You must realize that your business decisions and actions will affect many people and you will allows be held accountable to others. By Gary Shotton #000170

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Accountability

By Gary Shotton

Hello, my name is Gary Shotton and I’m a part of, and founder of the organization that’s putting on these videos and these audio teachings under the title of Inspiring Better Business(IBBTalks). Today we’re going to talk about the subject of accountability. I’m going to give you a little definition in a minute, and kind of give you an idea of what I mean when I talk about accountability. We’re going to talk about some of the policies that we’ve developed in our company of accountability, and some of the good things that have happened. And maybe some of the things that didn’t work out so well, and the kind of things that happen when we didn’t have accountability, we didn’t know something was happening, and we didn’t hold other people accountable for their actions. So, we’re going to wrap up with just a fallen solid understanding that people must take responsibility for what they’ve done, that’s being accountable for our actions.

So, accountability I think it just kind of comes down very simply taking responsibility for what you do. I must take responsibility for what I do. In my case, we’ll talk about it more in a bit. But I must take responsibility for things that maybe I didn’t even do but somebody and my company did. In other words, I can’t go to my customer and say well Joe over here he was late to work on Friday, and because he was late to work then he had a bad attitude, and you know he produced these bad parts. Now he’s the guy that did this. I would never do that to my customer. Because I’m responsible. Why did I let Joe get to work late? Why did I let him have a problem? I have responsibility. I’m accountable.

So, let’s talk about the attitude or culture of our company. You see, we have to hold people accountable and ultimately we want them to hold themselves accountable. In other words, we want to create an atmosphere that we say, “Hey! you know you need to be watching after yourself”. We need to get past this point that the company is going to cover for you all the time. So, we want people that become a kind of take responsibility for themselves all the time. That’s something we try to observe when we hire somebody. I don’t currently do all the hiring, but over the years I’ve hired lots of people. When I start talking with them and they start talking about their last boss, why did you leave your last company? And they said well you don’t understand this boss, and they start just ranting and raving. Start telling all the bad things that the previous company was done to them, and why it was unfair and unjust. You know what, that’s the biggest black mark, the biggest reason I wouldn’t hire that person. Because I will guarantee at some point he will leave our company, and he’s going to have those same bad words about me. Because I didn’t listen to him, I didn’t take care of him, I didn’t provide him whatever he needed to be successful and so it was the company’s fault. Probably his fault, he didn’t take accountability. He wasn’t accountable for his actions, he wasn’t accountable to come to work on time, to be an aggressive learner, to be engaged at work, he wasn’t accountable to do more than what was expected. You know there’s just something about that, that I wouldn’t accept. I’m going to take a count like 1, 2, 3, 4 of what you’ve done while you’re working for me. So, let’s find people that will take a count of what they’re doing themselves before I need to take a count of what they’re doing and they make the corrections before I need to make the corrections. That’s accountability.

We’re not the police department around here, we’re not hiring enough. When I joke about that, but I say that to our people. You know we’re not in hiring enough inspectors, to go around and check on everybody, make sure while our workers are trying to hide something from us, they make a bad part, they know they cannot slip that bad part into the pilot into the shipment and hope nobody finds it. That is not acceptable. So we wouldn’t probably never catch it, and more than likely the customer may never see it. We don’t know but that’s not who we are. We must be accountable for when we make a mistake. We don’t expect perfection, but we do expect honesty. You know what we’re dealing with people about being accountable? We want them to know that we’re not rude, and we’re not difficult, we’re not shooing them out, we’re not making them feel low, but we go around and we make things good by checking on what’s going on and knowing what’s happening.

Here are a couple of real examples of that in the manufacturing business. People don’t always do what’s expected, they do what’s inspected. That’s pretty common terminology. They don’t always do what’s expected. Many times do better when we have an inspection process. Frankly those people they’re doing a great job of inspecting themselves. They appreciate an inspection process. They don’t mind that. So, in our case, we’re always looking for efficiencies, and efficiencies come when we’re looking for better ways of doing things. Efficiencies come when we make procedures and processes, and so, in the process of creating a company we’re always working to improve things, always working for the result.

So, on a given day we have a schedule, we have jobs, we have documentation because it’s automated. We can look at the end of the day whether or not a person made what was expected as part of the time of their job should take. Let me give an example; we have parts that we figure that we know or expect them to be made in 15 minutes. So, what that means to us that in one hour there should be four completed parts on the table or the pallet in front of them. That would mean in 10 hours for easy numbers, that would mean there are 40 parts completed. We do and work hard at it and working towards it to say you know “Why didn’t you have 40 parts today?” That’s holding them accountable. And maybe there’s a good reason. They don’t mind that if we handle it with enough instruction and encouragement, not just choose somebody out. Because we must find out why we didn’t make our schedule on time. Maybe the estimated time was wrong, that’s possible. Maybe something broke down that day. Maybe they ran into some hard material that will never run in before. There’s always a reason for it. So, we don’t come blaming them, we asked them to show account of why we didn’t complete the number of parts in that given time.

We have a process here in a business term called layered process audits. Now that maybe sounds like a lot of mouthful, but we have layers of processes and then we audit those. You know almost all fast-food restaurants have a store manager, and then we have a regional manager, or our district manager that comes works with the store manager and they look at the numbers. How many did they sell? Is it in line with our expectations? So, in our case, we have things that need to be improved on. So, when we find a way of improving something, we change the system to improve that. Once we change that system, we try to think of something that would make sure we don’t stop doing what we just improved on. Case in point; if we find a better way of doing something, if we’re not careful and we think we fixed that, if we’re not careful sometimes maybe two months, three months later, we slip back and stop doing what we thought we’d already fixed in that particular case. This audit it’s an internal audit. Individuals are auditing each other from different departments. The quality department is maybe monitoring our gear Department, the gear department may be monitoring our machine Department, machine department would be then maybe that week or that month auditing the quality department. Because we need to know that we are accountable to follow the same basic procedures. Of course change if it’s not going to be a good thing, we change all the time.

I hope this is helpful. As the owner, I take responsibility for what happens in my company. You would not hear me at my customer talking about how somebody else did a bad job and why they were the reason that we flop. Nope. I’m responsible. I also follow up with a process or procedure to assure my customer that we’re doing everything possible within our power to create a system so that doesn’t happen again, or at least doesn’t happen regularly. Are we taking good accountability ourselves? Are we taking good accountability in our company? We can all do better. We can do better I know that. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Accountability is a part of having a positive and profitable company.