Where do you stand on Accountability Ladder?

SunEdison invested a lot into company-wide culture change program by the leadership of Matthew Herzberg and Ahmad Chatila with a lasting impact on most of us to switch to powerful mind-set by the workshops on lean thinking, being here now, mood elevator and my favorite accountability ladder as I mentioned in one my posts last year. Unfortunately, SunEdison's growth story ended prematurely before we complete our culture change initiative fully.

I returned to Europe after we closed Denver office and started at 阿西布朗勃法瑞公司（ABB） in April of that year, to lead a great and diverse team of supply chain professionals from every corner of the world. As I joined almost mid-year, all of the annual objectives in terms of cost reduction tender cost improvement, payment terms etc were already set few months ago and reflected in the company's state-of-art procurement management information system and I should recognise Daniel Helmig and especially Olga Krylova-Bruno corporate procurement team for creating and maintaining that complex and undebatable data base collecting live data from 100+different versions of SAPs globally.

A Litmus Test

To accelerate my learning on new organisation and bonding the team I ask my 15 direct report to fly (a couple of them drove from Mannheim though) to Frankfurt airport hotel to meet a couple of days for meeting, discussing and sharing in June within my first 100-day. The team was one of the best I have every work with and those 15 people are top-notch and seasoned procurement professionals. However, when we started to discuss targets and progress year-to-date, I immediately noticed a spectrum of awareness and state of minds. One of them said "which target? nobody assigned an objective" and few of them stated that " I did not really agreed on those" while some others provided "good" reasons why they cannot reach like "my spend will be way too low to achieve those savings" or "we cannot agree a longer payment term than legal limit" and some others were in wait and hope mode expecting exchange rate will help them out. they were convinced themselves that they were victimised. Almost one-third of them were aware of the targets and they had a plan to achieve. They presented the breakdown of actions and their impact to ensure they reach at their targets by the end of year.

As they speak I visualised a ladder and place them one a different rungs of the ladder automatically. In later meetings even we rated ourselves (identity) and assess others accountability perceived (perception) by the rest the team and discussed. Eventually team stepped up towards upper rungs in a short time. Congrats GI team, very proud of you!

Every rug is different mind-set and person standing there needs of support and this is the leader's primary role; pulling them up from powerless (something happened to them) to powerful.

Accountability is about silencing the thoughts that life is happening to you and embracing the fact that life is happening because of you - Simon Tickner

Every rung of the ladder deserves a detailed iteration and discussion for you to provide your options and sharing experiences you have in coming episodes.

To be continued...

What is a Powerful Mindset?

A powerful mindset empowers us to set and stay focused on intentions as accountable behavior. It keeps us from making self-destructive decisions. A powerful mindset will not be derailed from an outcome or goal, despite inevitable struggles or obstacles.

Seamless Connection to Lean Thinking

One of the 10 Commandments of Continuous Improvement (or Kaizen) is to have can-do attitude and my own translation is, instead of wasting your time and creativity to find excuses and convince yourself why it cannot be done, use your energy to think and collaborate to find a solution, at least try! as Levent Türk (??Mr.BTFA??) and David Bovis, M. npn separately iterated recently in their posts, accountability is the fuel of the sustainable improvement.

An attempt resulting a small improvement is much valuable than the best excuse to avoid any action and responsibility in my strong opinion.

Once people stop making excuses, stop blaming others, and take ownership...they are compelled to take action to solve their problems. They are better leaders, better followers, more dependable and actively contributing team members and more skilled in aggressively driving towards mission accomplished – Jicko Willink, Leif Babbin | Extreme Ownership

Climate Change: Wait and ... Hope!

Common trait of wait and hope rung is “As a powerless person, there is nothing I can do; therefore, I’ll wait for someone or something to intervene. Maybe everything will be fine?”

No! Change starts with you. Seriously. Every human on earth - even the most indifferent, laziest person among us - is part of the solution. Fortunately, there are some super easy things we can adopt into our routines that, if we all do it, will make a big difference.

For inspiration, please take a look at just a few of the many things in The Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World from UN to see what you can do to make an impact!

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/takeaction/

in which the actions you can take are clustered in to 4 levels of laziness, chose yours, from couch, at home, outside of home and at work. My favorite ones

From couch:

• Share, don’t just like! and Speak up!

At home:

• Air dry. Let your hair dry (I think this is something Dutch have been practicing this forever summer and winter ????) and naturally.
• Eat less meat, poultry, and fish. More resources are used to provide meat than plants and with 50% of waste, meat is the most wasted food category in the world.
• If you have the option, install solar panels in your house as their prices at record low level now. This will also reduce your electricity bill!
• Adjust your thermostat, lower in winter, higher in summer especially our friends in the US, folks, you do not need to freeze yourself during summer.

Until next episode, stay safe and accountable! wisely choose your PDCA cycle: Plan-Do-Check-Act but not Promise-Delay-Cancel-Apologise as it will be stick as a habit and the behavior.

Be the Change!

Please share your minds, thank you for your curiosity.