So, I'm going to go right into this because our time is limited. If you have questions, though, and you want to go deeper into anything that we bring up, feel free to just stop me. This is your session, not mine. I just want you to leave with helpful information and some insights that can allow you to start to do some of these things. By the way, we only have an hour. To fully go into all of this would take a week, maybe. So, I'm taking some highlight, really general concepts that are key principles that are often neglected with many teams, departments, and organizations. So, this is what our buddy Henry Ford had to say about peak performance, innovation, collaboration, and engagement. Coming together as a beginning, listening to one another as a progress, and learning from each other will bring success. And it's all about how do we all come together? We're aligned, looking for the outcome that will benefit all of us, all the stakeholders, what's in it for me, how will it make my life better, how will it improve my team's performance, how it will help the stakeholders, and so forth. So, how do we create that alignment, engagement, passion, energy, so that people go above and beyond what's required to help us achieve what's truly critically important? So, we're going to leave with some key concepts, but before we go into that, I have a quick test. Paul, I'm not sure if this is, there we go. Maybe I have to be closer to this for this to work. I'm going to give you four seconds. I'm going to flash the collage up on the screen. In four seconds, I need you to identify as many objects as you can, starting now. Ready? Four, three, two, one. You got an extra second there, so this class should do exceptionally well. So, let me ask, name one thing, what's your name? Beverly, name one thing that you saw in the collage. Who saw pizza by show of hands? Oh, you're all still hungry, aren't you? One thing other than the pizza. Who saw a baby? Do you have a baby? About 75% of the room saw a baby. One thing that was not mentioned? Who saw a shark? Yeah, down here in Florida, seeing sharks. Seven people, one thing that was not mentioned? Who saw a cell phone? Do you know what type it was? The old flip phones, right? One thing. Who saw a guitar? Oh, wow, 60, 70% of the room. Let's take a few more. One thing that you saw? Who saw Coca-Cola? Wow, look at the branding. Almost everybody, huh? Let's take one here. Who saw the BMW? Oh, nearly half the room. Let's take three more. It's a yellow candy or Toblerone. Toblerone. Who saw the Toblerone? Oh, just three or four people. Sir? Who saw an ice cream cone? Seven people. One more. I'm worried that this does not do, but I saw the wine glass. Who saw? Who saw the wine glass? Yeah, I came down this morning, saw champagne glasses down by that little hub center. I don't know about this conference. Anyway, let me ask you specifically, why did you, Beverly, why did you see what you saw? Why did you see what you saw? You miss your kid? Why? My eyes went right to it. I recognized it. Give me some other reasons. Anybody, just yell them out. Yeah, maybe use a processor from the outside. Four seconds, I'm just going to nail this right side. Maybe we'll do a test later and see what's on the right side. Why did you see what you saw? Like it's something I like? So what else attracts us to see what we see? Color? What else? Brand recognition? How about size? How about you use a processor? It's just where my eyes went. There's a lot of reasons why we see what we see. Were any of you in here able to identify all 30 objects that were in the collage? No. But if we kept going, I would assure you we would have got all 30. So you tell me, what's the learning there? We all see different, better as a group. We only can come together and see all there is to see and the realities that we are dealing with when we collaborate, when we're talking and getting perspectives of others, opening candid communication, asking for and offering feedback, talking about the elephant in the room. Those are the keys to creating a highly accountable culture where people collaborate, they innovate, they go above and beyond what's required to achieve what's critically important. And we just demonstrated in a very simple activity by showing the collage. If you see only what you alone can see, you're not seeing all there is to see. Sounds a little bit hokey, but it's spot on. If you go through life with the blinders on and you only see the world through your lens, you're setting yourself up to fail. I don't care how educated you are, how long you went to school, what your title is, how long you've been doing what you're doing, no one person can see all there is to see. We all see the world dramatically different. If you don't see the problem, you can't fix a problem. And yet none of us saw everything. The other possibility here is if you don't see the opportunity or the possibility, you can't go after it. That's why those four best practices that I just mentioned and we'll talk about them again, that are inclusive and the first key to creating a highly accountable, collaborative, innovative organization is recognizing our realities. And no one person can do it on their own. For example, nobody mentioned the roller bag. What if that was a gigantic hazard or an obstacle or a challenge and we're not talking about it? On the other hand, what if it was a terrific opportunity or a possibility and we neglected to see it because we're not talking openly and candidly, getting perspectives of others and so forth. Now, don't mention anything and don't say, I haven't seen this before. What I'd ask you to do in the room right now is just look at the picture that's on the screen and just in your own mind, don't say anything, but in your mind, come up with what you believe you see in that picture. Now, I'm going to show a different version, same thing, stay quiet, don't share your thoughts with anybody in the room. And now by show of hand, how many of you see a young girl? How many see an older lady? So it's about half and half within the room. So for those of you that did not see, here, let me move forward. If you didn't see the older woman, there she is. So there's her eye, her nose, her mouth. She's got dark hair, a scarf on her head and a little feather up there and some sort of shawl. If you did not see the young girl, there she is. There's her chin, a necklace. There's her eyelash and her nose