When I was around 18, I worked as a shift manager at McDonald’s Corporation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One of the assistant managers that helped me get promoted and then trained me was a man named Don Griffin. I admired Don because he cared about the work that he did and he cared about me and the rest of his employees. He was also very focused on producing results for the company. Don had a huge influence on my work ethic and basic management philosophy.

Over the years, I’ve never forgotten Don telling me “Performance talks, bullshit walks.” I could count on hearing it every time I tried to give Don an excuse for poor performance. That simple concept still influences how I interpret almost every interaction I have with people in my various work related roles.

I’m OK with folks dropping the ball and making occasional mistakes, and I’m OK with people not delivering as promised from time to time. We all do it – including me. But I have a very low tolerance for folks that won’t accept responsibility for their mistakes. I’ve never known anyone commit to fixing a problem without first admitting “I screwed up.”

Don still lives in the Tulsa area, and he and his wife have a son named Bret.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

I’d really appreciate your help with a survey I am conducting! Click here to learn more about participating.

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Big thanks once again to Dan McCarthy at Great Leadership for organizing another great Leadership Development Carnival. The heavy lifting for this one was done by Kevin Eikenberry at Leadership and Learning. My contribution this month is entitled “The Vice of Ingratitude.” I also really enjoyed “The Accountability Contagion,” by Jason Lauritsen, and “Suspend Your Seeing,” by Lolly Daskal.

Hope you take a few minutes to check out the carnival!

There are plenty of reasons for weeping and gnashing of teeth over the scandal unfolding at Penn State University this week. The firing of legendary head football coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier does not merit any lamentation.

What Jerry Sandusky did was evil, and he will pay for it.

But good men also do bad things sometimes, and when they do, they too must be held accountable for their poor decisions and actions. Paterno, Spanier, and others at Penn State were intoxicated with power and hubris and contributed to a culture where silence and compliance were valued above justice and courage.

The truth is this is just as much a failure of followership as it is a failure of leadership. I predict we are going to learn that plenty of people knew enough to warrant sounding a louder alarm about Sandusky but failed to do so.

If you have knowledge of abuse in your organization (e.g. sexual harassment) you have a responsibility to report it. If you are a leader and someone has the courage to report abuse to you, you better look into it, especially if the person accused of abusing or harassing others is also in a position of leadership or basic supervision.

It’s your responsibility to protect those you’ve been given the privilege to lead. If you fail at that responsibility, you forfeit the moral authority to lead. You earned your punishment.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below! And please take the time to fill out my new survey!

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I have the honor of speaking today at the EcSell Summit in Atlanta. I am the last speaker on the last day of the meeting, so my role is not just to provide some new learning but also to help folks bring together the learning from the previous day and think about how they will apply it when they return to work. My first point will be that if as a result of attending the conference you don’t find yourself doing something different to help your team improve it’s performance, then don’t return to this or any other conference. If you spend two days at a professional conference and don’t learn anything new, you need to confront the reason why, and I would suggest that looking in the mirror is the place to start.

Here are some of the other points I hope to make:

1. How is the wrong question. Work hard to understand why things work, especially why your team and it’s customers behave in certain ways. Understanding why affords you the opportunity to create competitive advantage rather than competitive parity.
2. For most businesses, growth through excellence should be the top priority. If your business is not growing, it’s probably dying. If you are not growing personally, you are probably decaying as well.
3. Your people are the key to the growth of your business. You are the key to the growth of your people. If you refuse to change and grow as a leader, you will constrain the growth of your people and likewise the growth of your business.
4. Your ability to learn faster than your competitors is your core performance technology.
5. Help your folks become interdependent partners with you at work. Help them become better at working autonomously and asking for and accepting help when they need it. Give them a reason to perform with passion and care about what they do and who they do it for and with.
6. Be REAL in all your relationships with people. Assume responsibility, invite others to share their expectations of you, make accountability start with a look in the mirror, and never stop learning and growing.

I hope during my time today I am able to change a few minds about the value of partnering with others at work to create a more healthy, responsible work environment where everyone can thrive.

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The fall semester starts today. I am teaching my regular organizational behavior class to MBA students, and for the first time ever I’m teaching a version of that same course entirely online in our new Executive MBA program.  I’m also teaching my first semester long course in personal branding to undergraduate students (I’ve been teaching this in the summer only for several years). I taught a version of that class for the first time in the spring to MBA students.

I’ve offered advice to students in two previous posts that you can find by clicking here and here. My new piece of advice is this: set high standards for yourself.

Don’t compare yourself to others. That is a recipe for complacency and mediocrity. Don’t set your standards based on explicit requirements, with a goal of doing just enough work to “pass”. When you get feedback that your effort was not good enough, you will be very unhappy. Instead of seeing yourself as the source of your own discomfort and displeasure, you will probably find someone else to blame (e.g. me).

Expect more than the norm from yourself and you simply won’t have anything to worry about – ever. External standards and expectations become irrelevant when you operate above them.

I framed this post as advice for student success, but setting high personal standards is a recipe for success in all aspects of work and life. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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If I owned my own business, or managed one for someone else, I would work very hard to only hire conscientious employees with an internal locus of control. I would also check their online profiles to see if they were good digital citizens. I’d be looking for employees with a specific personality profile and a track record of operating professionally personal accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. If they also had a current blog with good content and conversation around that content, it would be a home run.

I would then work very hard on a daily basis to impress the socks off of my conscientious and connected employees. After I had trained them to be good at their current jobs, I’d make sure they understood that I expected them to make decisions and take actions in an attempt to impress every one of our customers, every single time. I would expect them to partner with me and their peers to develop solutions on how to fix any broken systems and continually improve our ability to deliver products and service so good that our competitors will struggle to keep their current customers from becoming our loyal customers.

