To learn the best practices involved in lengthier, more complex accountability discussions, we asked the plant manager if there were any supervisors in the building who actually did hold others accountable in a way that worked, and if so, would he allow us to watch them in action?
At first, he pointed out that his supervisors fell into two camps. You had those whom he described as running a “country club.” These were individuals who were so pleasant that they created good morale, but they only achieved mediocre results because they rarely held others accountable. In the second camp you’d find leaders who could solve problems all right, but only by demeaning and threatening others in a way that led to low morale and eventually to poor results.
But then the plant manager thought of a few individuals who routinely found a way to hold others accountable, and they did so in a manner that not only solved the problem but also improved their relationship. They found a way to be both honest and respectful — and rarely had to invoke their formal authority to get things done.
And thus began our first attempt to study “positive deviants”—people who struggle in the same circumstances as others but find a way to produce remarkably better results. In a world filled with failure, we learned to find a handful of individuals who succeed in the face of danger, observe them in action, identify exactly what they do that differentiates them from their less successful peers, and then teach these unique actions to others. In short, we came up with a plan to study the best, share the wealth, and eventually infect an entire organization with healthy behavior.
It was worth a shot. If we could identify accountability skills that actually worked and taught them to others, we predicted that people would watch the skills in action and eventually change their mental math. In time, with new and positive expectations, they would step up to accountability discussions as a matter of course.
For months we compared the actions of positive deviants with everyone else’s actions. Eventually we succeeded. One by one, action by action, we began to identify skills that positive deviants routinely employed as they stepped up to others and held others accountable — skills that others failed to use.
For instance, suppose that one of the individuals you’re observing in action points out an infraction to a coworker and the offending party doesn’t appear the least bit motivated to change his behavior.
“What’s the big deal?” he asks with a look of defiance.
In response to this question, poor performers launched into lectures or threats. Positive deviants took a different path.
Or perhaps the coworker suggests that he faced an ability barrier:
“I tried, but, dude, I couldn’t figure out how to use the tracking software.”
In this case, the majority of people you see in action immediately jumped in and showed their colleagues what to do. Positive deviants weren’t so quick to leap in with an answer.
On occasion, the coworker who had let them down dug in and became defensive, even disrespectful.
“Who died and left you in charge?”
With the majority, out came newer and even more pedantic lectures. Not so with positive deviants.
Skill by skill, our research team identified the insights and actions of those who routinely succeeded in the face of failure and then combined them into a training program that we used to teach accountability to hundreds of thousands of individuals worldwide. Eventually, in an effort to share these best practices with as many people as possible, we wrote this book.
After decades of tireless research, we have now identified about two-dozen accountability skills that, when used at the right time and delivered in the right fashion, separated positive deviants from everyone else. The questions remaining were (1) when taught, would people actually use the skills, and (2) if they did, would doing so yield better results?
The impact of teaching others the actions of positive deviants has been astounding. Of course, many people simply read a few passages from our work and walk away, changing nothing. Others make a feeble attempt to employ a skill or two, and to nobody’s surprise, they too fail to improve. But when individuals (or even entire work groups or organizations) read, practice, and routinely use the best skills modeled by positive deviants, the gains have been enormous.
For instance, after we spent a year teaching best practices at the manufacturing plant where accountability was reported to have been lost, people started dealing with infractions in a direct and professional way, and profitability increased by over $40 million a year. When asked how this had taken place, the plant manager explained, “Our leaders now talk early on and solve problems before they grow out of control — and they do so in a way that not only solves the problem but also strengthens the relationship.”
After completing our first project in the “land of no accountability,” we worked in dozens of other organizations where we were able to track the specific relationship between holding accountability discussions and key performance indicators. Here are a few of our findings taken from VitalSmarts case studies:
• Hospitals that influence employees to embrace better ways of holding each other accountable for protocol infractions, such as failing to wash on the way in and out of patients’ rooms, routinely move from the typical 70 percent compliance rate to nearly a perfect score. (On two occasions, the post-training scores were so high that compliance monitors doubted the results, repeated the analysis, and found that indeed, after being taught specific methods and scripts for dealing with protocol violations, hand-washing conformity reached nearly 100 percent.)
• After turning the use of crucial accountability skills into new norms for employees of a large telecom company, we found that an increase of 18 percent in the use of the skills corresponded with over 40 percent improvement in productivity.
• When an IT group improved crucial accountability practices by 22 percent, quality improved over 30 percent, productivity climbed almost 40 percent, and costs plummeted almost 50 percent, all while employee satisfaction swelled 20 percent.
• A project with a large defense contractor revealed that for each 1 percent increase in the use of the company’s crucial accountability skills, there was a $1,500,000 gain in productivity. Nine months after beginning the training, employees improved 13 percent. You do the math.
• Perhaps the most interesting finding came in the form of personal career success. We learned that in order to find people who were good at holding others accountable, we simply needed to ask leaders who their most valued employees were. Almost without exception the top-valued employees selected by the leaders were positive deviants who had learned how to hold others accountable. Learn how to hold others accountable, learn how to bring predictability and trust into an organization, and you’ll be counted as one of your company’s most valued assets.
So if you want to peer out into the distant and murky future, stand on the shoulders of giants. If you want to learn the skills routinely employed by individuals who effectively hold others accountable — and equally important, enjoy the results that come from creating a culture of accountability — stand on the shoulders of positive deviants. We (the authors) have seen enormous benefits in our own lives as we’ve worked to turn insights gleaned from brilliant communicators into personal, lifelong habits.