and she's looking out this way. Now, I'm going to put the first picture back up. Now, when you look at the initial picture, how many of you now can see both, the older lady and the younger woman? Some of you can, some of you can't. It does not matter one way or the other. The key is this. What did you see first, Chris? So you saw the young woman. Would it do any good for me to say, Chris, you saw a young woman, you're crazy, you're nuts, you're wrong, it's an old lady. I saw the old lady. Why would you even say that there's a young girl there? I mean, but yet we have those types of conversations in the workplace, right? Sure. So hold on. Can you pin it somewhere on me? Not on my skin. So the key is, it would do me no good to have an argumentative conversation with Chris saying he's wrong and I'm right because the reality is what you see is what you see. It's your reality. It's not right, it's not wrong. It's just what you see. The better conversation would be to say, Chris, I see an older woman. Can you help me see the young lady? And once he helps me see the young lady, how much more of a reality do I now see? I double what I saw before. It makes me much more effective in understanding what we're dealing with so I can accept ownership for it, find a solution to move forward and put that solution into play. But if we're not open to perspectives of others, if we're not getting feedback, if we're not talking openly and candidly, if we're not talking about the elephant in the room, we're missing all of this. I wish I could walk around with this thing, but I think I have to stay up here. One of the most important lessons from this session is right there. A single perspective is the enemy of reality. If you're only seeing it your way, you need to go out and get perspectives from others. You need to understand the entire reality so you can move forward and make sure that you're making the appropriate decisions. By the way, I'm gonna give all these slides to your coordinators here. So they'll send them out if you want them, but you're more than welcome to take pictures and steal them. And seeing the reality has more to do with our ears than it does with our eyes. As I just mentioned, it's about open and honest, candid communication, being open to the perspectives of others, not filtering any perspective you get based on personality type or tenure, or I don't like that person, or whatever you might be filtering it with. Asking for and offering appreciative and constructive feedback. And finally, again, recognizing the tough realities, talking about the elephant in the room. Here's another important element. Are any of you familiar with the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People written by Stephen Covey? So I worked with Stephen for seven years. One of the things Stephen used to say all the time is if you don't include folks, don't expect commitment. And it makes a lot of sense. Why would I commit or own what your decision was when you didn't even ask for my insight or my perspective? And yet we're out there rolling out new initiatives, new strategies, and we're wondering why people are pushing back. Why aren't they jumping in and just doing what we asked them to do? Well, it's because you didn't include them. People need to have their say. They don't necessarily have to have their way. And we know that's true because it rhymes. But it is true because think in your own professional career where you may have had some great ideas, especially those of us on the front lines and middle management positions. We know what needs to happen. And yet decisions are being made without even asking for our insight. I don't own it. You know, I might comply, but I'm not going to commit. Make sense? That's what our buddy Winston Churchill had to say about results. It's of no use saying we've done our best, we've got to succeed in doing what's necessary. And the reason I bring this up is because when we work with clients to help them go after what's most important to their organization, we say, let's get clear on the two or three results that you need to achieve in the next 12 to 18 months. And what we mean by that is in addition to the day-to-day whirlwind of activity, everything that you're already doing, highly effective and successful organizations of all sizes are always going after two or three new results that will get them into a better place in the future where there's a window of opportunity that if we make this happen, we get more market share or, you know, we find more clients or we develop whatever it might be. But complacency is very, very dangerous. In fact, it's the key element as to why most change efforts fail. Or, you know, we're just too complacent. We're not building enough ownership within an organization for people to actually want to help us achieve it. You create a have-to culture instead of a want-to culture. So it's about the results. You know, we don't use the word goals or objectives. Those can be kind of aspirational. And if you don't hit them, no big deal. Results are concrete. So we work, sometimes it takes two weeks for a CEO or a senior leader of an organization to say, because there's so much that you're working on. But right now at this point in time, based upon all the circumstances externally and internally, what are the top two or three that if we achieve these, blast us into a much better position than where we are today? And then let's find out how we can create alignment and focus and energy and passion within the workforce where it becomes everybody's job and accountability to help us achieve that. What percentage of leaders do you believe? This is a multiple choice question. What percentage of leaders do you believe when we asked over 2,000 leaders that they felt they were excellent communicators? It's one of these numbers. Which one do you think it is? You guys nailed it. It's 92. We rounded it down because we thought, no, it's not 92. And so we said, OK, great. And then we went out to the frontline folks in middle management. And we asked them. We said, how well do you think your leaders are at communicating to you? And it's one of these numbers. 