5 Actions of Positive Accountability: How to Build and Lead a Positive Culture for Peak Results

By Paulette Ashlin and John Kello PhD

Accountability can and should be a positive experience! This book shows you how. Accountability is within your control – with positive psychology and the right actions.

5 Actions of Positive Accountability will help transform you and your culture by showing you proven, positive, behavioral-science- based techniques to set fair expectations, minimize unsatisfactory performance, and deal constructively with consequences. You will learn how to be a highly effective leader or individual contributor, while achieving peak results through positive accountability.

Based on their research and study as organizational scientists, and their experience as organizational consultants, the authors have identified the five essential steps in a positive accountability process: the 5 Actions of Positive Accountability.

Featuring interviews with leaders in various industries and the world of sports, including among others, Dabo Swinney, Head Coach Clemson University Football, Bob McKillop, Head Coach of Davidson College Men’s Basketball and NBA all-star Steph Curry’s college basketball coach, Angelic Gibson, CIO at AvidXchange, and Brona Magee, Deputy CEO of SCOR Global Life, this book combines wisdom with practical dos and don’ts for holding yourself and others accountable.

A timely book! Low accountability is pervasive in organizations of all sizes and industries. In 5 Actions of Positive Accountability, Ashlin and Kello tackle the challenge of accountability with an easy-to-follow model that integrates positive psychology with culture. — Dr. Steven Rogelberg, author of the best-selling book The Surprising Science of Meetings

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663208507

Paulette Ashlin

Paulette Ashlin is a worldwide leadership and business coach and founder of Ashlin Associates, a management consulting company that provides coaching, organizational design and development, and human resources/capital services. She is also the author of Leading: The Way – Behaviors That Drive Success. Learn more at www.ashlinassociates.com. John Kello, PhD, is a scientist and practitioner. As a professor of industrial-organizational psychology, he teaches and conducts research in many aspects of organizational effectiveness. As a consultant, he draws on such research and gives evidence based advice to help organizations build positive cultures. Learn more at www.davidson.edu/people/john-kello.

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Copyright © 2022 Paulette Ashlin & John Kello, PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-0851-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0849-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0850-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021921457

iUniverse rev. date: 01/25/2022

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Challenge of Accountability

Business in the Past

Traditional Organization Limitations

Family Business Model Resurgence

High-Performance Organizations

Avoiding Accountability Mistakes

Table 1: 5 Actions of Positive Accountability and Common Mistakes

Chapter 2: Positive Psychology and Accountability

Sigmund Freud and The Person as Victim

Humanistic Psychology

Positive Psychology

Applying Positive Psychology to Organizations

Applying Positive Psychology to Positive Accountability

Table 2: 5 Actions of Positive Accountability and a Focus on the Positive Approach

Chapter 3: Understanding Behaviorism

Behaviorism Basics

Pavlov and Classical Conditioning

Behaviorism and Positive Reinforcement

Negative Reinforcement and Punishment

Acting and Behavior

The Issue with Authenticity

Practicing Positive Behavior

Table 3: 5 Actions of Positive Accountability and Behavior

Chapter 4: Organizational Accountability

Accountability Culture

Action #1: Anticipate

Action #2: Assist

Actions #3 Appraise and #4 Advise

Action #5: Affect

Positive High-Accountability Systems

Table 4: 5 Actions of Positive Accountability at the Organizational Level

Chapter 5: Individual Accountability

Identifying Accountable People

The Five Areas of Emotional Quotient

Self-Accountability

Making and Honoring Commitments

Accountability Conversations

On Communication Skills

Table 5: 5 Actions of Positive Accountability at the Individual Level

Chapter 6: Team Accountability

Teams and High-Performance Organizations

A Five-Stage Model for Developing Teams

Why Teams Matter

About Interdependence

Accountability Is Essential, Always

Table 6: 5 Actions of Positive Accountability and Team Accountability

Chapter 7: Motivation and Positive Accountability

What Is Motivation?

