So, one of the things I thought would be really great to talk about because it seems to be coming up over and over and over and over again lately in the clients we work with is the idea of accountability in your staff. Often times you hear, “Well, what am I going to do? Am I going to write them up? I’m not going to fire them.” But there is the component of the fact that the team can’t just go off and do whatever they want to do either, right? So, when people hear accountability in small businesses it’s often that there just isn’t a lot of it currently in a small business.
One, usually small agencies are not great at looking at the metrics, so holding someone accountable to a goal for a new business, account rounds, retention, following up on their activities or suspenses. A lot of times when we go to an agency we sort of start unpeeling the onion and find an account manager or producer with a hundred overdue suspenses. We find that there really is no visibility to the sales goal or they don’t know what it is. We also find out that the processes and procedures are just not uniformly followed. In this case it may be because there just are none, everybody just wants to do it their own way that they’re comfortable with or there are some but we keep finding mistakes, we just keep addressing it and addressing it and slowly but surely you feel like a little hamster on a wheel, but we’re not moving forward.
So I wanted to talk about how do we hold people accountable without the mass exodus of everyone leaving, still getting to the end of the agency goals and making everyone happy. Well, the one thing that I’ve found and it’s sort of a deep down secret, it’s not something that comes off first and foremost, is that people actually want structure. So if your agency doesn’t have structure then we’re not looking at the numbers, we’re not looking at the work flows. Really what leaves it happening is that you find that team spending way more time, and at the ground level, the team’s an argument about the best way they think things should be done. That’s not a great way to run a business. The next step is if you have these processes or any type of goal you have to have a coaching environment. So, especially if you’re going from really lacks, not a lot of accountability to now we’re adding some in the idea is that you want to empower people for success, not just come down on them. It’s not as black and white.
So I read an article that said that it actually takes an adult human to hear the same thing twenty two times before they digest it and make it a reality. So what can’t happen is you can’t get into a team meeting and go, “Yay! Rah, rah!” thinking you do the greatest thing in the world, leave, run your first report and you expect everything to be roses. It’s just not going to happen, so instead you have to sit there and say it’s something big, let’s have a launch party, document it, just sit with everybody to go over it. We have to look at those reports every single day to track to see if it’s going on and if it’s doing right. If somebody’s off track, sit down and go back over it with them and then at that point you know you’ve given it your best shot. Maybe you did tell them twenty two different times, but it really should be an experience of, “Hey, there’s a training period here. Try your hardest, we’re going to digest it and see what we’ve got.” But for most agencies it’s far too black and white. It’s either do it this way or I’m not doing it, and there’s this big odds that happen.
Now, on the flip side, you also have to do your part as a leader or manager. You have to run those reports, they have to be consistent, there should be team meetings where it’s discussed. There’s got to be a lot of visibility on, and let’s talk about if somebody’s just indignant, alright? So, the idea of accountability in the agency freaks many people out because one: maybe the items not big enough to fire the person over, or you’re looking around being like, “I don’t really have a ton of candidates nor do I want to go hire someone new but it is frustrating when this happens.” So if you’re not willing to put a little bit of skin in the game and be open-minded of the idea that this person may not be a good fit for your agency, I’m going to tell you right now you just have to let it go. If you’re not willing to maybe put some, you know, parameters on it, some disciplinary actions at all, not even a tiny one, right? Then it’s up to you to let it go. That person is never going to change, they’re not going to do it by osmosis or crazy brain will; it’s not going to happen, but I think that there’s a stepping stone.
So we always like to have incentives and some negatives, so maybe in order to get this person or the whole team on board there’s a little bit of incentive in play. Maybe it’s a raffle, maybe it’s jeans day, whatever it could be but if they don’t hit it there’s a little bit of a drawback. So maybe there’s a bonus pool and everytime it doesn’t happen five dollars comes out of the bonus pool. You have to come up with some push and pull, some people are motivated just by not getting in trouble as crazy as that sounds, but really think about it. What are the pluses and minuses you can put in place to help people kind of get on the board and get on the team. Now when it comes down to the fact that, that still doesn’t work you have to have an honest conversation with yourself. Is what they’re doing insubordination, and for a lot of agencies we put up with a ton of insubordination and we blame ourselves because maybe we didn’t do everything I just mentioned, sort of haphazardly put stuff so we fall on the sword, but the person still keeps doing things their own way. That’s not going to work either.