18. We rounded it up to make them look better. So you have 90% of your leaders thinking, I am a great communicator. But 20% of those you lead believe you're OK at communicating. Think about the impact that can have within an organization. People are cloudy, vague, unclear on exactly, specifically what we need to go after. If you want me to take accountability to help the organization achieve that, I can't even take accountability because I'm not quite sure what you want me to do. We have found over 23 years of working with organizations around the globe, even high-performing, some of the best companies on Earth, 90% of the time, the people you lead, whether it's a team, a department, or an entire organization, 90% of your people are not crystal clear, pristinely aware of the exact results. Not the whirlwind of daily activity, but in addition to that, what's critically important that we have to achieve that puts us in a better place. 90% of the time, they're vague, cloudy, or unclear. And what's your name, sir? Doug. So can I expect you to take accountability to achieve a result that you didn't even know existed? And how does it feel to be held accountable to deliver a result that you didn't even know existed? But yet, we're doing it 90% of the time. And if you want to find out next, when you get back to your workplace, go ask 10 people. If you know what your results are that you're going after, but it gets deeper than this, because you can say, hey, we need higher levels of employee safety. Well, what does that actually mean? Because a lot of people interpret that differently. What do I need to impact that? So we have to take it a step different, a little bit step further. So the first step is you need to get clear on what it is. And in the materials that you can look at that were sent on the PDF, you'll see some more detail as to what that takes. They need to be beat the 3M criteria. They need to be meaningful. They need the top, in addition to whirlwind, one of the two or three. And it's not more than two or three, because if everything is a priority, nothing's a priority. You just lose focus, and everything becomes just the whirlwind again. So it needs to be meaningful, because it will get us to a better place. Folks need to see what's in it for me. If I do determine that I will go above and beyond and help make this a reality, how's it making my job better? How's it helping my wife or my life? How's it helping my family? How's it helping my colleagues? How's it helping our stakeholders? How's it helping the community? If people don't see that, they typically will just disengage. They need to be measurable. And what I mean by that, I gave the example of safety. Well, if employee safety is a result, well, how are you measuring that now? Where do we stand? What's the metric today that we stand at? And what do we need to get to? And by when? X to Y by when? If people don't understand where we are today, they can't come to work tomorrow and make a conscious decision about what they need to help us do to get to the next level. It would be like me putting a board game in front of this table here with 300 pieces on it and just saying, go ahead and play. No instructions. We need to create the winnable game. People need to know where we stand today, what do we need to get to, and by what date. And when you are crystal clear on those results, you don't have to hover over people's shoulders and tell them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. People will draw their own conclusion as to what they can do to help achieve the result. They'll surprise you with their ingenuity. People are creative. And everybody goes to work every day with a certain degree or percentage of discretionary performance. We want everybody at least giving 100%, but most often they're not. How do we get them to give that? Well, let them know how to play the winnable game. Engage them. Make sure they know exactly what's important and what's in it for them. And finally, they need to be memorable. Again, that's an easy one. It's two or three. It's not 20. You don't want to diffuse focus. It doesn't mean we won't get there. You all, in every organization, I'll bet you there's a lot of ideas that come to senior leadership all the time, saying we should do this, we should do that, we should do it. And most of them are good ideas. You will never have the capacity to flawlessly execute all the good ideas. It's two or three at a time. And what are the two or three right now that are the most critical? Once you nail one, you bring in one of the other good ideas. But you can't throw out 20 and they lose your workforce with 20 things they need to be focused on in addition to their day job, keeping the organization humming. When we don't have clarity, it always leads to some degree of confusion. When people are confused, naturally we have misunderstandings. I'm sorry if I'm in your way here. When we have misunderstandings, we can't possibly communicate precisely. So there's degrees of miscommunication, which creates degrees of mistrust and distrust, even if it's a little bit. And when you see that in any team or organization or department, it leads to what we call isolation or the mindset, I'm just going to do my job, what's on my job description. I will comply. But in order to achieve better results, we need heavy doses of commitment. Compliance ain't going to do it. So some of the root causes, and there's probably 200 of them, here's just a few that can cause this lack of clarity. When we're not making decisions quickly enough, people are waiting. So when people are waiting, you know what they're doing? They're just keeping busy. Activity does not necessarily produce desired results. Unresolved conflicts, things that have happened and no one's ever closed the loop. We don't know where we stand. Silos, when we operate in silos and we're not sharing information, we're not collaborating. When we take too long to make choices, lack of specificity on measures and not defining the win, that's kind of the example with the game. You know, X to Y by win, that creates the winnable game. People come to work feeling like they're playing a game they can win rather than trying to keep their head above water. Priority plethora, if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. Mixed messaging. And finally, and by the last two, what we really mean there is whoever leads your team or your department or your organization, if you have a senior leadership team where three of your senior leaders are saying one thing and there's a message and three other senior leaders say, oh, we don't necessarily agree with this, here's what we think, then you have lack of alignment and you have that