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

How to Motivate

Classic Motivation Theories

Hiring Self-Motivated Employees

Motivation and Positive Psychology

Table 7: 5 Actions of Positive Accountability and Motivation

Chapter 8: Positive Accountability: Summing Up

A Final Note

Self-Assessments

Appendix: Interviews with Industry Leaders (in alphabetical order)

Mark Berry, PhD

Stacy Brungardt

Cathy Burns

Pete Frederick

Angelic Gibson

Brock Lodge

Brona Magee

Bob McKillop (and Chris Clunie)

Dabo Swinney

Bibliography

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Praise for the Book

Accountability can be pleasant and is actually kind! This is a great book for leaders and those who aspire to leadership. Ashlin and Kello apply proven positive, behavioral, and science-based techniques to motivate, inspire, and reward individuals and teams. You will learn about highly effective leadership and creating and sustaining a culture of positive accountability.

—Scott Rossmiller, MD, executive vice president, chief physician executive, Atrium Health

Nailed it! This book on positive accountability is clear, concise, and research based. The 5 Actions of Positive Accountability model will help individuals and teams remain focused and exceed their goals while maintaining strong relationships.

—Theresa Payton, former White House CIO, CEO and chief adviser of Fortalice Solutions, and best-selling author of books on cyber security

Accountability is at the heart of any kind of individual or organizational change. Ashlin and Kello’s positive approach to this critical issue provides actionable steps to achieving goals. Leaders who implement these ideas will enable meaningful change.

—Eden King, PhD, Lynette S. Autrey professor of psychology at Rice University, past president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology

This book should be required reading for leaders. The push to view accountability from a positive perspective and not just a code word for discipline and negative feedback will be a very powerful mindset shift for many. More importantly, Ashlin and Kello provide clear examples of what accountability as an integral part of a positive, high-performance culture looks like. This is both a road map and tool kit for implementing a better approach. Plus, with the major shifts happening in terms of where and how work is done, this book is so timely!

—Mike Guggenheimer, president and CEO, Blumenthal Holdings, LLC

Positive accountability is a powerful and welcome paradigm shift for many. This book is a must-read for individuals and organizations who aspire to become high performing. 5 Actions of Positive Accountability provides a step-by-step outline on how to hold others accountable in the most collaborative and effective way!

—Arshad Mansoor, president and CEO, EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute)

A timely book! Low accountability is pervasive in organizations of all sizes and industries. In 5 Actions of Positive Accountability, Ashlin and Kello tackle the challenge of accountability with an easy-to-follow model that integrates positive psychology with culture. As behavioral scientists and pragmatic management consultants, the authors combine their research with their experience to provide us an innovative and effective way to hold others (and self!) accountable.

—Dr. Steven Rogelberg, author of the best-selling book The Surprising Science of Meetings, chancellor’s professor at UNC–Charlotte, director of the university’s Organizational Science Doctoral Program, and president-elect of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology

Finally. A book that debunks the negative connotations of accountability! Holding people accountable can be a positive experience, and this book shows you how. In 5 Actions of Positive Accountability, Ashlin and Kello demonstrate the profound power of positive psychology.

—Min Lee, president, ALR Architecture

In 5 Actions of Positive Accountability, authors Paulette Ashlin and Dr. John Kello skillfully integrate psychological research, direct lessons from their own consulting experiences, and insights from accomplished business and sports leaders to illuminate the often-misunderstood topic of accountability and offer a playbook for building a positive and high-performing culture.

—Tim Frizzell, vice president, Human Resources—Southeast Division, Vulcan Materials Company

Paulette and John tackle a nebulous concept and do it beautifully. They provide excellent examples from their own consulting practices and from the stories they’ve gathered in their research. Their ideas apply to our business lives and our home lives as well!

—Dr. Beverly Kaye, author, speaker, thought leader, Bev Kaye & Company

Ashlin and Kello have amalgamated the critical need for collaboration, partnership, and accountability in a practical set of 5 Actions of Positive Accountability that will invariably lead to success. Accountability, as they portray it, is a shared one between leaders and supervisees—a real recipe for success!

