance Improvement

Every effort to improve performance can be accelerated and facilitated with a foundation of personal and organizational accountability. Our experience has shown us that until you get accountability right, you probably won’t get anything else right. Identifying and closing the distance between what you need people working on and what they are actually focusing on is an essential step in helping your team or organization improve their performance. We call this gap in performance the “Accountability Gap.” These gaps are too often ignored and accepted as a part of the organizational culture. When that happens, efforts to implement, execute and improve often turn out to be disappointing, short-lived, or both.

Consider the following example of how greater accountability led to a crucial improvement in performance and results. After experiencing a substantial decline in profitability, a well-known hotel chain implemented the Accountability Training throughout every level of their organization. The big idea: get everyone to focus on key results in their daily work, not just on “doing” their job. As people, on a daily basis, began looking for ways that they could impact accountability for revenue, customer satisfaction and quality objectives, performance improved. In fact, at every hotel where the training and emphasis on accountability was implemented, the numbers always went up. In the months that followed, the company was not only able to significantly improve performance, but restore a full $40 million in profitability.

Before the focus on personal accountability for organizational results, no one could really tell you what the hotel performance objectives were. In fact, one employee, when asked, responded: “to make another billion dollars this next fiscal quarter!”  She had no idea what the company was trying to do. Every effort to “close the gaps” and help people at every level of the organization take personal accountability for organizational results helps people move beyond compliance and mediocrity to true personal ownership and real continuous improvement.

To learn more about how to create a Culture of Accountability at every level of the organization, we invite you to join the Accountability Community at www.partnersinleadership.com, where you can watch videos of actual client case studies.

Accountability Training, Accountability Gap, Culture of Accountability, and Accountability Community are registered trademarks of Partners In Leadership Inc.