mixed messaging, which is damaging to your culture. And it's going to impede your ability to achieve anything that is significantly important. So again, we want to create a culture where the mindset is I'm coming to work every day playing to win. I'm engaged. And there's a big difference between employee engagement and employee satisfaction. There's a lot of highly paid, satisfied employees out there getting great benefits and great pay, but they're not engaged in the work and they're not doing anything to help you achieve the outcomes. This is about getting people coming to work every day, taking the necessary steps to help the organization move forward and achieve what matters most. They're not coming to work every day. And I think all of us in our professional career have probably had the experience where you go to work and you're just like, man, I can't even keep my head above water. I don't know what the most important stuff is. And I told my son once years ago, I said, you know, that was the toughest day I've ever had and I just don't feel like I got anything accomplished. He says, well, you should have stayed home with me. I played video games all day. That's it. The highest standard a leader can aspire to achieve is do your people, whether it's five people, 500 or 5,000, are they coming to work every day believing they're playing a game we can win as a team? All of this, all inclusive in the title of this session as well, but it all starts with clearly defining the results you have to achieve, whether you're leading a team of five, 50, 500 or 5,000. What are the results, the additional results in addition to the whirlwind of activity that we all have to make sure that we're looking after? You can't neglect that, but if you want to become a better organization, a better team, a better department, you're always going to be going after new results to improve and get better at what you're doing. And if you're not doing that, that complacency or clinging to the status quo will destroy most organizations and there's a lot of threats out there right now and we'll talk about this tomorrow in a much deeper context, but there's a lot of what we call the seven-sided pincer movement that's coming to take your job from you, to displace your department and to reinvent industries. What are we doing to protect ourselves so we thrive in this future work? We call it the age of disruption, the brawl with no rules. Things have changed dramatically, but it all starts getting very clear right there. There's limitations when we just focus on our job or our responsibility. So those R's up there represent your job, your role, your responsibility within whatever organization you represent. In an organization that operates like that, do things ever fall through the cracks, Doug? And why is that? Yeah, we're kind of set up that way, right? We're operating in silos, so things fall through the cracks. In organizations where things are falling through the cracks, how do many organizations tend to go about filling in the cracks? We need more what? More people, crack fillers. So in an organization where we get more people to fill in the cracks, do things still fall through the cracks? In fact, what do we create? chaos and more what? A lot more cracks, and now they're smaller and they're harder to find. What we want to do with, and it starts with identifying the must achieve desired results. It all starts, this notion of shared accountability, collaboration, engagement. It's about getting clear on the results you're going after, and they become everybody's accountability in addition to your job description. It's everybody's job within the team, within the organization, to help us achieve these two or three must achieve results, because that's why we hire people, to help us get better and produce better results. And do not hire people just to be busy. And in today's environment, corporate environment, any organization, things are changing so quickly that whatever you were hired to do three, four, or five years ago, it's not going to be the same today. It's not going to be the same next year. I mean, things exponentially, think of technology. We all better build new skills and develop new competencies every day, because things are changing so rapidly. If you rely upon only your skills from five, six, seven years ago, and your competencies, and what you knew then, you're going to find yourself on the outside looking in. But when we have this notion of shared accountability, the shaded areas become the results you're not achieving now, but you would when people go above and beyond their job description. Accountability is broader than what's on your job description. So the results, and I just put the graphic for the conference here, but this would be your organization, or your team, or your department. Get clear on the two or three, must achieve results. That becomes everybody's job. In fact, the next time you hire somebody, after you identify those, that's the first thing you tell them. Your job here at ABC Company is to help the team achieve these three results. In addition to that, here's your job description. Job's not done until we all win the game. Set that mindset from the beginning. But again, at the most, it's three at a time. And we usually say, go after two at a time. Whose job is it on a football team to recover a fumbled football, like that one right there? Why is that? So it's collaborative. OK, I'm going to play devil's advocate, so? So you're only as strong as your weakest players. Why? Say it louder. You've got to win. That's the result for a football team, right? That's what they're going after. When a team lines up on a Sunday or Saturday, the players aren't standing around saying, I'm not really sure why we're here today. They know why it's everybody's job, and responsibility, and accountability to win the game. That's why we're there. That's why we're on the team. So let's say this guy here, number one. Let's say he's a wide receiver. What would his job be as a wide receiver? That's what we do. We catch balls. But if there's a fumbled ball, like that one down there, does he stand around and say, oh, we should have had our fumble recovery guy in? There's no fumble recovery guy. You jump on the ball and go above your job description because you're very clear on the result to win the game. It's exactly how it works within the corporate environment, with any organization, any