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An excellent organization is one where people do the right thing even when
nobody's watching them over their shoulder.
Because that's what makes you best in class,
that's actually what makes you innovative.
That's actually what's the foundation for being a place that employees love to work.
So that's the hardest thing, how do you build an organization where people
do the right thing even when nobody is watching all over them?
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Accountability to me is not a list of metrics, accountability is what you feel,
so felt accountability is the important thing.
And from my point of view, there are two foundations,
one is a feeling of psychological ownership,
the other is a sense of obligation, and each one balances the other.
If it's 100% psychological ownership,
0% obligation, it becomes a gateway to being egocentric.
On the other hand if it's 100% obligation and
no sense of psychological ownership, that becomes burdensome and
therefore unsustainable, so you need a blend of both things.
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The problem I have with most executives is all that they think about is geez,
we've got to crank the incentive lever.
In short, we gotta pay people more, the more we pay people,
apparently the more accountable they feel, I'm not so sure.
Instead, you can actually do more lightweight things,
as a matter of fact, with my colleague Lindy Greer and
a wonderful graduate student Jennifer Daniels,
the three of us did an interesting experiment with ATT new venture teams.
What did we do?
We randomly put these teams into two conditions,
the control condition which I won't bother you about.
And then a treatment condition, these teams were teams of four to five people.
And all that we asked team members in the treatment condition was,
choose a job title that showcases your unique strength.
And people came up with titles like guru of software or the queen bee of
customer service, or the defender of the code or whatever, it was amazing.
The teams where people chose their own job titles what did it do?
It actually made them feel less anonymous obviously,
it improved their sense of self-esteem.
But much more importantly, it also solved the problem of who knows what in the team.
They were able to build prototypes that were quicker and
better than others in the control condition.
My question to you is,
does it cost you anything to ask people to come up with their own title?
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In most organizations when I look at high performers, on average,
high performers can be categorized into two buckets.
One bucket is high performers who are high maintenance,
they need to be stroked, they need to be paid,
they need to be recognized, and they're extremely self-centered.
On the other hand, there are other high performers who have
been referred to as extra milers, and what do they do?
They perform well, but they're also the most helpful people.
They're the go-to people when you run into a problem, hey how do I deal with this
customer problem, how do I deal with the technology problem?
It's these extra milers that do the most,
it turns out most executives they overload the extra-milers.
You're never going to go to your high maintenance,
high performance, high performer and say can you please do that.
They'll just immediately want a lot of things from you,
you instead go to your extra-milers.
They're very good at what they do, what's their principle weakness?
They don't know how to say no to you, or for that matter anybody.
So ironically the more you overload them, the more overwhelmed they get.
And some studies have actually shown that if you overload them with too many
requests, they actually begin to develop intentions of leaving the company.
Is that what we want to do?
I think not.
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