Agreements Make Organizations Work

An agreement is an arrangement between two or more people in which both participants concur on an arrangement, or consent to do or deliver something.  If you agree to go to lunch with someone, the two of you have concurred on a lunch date, time, and location. If you agree to take a job with an employer, you consent to (accept) the job description as a definition of your job responsibilities.

Agreements exist “in between” the parties involved.  If you and I have an agreement with each other, then the agreement is “between” the two of us, i.e., it belongs to you as much as it belongs to me.  This also means that if the agreement is broken, no matter which one of us fails to show up for lunch, it involves both of us: one of us broke the agreement, and the other is left waiting at the agreed location.

There are benefits for keeping agreements and consequences for breaking them.  Some are more significant than others: benefits of keeping agreements might range from an increase in trust to gaining valued personal or professional rewards. Consequences of broken agreements could extend as far as losing a job, a promotion, or a valued relationship. There are several negative byproducts that almost always accompany broken agreements, however, including resignation, cynicism, and resentment.

What makes agreements particularly important is that they are the basis for performance, results, and accomplishment in organizations of all kinds.  Two quite simple observations:

1. People make agreements all the time, sometimes with a formal and explicit contract and other times informally with a nod of the head or an “OK, will do” message on their Blackberry, and
2. When people keep their agreements, meetings happen, results are produced, and services are delivered – on time, accurately, and completely.

In other words, when people keep their agreements, things work. When they don’t, they don’t.

Managing People vs. Managing Agreements

What gets done in an organization depends on people keeping their agreements. So, it is not surprising that much of management theory and research has focused on trying to get people to do what they have agreed to do.  This has shifted the focus of management to the people themselves, asking: What makes people keep their agreements?

Management theorists have asked, “What will get people to do the high-quality job they committed to when they accepted the position, the project, or the assignment?” One answer has been to develop compensation packages that will “motivate” people to do their jobs well. Another answer is to use various performance management systems to support people in honoring their agreements. Both answers focus on managing the people, through compensation or performance systems.

An alternative and more direct way to getting things accomplished is to manage the agreements, not the people. You may not have any control over compensation systems, or performance management systems, but you can always manage the agreements that are critical for your own success. The point is to focus only on changing the agreements, not the human beings involved. (This is good news, since changing people is a specialty that is not a strong suit for most of us.)

Step 1. Make Your Agreements Explicit

Most of our agreements in the workplace are invisible or transparent. We only notice them when they are broken, i.e., when we have a problem. Job descriptions that are vague, or assignments given hastily, often leave questions about exactly what the agreement really is. Many managers are clearer about making their lunch appointments than they are about turning over a project to a staff member or colleague.

To make agreements explicit, take the time to specify:

a)   What results and outcomes are required or expected,

b)   When they are due,

c)    Why it matters to you, or the goals of the team or department,

d)   Who else could be involved in some way,

e)   Where resources and results could or should be obtained or delivered, and

f)    How the work should be performed, in the event that there are specific requirements for processing.

In other words, answer the “journalist questions” as clearly as you can. This makes it possible for everyone involved to know, at the end of the day, whether an agreement has been kept or not.

Step 2. Track Your Agreements

Peter, a manager I know, was frustrated by the lack of progress on a change he was managing.  He complained that things weren’t getting done as expected and that he was at risk of falling behind on the schedule his manager had given him.  When I asked him, “Which people are not doing the things you asked for, and what exactly are they not doing?” he could not answer the question. He said, “I don’t keep track of all the things I ask people to do. I just don’t have that kind of time!”

The lesson: Maintain an up-to-date “Agreement Tracker” – a list of all the agreements you have with people who have promised to deliver results to you, and people to whom you have promised to deliver results. If your agreements:

1. Are important to your success,
2. Involve results that will happen over time, i.e., are not resolved with a simple email or phone call, or
3. Include interim results that are critical to long-term success,

then they belong on your Agreement Tracker. You do not need a complex spreadsheet. Your Agreement Tracker should include (or refer to) the agreed specifics on What-When-Why and Who-Where-How for each important agreement.