result you're going after. It's everybody's job. We don't hire people to come in and work in a silo and just do what's on their job description. If you know what's critically important, you help the team go after it. I was flying on a Southwest flight a few weeks ago. And I'm standing at the gate waiting for the flight. And I see the pilot doing a safety inspection, walking around. And then he goes back. And he's helping the baggage handlers load the plane. And he's lifting baggage and throwing it up the conveyor belt. I kind of had a sense as to what he was doing. And as I was boarding the plane, he was there greeting everybody. I said, hey, I saw you back there helping baggage handlers out. What's the deal? And he said, well, in addition to safety, which is ultimately the most important thing, one of our key results that we go after is on-time departure and on-time arrival. So if I see that we're running behind, I go back and I help them. But what's his job description as a pilot? Fly the plane safely. It's not to help load the bags. But he's clear. Everybody in Southwest knows that they've won that award like 30 years in a row because everybody sees it as their job. If you're data entry, if you're reservation, whatever your job, you do whatever it takes, on-time departure and arrival. That's how it works within every organization. The tough part, and it's not easy, and there's topic. If our website's in there, I don't know. It's probably in the PDF that we sent out. But there's all kinds of papers to help you determine how you can figure out how to go about determining your key results in addition to the whirlwind. But you've got to watch out for the biggest saboteur that can prevent or impede you from achieving those results. And it is what we were kind of referring to earlier, the whirlwind. It's the day job. It's what everybody's doing every day just to keep the lights on in your organization. There's hundreds of things in every organization going on day to day. And you probably have balanced scorecards for a lot of that stuff. So in addition to the whirlwind, we go after the new results. The whirlwind can be often used as an excuse for a reason why we can't focus on that stuff now because we have this crisis, or there's chaos, or this happened, or that happened. Well, that's just an excuse. I mean, highly effective organizations will find a way to do it. So you have the whirlwind over there on the left. It's urgent. It will act on you, crisis, chaos, all that sort of thing. And on the right, you have your new results. They're important, but you have to proactively work on those. There's a rub of the conflict between the two of them. They don't like each other. And they can actually prevent your team from really doing what it takes to help you achieve the results. Let me ask, if I asked all of you in this room, if I said, hey, next year, you guys did great last year, no additional results. Just do what you did last year. Would you still be busy every day? Yeah, very busy, right? So if nothing new, you're still busy. The trick is to go after the results, the new stuff. It's to how do we create the focus, the commitment, the accountability, and the desire to go after what we really know will move us forward in the midst of a 100-mile-an-hour whirlwind. That's never going to stop. The white waters of change aren't going to calm anytime soon. If anything, they're going to get much, much more turbulent. We're going to talk about that tomorrow. What's the difference, would you say, between those two things? Can I put you on the spot? What's your name? Sherry. Sherry, can you take a stab at that for me, please? What's the difference between activity and results? Activity is just doing, results is achieving. I like that. Activity is doing, results is achieving. Any other perspectives? Anybody else want to take a stab? OK, I like it. So let me ask this. Safety, safety, it's critical. So let me ask the whole room this. Does all activity produce a result? You're all wrong. Because even if I do nothing, do I still get a result? It's just not going to be the result you want. We tend to think of only the positive outcomes of taking actions. We say activities are the actions people take that lead to results. And the results are the desired and undesired outcomes of the actions we choose to take. Again, actions in and of themselves will not necessarily produce your desired results. And the only reason I have this little conversation is you want your team, your department, your entire organization coming in daily focused on results, not on keeping busy. Does that make sense? It's so simple that it's like, why aren't we doing this all the time? Because we get caught up in the whirlwind. We get too busy to focus on what matters most. You tell me if you think this individual is focused on activity or results. So you may have some folks in your organization that think, hey, I had a really productive day. But productivity does not mean you're going after the right thing, right? So you've got to watch for it. Most of you in this room, I guess, would see yourself over here, that your job is to help your team, your organization, or your department achieve what matters most. Many people come to work every day focused. I'm just putting my head down, do what I was told to do when I got hired 20 years ago. What we want to create is this mindset. Achieving what matters most is everybody's job. It doesn't matter what your job description is, what department it's in. It's everybody's job. And if you can't make the connection between what your department or you do and how it helps us achieve the result, you need to work on that. Or your manager or leader needs to work on it. Because we're all on the same team. I mean, share resources. Be innovative. Whatever it takes, we're in this together. Because the only way we'll continue to thrive in this new world of work is by constantly achieving better results. And it's just going to get tougher. I mean, I read an article yesterday that Japan just developed artificial intelligence that can read your mind. You can sit in front of this AI, and it can accurately tell you what you're thinking about without you saying a word. Yes, it's very scary. I'm glad I'm old. When those results are unclear or cloudy, there's a lot of negative outcomes. In fact, let me ask the group. Suppose you imagine, if you would, that you're driving down a mountainous