I’d provide my employees with social media guidelines that would help them make better decisions about how to represent our business in their online social networks. I would hold myself accountable for earning their good faith and positive word-of-mouth marketing away from work by the way I had treated them while they spent time with me at work. I’d ask them to keep their eyes and ears open for content and conversations online that might be opportunities (e.g. personal recommendation for our products and services) or threats (e.g. customer complaints) to our business. I’d recognize and reward good social business behavior, and quickly address with training and clarified expectations poor social business behavior.  I LOVE this excerpt from the TNT Social Media Guidelines:

I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of my competitors will continue to sleep through these times of tremendous change in the way we communicate. They will continue with their systems of haphazard hiring, inadequate training, and ridiculous expectations for their disengaged employees to impress their customers. They will be oblivious to the effects their turnover mill of disgusted yet hyper connected employees has on their ability to grow their business.

My competitors will probably continue to compare themselves to each other, thereby ensuring that they are all very comfortable in their mediocrity.  The bar is very low for social business awareness and savvy. No one cares more about your business than you and your employees. Why would you outsource the passion and experience of those voices to an agency? I would not.

This a time of tremendous strategic opportunity for any business with the leadership foresight to see the radical new potential of the empowered, enabled, and responsible social employee. Good social business is more than a marketing issue – it is a leadership imperative.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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My favorite word in the world is DAD. I love when my children call on me because I love being a father. Being their father is both the greatest responsibility and the greatest joy of my life.

Leadership is a journey. Almost a year ago I wrote this:

I do my best to assume full responsibility for myself and to help others along the way so that I can be better prepared to teach my children and grandchildren how to do the same. If I ever do something for you, know that I am doing it for me, so that ultimately I can do it for them.

My own personal journey is to live long enough for my grandchildren to know me well enough to remember my face, my voice, my hug, my smile, and my words for the rest of their lives. My final act of service to my children will be to help them lay a solid foundation in the lives of their children. God willing, I hope I get that chance. The dream of seeing the children of my children invigorates my life.

My own father died of a heart attack when I was 24, but he left when I was about 12 so he had very little influence on me, with the exception that I knew I wanted to grow up to be nothing like him. I’m not bitter at all about that, but it is what it is. My mother died of lung cancer 6 months before my father. My only regret in life is that my children never knew my mother, and that she never knew them. They would have loved her, and she would have loved them.

I turn 50 this week, and since both my parents died in their early 50s of poor health, my genetic clock is ticking. I work hard to stay healthy because my personal journey depends on it.

I’m going for a run this father’s day. My kids won’t notice or think anything of it, but I’m doing it for them. Sometime today, I’ll also take a nap.

What are the most important things you do daily to serve your children? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Accountability is the binding strength of interdependence. The two primary principles of real accountability are that it always starts with you and that it always seeks productive solutions rather than blame when challenges occur at work.

We are accountable for keeping our promise to assume full responsibility for performing our jobs with distinction, trying to continuously improve our jobs as we master them, and caring about what we do. We are accountable for performing as autonomously as possible, but knowing when and how to ask for help when we need it.

We are accountable for knowing what’s expected of us and understanding how we need to behave in order to meet and exceed those expectations. We are also accountable for understanding that our expectations of others, even our leaders, are legitimate, and we must have the courage to share our expectations with others. We can’t expect people to help us excel until we ensure they know what we need.

We are accountable for helping others keep their promises by being enabling and encouraging, rather than disabling and discouraging. As we master our jobs, we try our best to help those around us master and improve their jobs. As purposeful performers, we are driven to find ways we can inspire others to enact their best selves at work.

We are accountable for not looking the other way when things go wrong or when people behave in unexpected or inappropriate ways. We are accountable for seeking solutions rather than laying blame; however, we understand that sometimes solutions require tough choices.

A team or organization that is void of real accountability is one that is incapable of delivering remarkable performance. Interdependence is the walk of excellence, a walk that requires intention, foresight, effort, introspection, discipline, patience, persistence, openness, integrity, respect, trust, compassion, courage, commitment, growth, gratitude, and grace.

That’s what we are accountable for.

Did I miss anything? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Expectations are the framework of interdependent work relationships. They are built on a foundation of REAL responsibility and secured by the glue of REAL accountability.

We naturally expect our leaders to have expectations of their followers. Not all organizations and leaders engage in formal goal setting, but I would not give you a nickel for a leader that does not communicate clear performance and behavioral expectations, help followers achieve those expectations, reward them when they do and take timely and developmental corrective action when they don’t.

That’s status quo leadership. If you want to practice truly remarkable leadership, you have to take your relationships with people to the next level. This means inviting your folks to have higher expectations of you than you have of them, to share those expectations openly with you and everyone else on the team, and to collectively hold you accountable for those expectations.

Get your team together and ask them all to share openly what they need from you in order to excel at their jobs. You need to hear those expectations, and they need to hear each other’s expectations. When the team hears the full spectrum of things people expect from you as a leader, they will probably realize that you are going to need their help if you are going to have any chance of helping them by meeting those expectations. Openly sharing expectations is one way of moving folks on the team toward assuming even more self-responsibility, which is the foundation of interdependence.

You have to work hard to make it safe for your folks to share their expectations of you openly, because you also have to make it unacceptable for them to not hold you accountable for high expectations. Keep in mind that if you go this route, you will be modeling for them a style of leadership that they probably have not seen often if at all. Be patient, be gracious, but be unequivocally resolute.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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