What we like to do is a performance improvement plan, so it could be thirty days, sixty days or ninety days, but it’s a clear outline of, “Hey, we know you have a challenge and I want to talk to you about it. I want to write it out with you, I want to share with you the problems on this, and it actually says that the accountability is. So I’m going to meet with you every two weeks, we’re going to go over if you’ve improved in this area.” and sometimes that formality just pops people into place. It’s like, “Oh, hold on a second here. This is serious, I have to get my act together.” but you have to stick to it, right? So a lot of times when there’s a sense of insubordination in an agency it’s because the team has sort of learned you’re probably not going to stick through, it’s probably going to just go away if I just keep doing my thing, maybe another thing in the list of pile of stuff I wanted to get to that I just didn’t.
So you also kind of have to dig in deep on that front, you can’t just go and leave it alone. So really what I want everyone to focus on is you have to have that honest conversation with yourself. Am I willing if this person doesn’t do it to sit down and have a performance improvement plan? If after sixty days of all that coaching and they’re still not getting it, and usually there’s also about ten other things they’re not getting and their attitude might not be the greatest, is this truly someone you want on your winning team? Don’t be held in fear of the fact that there’s no one good out there. We were just at an agency where we ran through this exercise of going on Indeed and just seeing who’s out there that’s searching for a job that meets your qualifications and we were outstandingly surprised at the quality of candidates. So the idea isn’t that you want to push somebody out the door for not getting email addresses, the idea is that if we go through all of this energy and exercise and you spend all your time, and it’s clearly documented on a plan, right? It’s like, “I’ve done everything. I’ve hit all my milestones. I need you to as well.” We get to the end and it’s still not any better, what are you going to do?
If you’re going to just put up with it just zip your mouth, swallow it and never talk about it again. Not with your spouse, your business partner or anybody. It’s just okay because you have accepted it, but if you’re still irritated you have to be able to do something that’s going to make sense and I really encourage agency owners to think about this word accountability, because it’s ruining agencies out there. People are left to their own devices, do whatever they want, all the reports are a muck, you’re not hitting your goals and all we do is just sort of circle the drain about it. We need to be accountable in our positions. I remember having a job and I have this thing where I put it through the filter in my head, and I’m like, “If I ever did that to this manager, I would’ve just gotten a box and stuck to myself and walked away.” I, myself, have managed twenty person teams, we put in different accountability measures so that you knew proactively when you’re not in compliance so we could deal with it together. It wasn’t a surprise, and there was not an emotional response for the most part. If there was an emotional response, it was actually positive to me because it meant you wanted to get better and we could put the resources into it. Lo and behold there was not a lot of transparency in agencies, this is something we have to work on and if you have a lot of transparency and it’s still not clicking through you may need to consider what are you going to do differently.
Especially if you’ve done all these things, invested all your time, this person just might not be the best fit for you and that’s okay. That is okay. There’s so many different ways that we can solve that problem together. So really look, what’s your accountability plan, what’s your strategy and are you fearful of accountability because maybe you think that the only option is termination. There’s a whole plethora in there. So I hope you enjoyed this vlog, which is fun to say. I’m sitting here in my winter attire because we’re having a little nor’eastern going on this weekend which is pretty impressive. There’s trees down everywhere, we haven’t lost power thank goodness, but it was a great time to talk about accountability. So have a great weekend, have a great week and really focus on your accountability strategy and if you need help, this is why we exist. We go to agencies every single week, this week I am in four agencies across the country, next week I’m going to LA to San Diego to speak, to Ohio, this is what we do to help people. So if it’s not your thing don’t feel alone either, okay? Well we hope to talk to you guys soon and leave some comments on our vlog. Let me know what you think. Bye.
