Bolstering Accountability

How do you ensure accountability – that metrics are met and commitments are fulfilled? And can you highlight one leadership practice that you have established to hold people accountable on your team?

Well, obviously, we have a culture here to pay for performance. I mean, that’s the fact, you know, 50% of the pay is all performance-driven, not just the sales force, which can be 60, or it can be 20, depending on what role you have, but in the end, the principle of pay for performance, because ultimately, we have to deliver value. And our value is both to customers and to our shareholders.
And that has worked very well, in the sense of when we construct a plan, we obviously construct a return to shareholders, a growth for our employees in the journey. Meaning if we deliver that value to shareholders, everybody should get the benefit of it, right. The way I do it is basically I sit down with each of my direct reports every quarter, and I show them where we are against the objectives we establish together.
And then there is a component of discretion. The discretion includes things like diversity and inclusion, but at the same time, in my view, it also includes how we get things done. But the process is very simple, you know, normally we have three pages. One is the three objectives. Number two is feedback from the peers, because eventually we are a team, right? We win or lose as a team, not just individual performance, and then what is next? So that we get always aligned, calibrated to what comes next. And that process works fairly well.