Own It!

You mentioned that accountability is something that you feel is very important to measure in performance. Describe one leadership practice you have established to hold people accountable on your team.

So first of all, accountability means you give people a job and expect them to complete it and do it in a timely effective manner. If they need help, they come back to you and say, "I got some issues here. What can I do? How can you help me achieve that?" That's the other thing is that I am not a micromanager. I am not. I believe that if I'm paying you X amount of dollars, and I've laid out the plan for what we're trying to achieve and we agree on it, then I expect you to deliver. And if you can't, you're going to come back to me. That's what I mean accountable. It's shared but it's also yours, but you have a shared part of it in being able to communicate to me why you cannot achieve what we agreed upon.

You need to own it.

Got to own it. But you also, if you can't, if you can't complete it on the time and the way in which we agreed upon, then it's your responsibility to say, "Kevin, here's where I'm having difficulty. Here's what I need." Do that. An example, we were doing a project last year, and one of the folks that I was dealing with said, she said it was going to take about a year and a half to do it. I said we need it by September, and that was like eight months. Person looked at me and they're, "Oh, my god." I said, Now, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go back and tell me what you need to get it done by September. Let's do that. I know I'm pushing you, but I want you to tell me if you have to get it done by September, what are the other kinds of things that you need to have, team resources to get it done? That's the way we want to approach it.