road, pitch black out, and it's pouring down rain. Got that in your mind? Give me some adjectives that describe how you might feel in that scenario. Tense, what else? Scared, uncertain, nervous, moving fast or slow? Proactive or reactive? All of those adjectives that you just used, that's exactly how people feel when they come to work and you have not clearly defined your desired results. That's exactly how they'll behave. Now, if you're on that same road on a clear, sunny day, and you see exactly where you're going, now give me some adjectives. How do you feel? Confident, moving fast, proactive, making progress, I'm at ease. And that's how people feel when you get very clear on the desired results. It's the simple things that matter. You don't need some big 400-page binder on how to get people to be engaged. Let's get clear on what matters most. Honestly, they will surprise you with their creativity, innovation, and willingness to go above and beyond without you even asking them. They'll jump on board and say, I'll help you do that. I see what's in it for me. How can I help? When do you usually hear that question being asked? Who's accountable? When something goes wrong, and when something goes wrong and you hear that question being asked, what are people really hearing you ask? I'm just checking to see if I'm on time here. Who screwed up? So when people are thinking you ask who screwed up, what do they generally come up with? Excuses. So as leaders, we think all we hear around here are excuses, so we ask the question even more. Who's accountable? Who's accountable? But all people are still really hearing you say is, who's to blame? And you hear more excuses. It's a nonstop merry-go-round. The connotation and perception of accountability in most organizations is often somewhat negative, and we wonder why. So we need to flip it. How do we create an accountable organization where people choose to be accountable and want to be accountable? So I'm going to give you a brief overview of this. There's a lot more to get into, and there's videos that you can download off the website if you want them. But this really struck me years ago. My two sons, they were probably six and eight at the time, and we liked to golf all the time. So we're on the course, and we had a commitment that night to take my wife to dinner at 6 o'clock, and we weren't even off the golf course at 6 o'clock. So I looked up at my boys. I said, guys, mom's going to be really ticked when we get home. And my younger son, who was six or seven at the time, he's looking at me for a little bit, and he goes, dad, just tell her that we had a late tee time, a slow foursome in front of us, and we got into traffic. I said, Nick, where do you get this stuff? I said, we're going to use those, but we got to talk. So we literally get home, and I start launching in with my wife, and I used them. And my boys are standing right there, and it struck me. Do you think she's accepting any of it or believing any of it, by the way? And the other question is, if we truly wanted to be home, could we have been home? We could have left early, played around, whatever. If you own the result, if you truly own the result, you'll find a way to make a step closer to it or to achieve it. That's just the nature of things. There's a whole other module that I wish we had more time to get into, how do you create ownership around your results? But if people don't own the results, they will not contribute or commit. But anyway, my sons are watching me how to actually not take ownership for a result. So I thought, I don't want that. That's how I want my kids growing up, being excuse makers and blame game players. But anyway, what's the difference between reasons and excuses? So we haven't talked with this side of the room. I'm coming after you. What's the difference between reasons and excuses? An excuse is like you're trying to get out of something, is what you said, and a reason is what happened. Okay, okay. Any other perspectives? Yes, sir. Yeah, and these are the types of definitions that we typically hear, but we would say this. There's no difference. Reasons become excuses when we just give up and stop looking for a solution. You can have a legitimate reason, but if you stop working on going after the outcome, it becomes an excuse. There's really not much of a difference between reasons and excuses, and you have lots of highly intelligent people in all your organizations. They can come up with some doozy reasons and excuses as to why they can't do what you need them to do, but if they owned it enough, they would get there. So in this model here, you'll see there's three areas. In the middle, there's a pool of water. Below the water are the seven categories into which all blame falls into one of them. Above the water are what we call the four keys to accountability. When somebody is down here, anchored in the blame game below the water, this is where they're at. They're focused on everything they can't control. They're like an anchor holding the organization back. They're missing every opportunity to move forward. They're stuck. They're frozen in their actions. They're blaming everybody else for their circumstances, but the primary thinking when somebody's down there is that it's not my fault, and there's nothing I can do about it. You probably know people like that. I have a brother that's like that. When people are above the water, engaged, taking accountability, it's completely different. They're focused on what they can control. They're like an engine propelling the organization forward. They're driven. They're persistent. They're resolute, looking for solutions around every obstacle, challenge, and barrier, but the primary thinking up there is that. Those folks always have in their mind, what else can I do no matter what the situation is to get to the result that's important to me and my team? You probably know people in your personal life and professional careers that seem to always achieve and exceed what they want to go after, and that's their mindset. Think of professional athletes, Olympic athletes. They don't let anything stop them. I'll give you a couple examples of how this works. Are any of you from the Pacific Northwest by any chance? Do you remember what happened with Jack and Box, the fast food chain back in the 90s? The E. coli in the hamburger meat, it caused several people to die and caused almost 700 children to have