3 Mistakes Owners and Managers Make While Trying to Create a Culture of Accountability

One of the biggest challenges small business owners face today is creating a culture where they and their team members can be held responsible for getting the right kind of results. For example, you and your team might project that with current market demands and the right mix of new clients, your company should be able to bring in an additiional 15 percent in business this year.

Related: 4 Steps to Building a Culture of Accountability

The challenge is, how do you get everyone, and I mean everyone,to totally commit to making this focus a reality?

Along the way, there are plenty of mistakes business owners may make that will sabotage this goal, including three of the biggest:

1. Not including personal accountability in the rules of the game
2. Being vague or general with the goals for their company.
3. Setting too many boundaries.

1. Not including personal accountability in the rules of the game 

The obvious implication here is that accountability by each and every member of the company has to be a core value.

I remember how, in one business I worked at early in my career, the owner allowed certain salespeople to cheat the leads system. For whatever reason, he felt that it did no harm to let a few people solicit and sell to accounts that had been sold and serviced by other sales representatives. Did that practice infuriate those salespeople who lost sales to the dishonest sales reps? You bet.

But, even though the majority of the sales reps were honest and ethical, they were powerless to do anything about the situation. The owner ignored requests to correct the recalcitrant and fraudulent behavior. Because, as long as the company got the sale, he did not care who got the commission. 

A better way to prevent this predicament from becoming an issue at all would have been to institute and enforce a policy that prohibited such dishonest behavior. As management consultants Roger Connors and Tom Smith say, “When people are accountable to themselves and each other, trust improves, and walls fall down.”

2. Being vague or general with goals for the company

In short, the owner here is not clearly communicating what the specific goals are. 

In another company I worked with, the owner, from time to time, would set sales goals that were unrealistic. He believed that if he could just pump up his troops, they would believe it was possible to achieve his improbable goals. One of the limiting factors, though, was that he didn’t give his salespeople additional tools, funding or the guidance needed to make those sales goal achievable.

Related: Build Accountability to Create an Unstoppable Business 

The result was that people tried, but soon became frustrated by, the lack of direction and the disjointed efforts of the other sales team members; then they gave up.

In many instances like the above illustration, the business owner is a big-picture type of person and doesn’t waste time looking at the details, so specific goals are not set. Owners like this have the misbelief that if they set big, hairy, audacious goals, they will achieve them. They believe in the saying, “If we build it, they will come.”

The sad part, though, is that “they” (the customers) ain’t really coming, and the business owner has no clue. So, the owner ends up blaming the economy, the sales team or even the U.S. president, but never himself (or herself). Team members sense that their leader may be fearless, but they also see someone who's clueless in leading the charge.

In other words, they realize that this person doesn’t really have all the answers despite feigning otherwise. Don’t let this happen to you, or your company or organization.

3. Setting too many boundaries.

This is the direct opposite of the second mistake but can be just as fatal. The key here is to give your team the ability and authority to be creative in achieving the results you want. Provide support and encouragement, but do not micromanage the situation. In other words, do not be overbearing. Give your people room to make mistakes and the freedom to learn from them. 

One way you can sabotage your team’s efforts when allowing them this kind of freedom to fail or succeed is through your body language or verbal insinuations that can up-end any positive and creative problem-solving. If your team's efforts result in a success, give positive feedback. If a failure occurs, give corrective encouragement and guidance. Just remember: A culture of accountability starts with you.

8 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks

If you ask 10 CEOs to tell you what marketing is, you’ll probably get 10 completely different answers. And get this. If you ask their marketing veeps the same question, you’ll get the same result.

Marketing defies definition. It confuses everyone, even those who do it for a living. I know that because that was my job in a former life, and I’m the first one to admit that I never considered myself an expert. Besides, my brethren could never agree on what their job titles meant. They were all over the map.

As I explain in my new book, Real Leaders Don’t Follow: Being Extraordinary in the Age of the Entrepreneur, marketing has always had a perception problem. It’s truly ironic that the field responsible for branding has a brand identity that’s about as unambiguous as Facebook’s 58 gender options.

And yet we live in a commercial world where consumers and businesses make buy decisions based to a large extent on a field that nobody seems to understand very well, not even those who make big bucks doing it. Don’t you find that just a little bit unsettling?

Now you know why I quit marketing. I was tired of explaining to every CEO, board, and management team what marketing is and why it’s so important to the success of the company. I felt like Sisyphus, the sinner condemned to roll a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down, again and again, for eternity. I always wondered what I’d done so terribly wrong in a prior life to deserve that.

Related: How and Why You Need to Make Your Own Luck

If you find marketing to be somewhat elusive, don’t feel too badly; you’re in good company. And while I intend for this to be instructive, not critical, there’s a very good chance that your company’s marketing sucks. Here’s why:

You have no idea what it is.

In his seminal book, Marketing High Technology, legendary VC and former Intel executive Bill Davidow said, “Marketing must invent complete products and drive them to commanding positions in defensible market segments.” I couldn’t agree more. And anyone who finds that confusing should not be running marketing.

It’s so easy to fake.

As VC David Hornik of August Capital says, “VCs like to think that they are marketing geniuses. We really do.” He goes on to say that they meddle in the marketing of their portfolio companies because “we can fake it far more convincingly than in other areas …” As I always say, marketing is like sex; everyone thinks they’re good at it.

You’re a follower of _____ (fill in the blank).

Marketing may be as much art as science, but it’s still a complex and nuanced discipline that takes a great deal of experience to develop some level of understanding or expertise. I don’t care if you’re intoPurple Cows or The Brand Called You, popular fad-like notions won’t get you there.

You’ve lost sight of the big picture.

In some ways, growth hacking is no different from traditional marketing, and I mean that in a good way. That said, I see a lot of businesses chasing lots of small opportunities or incremental growth improvements with no overarching vision, strategy, or customer value proposition. That, in my opinion, is a recipe for disaster.   

It’s built on flawed assumptions.

Most product strategies and marketing campaigns are built on assumptions that nobody ever attempts to verify because their inventors think they have all the answers. The problem is they don’t know what they don’t know. Never mind what customers say and do. What do they know?

Related: 11 Qualities Our Next President Must Have

You have an MBA.

MBAs may be good for something, but marketing is not it. I’m not saying marketing can’t be taught, it’s just that, in my experience, it’s better learned on the job in the real world. Davidow, Theodore Levitt, Regis McKenna – none of these innovators who literally wrote the book on marketing had MBAs. Maybe there’s a good reason for that.  

You’re not measuring the results.

Show me a marketing program and I’ll show you beaucoup bucks spent on a mostly “shoot from the hip” approach that lacks sufficient metrics to determine if it’s effective or not. If you don’t measure it, how do you know if it’s delivering a return on investment?

You’re a marketer.

One of the reasons for marketing’s perception problem is that senior-level talent is hard to find and few execs have the ability to articulate the importance of the function. And since CEOs tend to be a pretty cynical bunch, marketing has, to a great extent, been marginalized in the business world. Sad but true.

Marketing is an enigma. It’s both art and science, creative and analytical, intuitive and logical, amorphous and tangible. It’s two sides of the same coin. That’s probably why it mystifies most. And yet, marketing is, without a doubt, among the most critical functions in every company.

That may be a perplexing paradox, but companies that somehow manage to unravel the mysteries of marketing have a far better chance of making it than those that don’t.