My observation is that keeping a current record of agreements is actually a time-saver, not a time-waster. Your Agreement Tracker allows you to see what agreements you have with other people and groups are currently outstanding, and when the next action or result is anticipated.

Step 3. Follow Up, Early and Often

Why keep an Agreement Tracker? It’s so you can stay alert to the progress of performance on each agreement. You owe something to someone? Someone owes something to you? Your Agreement Tracker shows you Who to talk with, When to talk with them, and What result you need to reference. Manage your agreements by knowing what they are, who they are with, and when to talk to them.

Communication about your key agreements is the lever that will ensure your successful performance.  Follow-up conversations don’t wait for the due date to arrive – they anticipate the due date, and confirm whether the agreement is on track. This serves three purposes. First, it reinforces the importance of the agreement; Second, it lets you know if things are going as planned or if there are issues that need someone’s attention; Third, it lets you update your Agreement Tracker to alert you to the next time communication will be needed.

Follow-up: Are things going according to plan? Are there problems on the horizon? You want to know early. Touch base on your most important agreements early – and often – to take the pulse of progress and perils. The purpose here is not to micromanage anyone, but to support accomplishment for everyone involved.

Here are some ideas on the kinds of things you might say in some of your follow-up conversations:

• The next project due date is approaching and I want to be sure that you have everything you need in order to get everything done on time.
• I know that I have a report due to you at the end of this week, and I thought I would check to see if there is anything else you’d like me to include before I finalize it?
• The IT manager had a delay in deliveries this week, so I would like to talk with you about whether that might impact our agreement for the system upgrade.

Managing agreements is about working with people – after the agreements are made – to fulfill the agreements successfully. It includes getting and giving alerts regarding potential problems, and updates on any necessary modifications. Follow-up conversations are the opportunities to work with people to ensure their success as well as your own.

Conclusion

The primary difference between managing people and managing agreements is where you focus your attention.  When you shift your attention away from the characteristics and attributes of people, and toward the state and condition of your agreements with them, you are paying attention to performance, not personality or preferences.  Are the agreements alive and well, or have people forgotten about them?  If people have forgotten, what needs to be done to put the agreement back into effect?

Managing agreements means that you establish clear agreements, keep track of them, and have periodic follow-up conversations to learn how things are going. It is a way to avoid unpleasant surprises, and it also works well to develop other people in being more accountable, more aware of the importance of their agreements, and better attuned to their role in overall workplace performance.

This was reprinted with permission from The Great Managing Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 23, published by Critical Path Consultants.

I encounter this complaint from the managers in my MBA classes as well as those I interact with in the “real world”. They insist that a lack of accountability is the primary source of the problems they have in their organizations.  Laurie (my management consultant wife) encounters it with her clients, some of whom maintain that the reasons for inefficiency and poor communication is because people are not being accountable.

It’s as if “accountability” has become the new mantra of managers or the new solution for whatever problems leaders might be having getting things accomplished.  “If people were more accountable, we would be much better off,” they say.

Unfortunately, the call for “more accountability” is often one sided, focusing on the lack of accountability in others, and fails to recognize that there are two sides to accountability: the “holder” side and the “producer” side.  The two sides are located in different places and both are necessary to have any accountability actually perform.

Holder Accountability is the responsibility of a person who wants something, asks for it, and “holds” that commitment until the result is produced. A person with Holder Accountability might be a manager who wants her team to handle customer service calls, or a supervisor who wants his crew to repair equipment. The manager or supervisor (or parent, or friend) requests what s/he wants and then checks back at the end of the day or week or month to see what portion of the request is completed. The manager holds people to account by asking the customer service team or the repair crew to account for their work, their performance, and their results.