to have organ transplants, and their immediate reaction to it was what? Anybody remember? They pointed to Vaughn's supermarkets and said, it's not our fault. It's Vaughn's. We buy the meat from Vaughn's. Do you think Vaughn's is going to take that sitting down? Vaughn says, no, we get it from these meatpackers. It's the meatpackers fault, and the meatpackers jumped in the game, said, nope, not us. It's the USDA. Not enough inspectors to inspect the meat, and the USDA said, nope, it's Congress. They didn't give us enough budget. So on and on and on, the blame game goes. Does anybody have any idea how long it took Jack and the Box to recover financially? Seven years. They don't even exist on the East Coast. They're doing okay on the West, but seven years because of the blame game going on and on and on. The antithesis of that is, do you remember in Chicago in the late 80s, what happened with Tylenol? Some lunatic laced capsules of Tylenol with cyanide. It killed seven people, caused hysteria worldwide. At the time of the incident, Tylenol had a 38% market share. Do you remember what they did within 48 hours? Not only did they remove everything off the shelves, they incinerated $300 million worth of products. So their market share went from 38% down to zero in 48 hours. What did they do next? There you go. You both kind of nailed it. The safety packaging, the tamper-proof packaging, and it was the state of the art. They were the only ones that had it back then, and still it's on everything today, from peanut butter to medications. In fact, if you have a headache today, you got to plan three days in advance to open the damn package up. But back then, since they were the only ones that had that technology, any guesses as to how long it took them to recover financially from 38% to zero and recapture 38% of the market? Two months. You nailed it. Two months. Took them two months. That's the difference between having the blame game, not my fault, nothing I can do, and being above the water, engaged, accountable. What else can we do? Here's the main learning, at least for me. Most people would have given Tylenol Pass. They would have said, they can't control the lunatic. It's not their fault. That's not how their CEO looked at it. He thought, he stated, we did not do enough to protect the consumer. It is our fault. Recover in two months versus seven years. You can always play the blame game and oftentimes individually in your personal life and in your professional career. We'll be justified. You have a colleague drop the ball, a vendor, a partner, whatever, and you'll have a reason or an excuse that you can play the blame game. But all the time we spend down here playing the blame game, you will never, ever, ever, ever, ever achieve an important result. It's almost like a crystal clear turquoise pool down there with all your buddies down there, Chris sucking on margaritas saying, dive on in, man. This is great. We got our excuse. We don't have to do anything. It takes a lot of internal fortitude to realize when you're here and take the keys to accountability to achieve what matters most. Have any of you in the last two weeks played the blame game even to a little degree? By show of hands, just be honest. We all have. If your hand's not up, you're in ignore-deny right now because we all go there. And it's not wrong to go below the water and play the blame game. Sometimes it's therapeutic to vent, get it out, to understand why. But what would be wrong? To live your life there, to have your mail forwarded to below the water. I mentioned my brother. He's 52 years old. To this date, if you ask Billy why he's never been able to achieve anything, it's because it's always somebody else's fault or something. I said, you're wrong. I said, listen, two people can be confronted with the exact same challenge, and they'll make different choices. One's going to say, nothing I could do, and they don't. They won't achieve anything. The other person will say, I know it's a tough situation. It's not really my fault, but I want that result. I'm going to go after it and get it. It's one thing we have total complete control over the choices we make and the decisions we make. And some people will do that. Some people won't, because oftentimes they don't want to put in the work to do it, or they don't own the result. Don't have to answer it, but just think about it. Within your team, how much time do you spend below the water or your team spend below the water focused on everything that went wrong and things you can't control? It's good to go there and understand, but then you've got to move forward. And so I'm going to show you a clip from Rocky 27. And in this clip, you'll see Rocky and his son are having this conversation, and his son is blaming Rocky for everything that's going wrong in his life. And just when you watch this, it's like two and a half minutes, but watch the body language and listen to some of the words that are used, and then we'll go forward from there. Yeah, well, I think I do. Now with all this going on, it's gonna be worse than ever. It don't have to be. No, sure it does. Why, you got a lot going on, kid. Well, my last name? That's the reason I got a decent job. That's the reason why people deal with me in the first place. Now I start to get a little ahead. I start to get a little something for myself. I'd hold you up and say to your mother, this kid's gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid's gonna be somebody better than anybody ever knew. And you grew up good and wonderful. It was great just watching every day, it was like a privilege. Did the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world, and you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you're no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame. Like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place, and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me or nobody, is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits and not point your finger saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him or her or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that. So, the next time someone comes up with an excuse to you, there's your rebuttal right there. But you heard this, Son, you know, blaming the big shadow, somebody else, something. No, it's, well, what are you gonna do about it? It's your choice, it's your life. I'll live my life. You need to