Convincing Senior Management To Embrace Bottom-Up Accountability

Your Question:
“What do you do if senior management isn’t buying the benefits of bottom-up accountability? What if they don’t trust their people to step up and take accountability? What if they believe that bottom-up accountability will not only cause them to lose control but also lead to organizational failure? How do you convince them when they are entrenched in a top-down approach to accountability?”

Our Answer:
Last week we wrote that top-down accountability is a way of life in many organizational cultures and that it has fueled the crisis of accountability we currently face in the world. It’s true. One of the main reasons we don’t enjoy higher levels of accountability in the world is because leaders and organizations don’t trust bottom-up accountability. So, they neither foster it nor count on it. The result is underdeveloped and underutilized bottom-up accountability.

Top-down accountability will always produce results, but never the breakthrough results that bottom-up accountability can produce. Why? Top-down accountability relies on a few people at the top to enforce accountability for achieving results throughout the organization while bottom-up accountability depends on everyone in the organization taking personal accountability for achieving results. The difference between the two is monumental, and, all too often, top-down accountability prevents the development of bottom-up accountability. Based on our more than 20 years of experience developing greater accountability for achieving results in thousands of organizations around the world, we can categorically say that bottom-up accountability not only produces greater individual and organizational accountability than does top-down accountability, it also produces dramatically superior results. That’s our experience, time and time again.

Consider the following example of a $2 billion consumer products company, whose senior management had employed top-down accountability for several years to increase revenue and profitability. Unfortunately, the desired results had not been forthcoming, and the company’s steady decline in performance had continued. When the company’s senior management turned to us for help, they were still unconvinced that a shift to bottom-up accountability would deliver the sort of turnaround they needed. After much internal debate, senior management decided to take a test run by applying The Oz Principle Accountability Training (bottom-up accountability) to only a few of the company’s operations. A few months later, senior management witnessed the dramatic difference in results. The operations that had implemented bottom-up accountability through The Oz Principle Training began to deliver substantially superior results on a consistent basis. When senior management projected the potential impact of bottom-up accountability training in the rest of the organization, they realized that they had found their solution to the multi-year decline in performance. A year later, benefitting from a company-wide commitment to bottom-up accountability, senior management reported record revenues and earnings to the company’s shareholders. Needless to say, senior management had become convinced. It’s results, and only results, that will convince senior management to embrace bottom-up accountability.

For more information on how you can take a test run on bottom-up accountability in your organization, go to www.partnersinleadership.com. Learn how greater accountability from the bottom-up can help your organization increase revenue and profitability, reduce costs, and implement key initiatives.