When your boss gives you an assignment and then asks you questions regarding its status, she is demonstrating Holder Accountability, holding you to account for the assignment.  Similarly, if you tell a colleague you will do something for them by Friday and they ask you about it on Thursday or Friday (or the following Monday), they are holding you to account for what you said you would do.

The second side of accountability is Producer Accountability. It is the accountability of the person or group who will be producing the results or doing the work: the customer service phone team and the equipment repairmen who are doing their jobs are demonstrating Producer Accountability. They were assigned to do a job and they are doing it, and they will report on the status and outcomes as needed.

There is no “accountability” without both halves of the equation. If there is nobody making a clear request for something to be done and who cares enough about that request to follow through and see that it actually is performed, there is no Holder Accountability. If there is nobody who accepts the request to perform the work, there is no Producer Accountability. Getting “more accountability” in an organization requires accountability on both sides of the table: manager and staff, boss and worker, or any person who asks for something from another and the person(s) they ask.

Someone else can impose Holder Accountability on us, but only we can impose Producer Accountability on ourselves.  When my doctor gives me a diet to reduce my cholesterol, I don’t think about that as any kind of accountability – until I go back the next year for another blood test. She looks at the blood test results and she can tell whether I’ve kept my part of the bargain or not.  Producer Accountability is completely self-generated, and we have only ourselves to look to if it is missing. My doctor will hold me accountable by saying, “Your cholesterol has improved, but only a little bit. How much did you follow the diet?”

Authentic Producer Accountability says that we own the work we have to do – it is ours.  It’s like saying, “I will look to see what needs to be done to accomplish this, and I will do it. I will get the help and the resources needed, and if I can’t find them, I’ll get back to you and ask for your guidance in how to take the next steps.”

So, what is it that leaders are really calling for when they call for “more accountability” in their organizations? More often than not they want more Producer Accountability.  They want employees to show initiative in taking on work, to own their work, and to do what needs to be done without constant supervision and without excuses.

But here’s the catch: if a leaders does not provide a clear request with a visible outcome that permits a follow-up, they are not living up to their side by providing any Holder Accountability.  Furthermore, if a manager has no commitment to holding people to account, and following up with them regarding their performance, workers will eventually assume the managers doesn’t really cares how, when, or if the work gets done.

It is wishful thinking to expect people to generate a high level of Producer Accountability in the absence of Holder Accountability.  The key to building a culture and organization of “more accountability” starts by creating the conditions for authentic Holder Accountability.  In other words, if managers want more accountability, then they will want to learn how to assign work in a way that makes what people are accountable for clear and then hold them to account. Good Holder Accountability gives people a reason to develop Producer Accountability: with a great manager, I’ll maintain or improve my work performance even when I’m in a bad mood.

How can you improve your Holder Accountability?  Here are some ideas:

1.            Spell out the conditions and measures that must be met in order for the assignment to be considered successful.  People need to know what the job is, and you need to know how to tell if they did it. No fair saying, “Do a better job.” You’ve got to say how you – and they – will measure success.  People need to know the “what”, and if needed the “how”, they will be held to account for.

2.            Provide specific time lines and due dates for when you’ll be checking back with them. They need to know YOUR timeline for your Holder Accountability, and when they will be expected to give you a status report or a result.  They need to know the “when” they will need to account for.

3.            Follow through on a consistent and regular basis, such as weekly debrief meetings in which people have to report on the status of all their work and make projections about what they will accomplish in the following week. Holder Accountability is all about reliable follow-up on assignments and is where holding them to account actually happens.

As to building Producer Accountability, here are some tips:

1.            Be sure you assign work to people who have the ability to do the job.  When you give a work assignment to someone you know will fail, it will not build their Producer Accountability. It will build resentment, distrust, and cynicism. If you have people who can’t do the job, you may have a training problem but you don’t have an accountability problem.

2.            Be sure people have all the information and resources they need to succeed. You can’t expect people to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. You’ll build Producer Accountability by telling people that you want them to be specific about what resources they need, to assemble as much as they can themselves, and to come to you when they need help.