make your own decisions. If it's tough, find a way around it. Move forward, find a way. But accountability is not a confession. It's these four keys. First is recognizing the totality of our realities, just like the collage picture earlier. You can only recognize realities when we're doing the four best practices that we've focused on there. Feedback, perspectives, talking about the elephant in the room, open and honest, candid communication. Once we know and recognize our realities, we need to accept ownership, even if it's not our fault as to why it's there or we can justify why it's not our fault. We need to accept ownership for the reality. And then once we accept ownership, create a solution and exercise action. Again, so simple, it's almost ridiculous, but that's it. And there's a little acronym that goes with it, R.A.C.E. But in addition to the four keys to accountability, there are 20 best practices. So there's five within each of the four keys. So under recognize realities, we talked about those. Under accept ownership, there's four or five, and there's five under each of the other two. So there's 20. And if you look at those up there, they're not complex. They're not brain surgery. They're actually very common sense things. And it's not about how well we do this stuff. It's about how often, it's about frequency. Individuals that do these things frequently usually achieve and exceed what they wanna go after. Same thing happens with teams and departments and organizations. Where you see these things happening frequently, they tend to always achieve and exceed what matters most. Here's the dictionary's definition of accountability. Subject to, having a report, plain justified. Does that strike you, Doug, as above the water, does that strike you, Doug, as above the water, engaged, or kind of below the water, blame game? Almost shouts out, if you don't deliver, deliver an excuse. It's like blame game. We would say this. There's two views of accountability. This is what you see in most organizations. We ask the question, who's accountable for failing to achieve the result? And it's usually after someone messes up, people see it as punitive, historic, and it's focused on blame, and we beat people over the head with it. What we just talked about here in this short session is first identify and get very clear, meaningful, measurable, memorable results, and it becomes everybody's accountability to help us achieve those. And you ask the question on the front end and engage people. Who's accountable to help us achieve these results? Well, everybody is because you're on the team. We hired you to help us achieve what's most important. The difference is you can't do anything about the result here, it's already in. Here, you can still impact it. There's a lot more to all of what we're talking about. I just wanted to give you some of the high-level concepts. But you let me know, this is about a 45-second video. Do you believe these two folks are above the water engaged or below the water blame game? Do you have a phone? No. Sorry. Somebody! Hello! There are two people stuck on an escalator and we need help. Now, would somebody please do something? Help! I don't believe this. You've got to be kidding me. I'm impressed. See, you heard what he said. Nothing we can do. That's the definition of below the water. Hopefully nobody is that degree below the water within any of your organizations, but we've seen some come pretty close. And don't tell anybody, but the name of that clip is federal employees. We would say this is the more effective definition of taking accountability. It's a personal choice to rise above one's circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving what matters most by, first of all, recognizing our reality, accepting ownership, creating a solution, and exercising action. What two words in that definition stand out to any one of you in this room? That's it. It's a choice. I cringe when I hear people say, oh, we've got to make them accountable. You can't make somebody accountable. You can hold them accountable in a positive, principled manner. You can't make anybody anything. It's always a personal choice, not just with accountability, it's with anything. So that's it. It's a personal choice. And how do we create that? Well, we have to increase, get clear on the results, and increase levels of ownership and desire to go after it. And there's a lot more to that, too, but we only had an hour. We could have spent four days on all this stuff. We could have talked about in this brief time we had together. You'll find that in your organization or department, if you're in your team, we move from externalizing change, meaning you all need to change, to internalizing change. I need to be the change I wish to see in others. I need to model it and lead it, because otherwise people aren't going to watch you or listen to you. From blaming others to taking accountability. From doing the job, what's on my job description, because it's everybody's job. From working in silos to true collaboration, and from telling people what to do to truly engaging their hearts and their minds. So here's a little kind of a jeopardy question. 92% of people that belong to health clubs and 88% of people that own exercise equipment, what do you think they have in common? They don't exercise. Those numbers astonish me, because they all recognize their reality. They even accepted ownership, and they even went as far as creating a solution. But they didn't do the most important thing, which was implement it. The reason I put that up there, accountability is not, you can't be, someone asked me last week, can you be partially accountable? I said, sure you can. It's called not being accountable. It's like taking a trip from Orlando to San Francisco. You can't stop in Kansas City and say, I'm there, because you're not. You have to put all four keys and look at the 20 best practices, not to be acing all of them, but you need to be doing them more frequently than you are today. I'll leave you with this. Only when you assume full accountability for your thoughts, feelings, actions, results, and beliefs, and outcomes, can you direct your own destiny. Otherwise, somebody or someone else or something else will. So I thank you for your time. Live and lead accountably. Thanks.

accountability

ownership

actions

outcomes

results

proactive solutions

communication

collaboration

personal choice