3.            Give people timelines, milestones, and deadlines. It will support them in good planning to meet your expectations.  No fair saying, “Do it as soon as possible.” Performance is a function of time, and if people don’t have deadlines, they can’t organize their resources to deliver what you want.

When you strengthen your own Holder Accountability, you also strengthen other people’s Producer Accountability.  If you want more accountability in your workplace, start building it!

The idea behind offering incentives is that they make a task or activity more attractive than it might otherwise be and thus increase the likelihood that people will do it.  But, as Dan Pink indicates and the research supports, extrinsic offerings don’t always work and in fact may actually make the activity less attractive.  But does this mean that incentives don’t work?  No, it means that what you offer someone as an incentive may not be an incentive.  Whether or not something is an incentive depends on its effect on the person to whom it is offered.  Incentives are meant to incent – to arouse or encourage.  If they don’t do this, then they aren’t incentives even if you call them incentives.

Whether or not something is an incentive, therefore, depends on the person to whom it is offered.  To offer workers who want more money more time off is unlikely to occur as an incentive to them.  In fact, you are likely to hear someting like “What kind of incentive is that?”, or “That’s no incentive?”  Since whether something is an incentive and works as incentive depends on the person to whom it is offered, using incentives is a tricky business.  In fact, many managers have found attempting to use incentives frustrating because they can’t seem to find “what works” and what they can provide isn’t always sufficient.  This is one reason why books on recognition, such as Make Their Day! Employee Recognition that Works, have become popular because they focus on things managers can do other than offer incentives.

One way around this issue is to ask people who are hesitant to do soemthing you want done “What would it take for you to do this?” and then determine whether or not you are willing to “pay the price”.  Another way around this issue is to build the level of integrity in the relationship so that people are accountable for what they say and know that they will be held accountable for what they say.  Surprising as it may seem, most people truly value their word and do not want to gain a repuation for being someone who “says yes, but does no”.  Giving people the opportunity to operate consistent with their word, and then operating consistent with their word, reduces the “guessing game” of incentives.  Then, when you do want to use incentives, you can ask people and they will tell you what will work.

First a brief (very brief) introduction to networks.  A network is an interconnected system of things where the “things” are represented by nodes and the connections between them are represented by “lines”.  Nodes, for example, can be individuals, teams, groups, departments, divisions, other organizations, cities, states, countries, etc.  Lines, on the other hand, indicate the connections that are “in between” the nodes and include such things as communications, products, services, transactions, trust, friendship, etc.  A road map of the United States is a network showing all the towns and cities and the roads that connect them.

In traditional management approaches, the focus is on the nodes.  As a result, managers try to get the best possible node (e.g., most talented person, team, or group) on the assumption that if the node is good, then performance will be good.  Traditional management treats the node as king.

In networks, however, it is the connection between nodes that becomes king.  It makes no difference how good the node is if it does get what it needs when it needs it or does not deliver what it needs to when it needs to.   Michael Jordon may be the greatest basketball player of all time.  But no matter how talented he was, if he did not get the ball, he could not score points.  His scoring performance was a function of connections.

In cancer treatments, one of the ways to kill a tumor is to cut the blood vessels that feed it.  Cut the connections, and the tumor cannot do its thing.  The same is true for every node in an organization.  Disrupt the connections, and node performance will drop.

If you doubt this, then consider what happens to your performance when people get things to you late (if at all) or get you things that are incomplete, inaccurate, or of poor quality.  No matter how good you are at what you do, if you don’t get what you need, you can’t perform up to your ability.

Success in an era of networks depends on managing the connections, not the nodes.  When things don’t work, focus on the connections not the nodes.  Trying to motivate people, for example, is focusing on the nodes in hope that they will deliver what they are supposed to.  An alternative is to focus on the connections and improving them.  It is a relatively simple shift, but it is incredibly powerful in terms of the results and outcomes you can produce.