—Elias I. Traboulsi, MD, MEd, director of Graduate Medical Education, Cleveland Clinic

Ashlin and Kello skillfully integrate research, anecdotes, experience, and interviews into a helpful and innovative approach to accountability. I especially appreciate the wisdom gleaned from stellar leaders in various fields, including sports. Everyone should learn how to apply 5 Actions of Positive Accountability to generate positive outcomes.

—Jay Courie, managing member / leading member, MGC Law, MGC Sports

Practicing accountability can be difficult for even the best leaders and professionals. 5 Actions of Positive Accountability shows you how to integrate positive behavior into every step of accountability. Ashlin and Kello present an easy-to-follow model that generates great results while maintaining excellent relationships.

—Chris Peek, president and chief operating officer, CaroMont Health

To our wonderful families, who keep us grounded

through positive accountability.

Thank you!

INTRODUCTION

T his is a book about positive accountability. That may sound like an oxymoron, given the experience that most of us have had with accountability. Whether in the workplace or not, no one enjoys being called on the carpet and blamed. That’s negative accountability, the type that unfortunately is all too common. We will make the case that accountability is not inevitably negative and indeed can and should be positive. We will further claim that when leaders use the tools of positive accountability, they empower their employees and their teams, and they build their effectiveness as leaders. We will make the case that positive accountability is not only possible but indeed is a central, essential part of a positive work culture, a culture that we will identify as high-performance.

When a typical business consultant analyzes a company and its leaders to assess how to improve operational procedures and team management, the usual method is to focus on what’s wrong. It’s almost always easy to spot problems, because nothing is ever perfect—not in business or in our professional and personal lives. The negative side of life is all around us.

The problem with the traditional way of trying to improve a business through the identification of what’s wrong is that it reinforces negativity among members of the team. Individuals understandably feel uncomfortable when the boss calls them in for a friendly chat, which generally means they are being held accountable for their performance, more specifically a performance problem. The focus of such conversations is most often what the person did wrong and how that hampered the achievement of important performance goals. The individual may respond to such a critique out of fear of losing his or her job. In short, the impulse to improve is driven by the fear of negative consequences instead of by a positive desire to truly contribute to the organization in a meaningful way.

Accountability is often viewed negatively because employees feel abandoned by management for the end result when it is not positive.

Mark Berry, SVP, Georgia Power Company

We argue that it is better to focus on the positive instead of the negative, both in business leadership and in life in general. If an individual is encouraged to improve through reinforcement of what they’re doing right, then the outcomes in terms of their morale and engagement are more likely to be positive, they and their team will perform at higher levels of productivity, and the company will deliver better-quality services and products. As a business leader, your effectiveness will be greatly enhanced as well, and that should provide a great incentive to learn more about the positive approach to accountability.

We’ve all heard of Norman Vincent Peale’s concept of the power of positive thinking. One reason that concept is still widely discussed is that it actually works. If we embrace the positive aspects of our lives instead of dwelling on the negative, we will obviously be happier and less stressed. If you apply that basic concept to improving how you lead, you get what we call the power of positive accountability. This book is designed to show you how to turn common negative leadership techniques upside down as you gain new insights into the way you can lead your team more effectively.

We are both organizational scientists by training. Our field of organizational science is a hybrid field of science and practice that draws on several disciplines, such as behavioral psychology, sociology, communications, human resources, and management, to understand how organizations operate and how they can be improved. As organizational scientists, we study organizations and conduct research about them, focusing on issues that are most important to those organizations. As practitioners, we take the best available science and put it into practice, advising organizations how to enhance their effectiveness.

As founder and president of Ashlin Associates, an organizational and human capital consulting firm, Paulette has provided leadership coaching and organizational design and development services for a wide range of companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, in industries ranging from health care, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, and retail to food service, academia, utilities, nonprofits, and government. With her business and psychology background, she has worked with countless individuals and groups to help them with their leadership and productivity.

John has his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and PhD in psychology, positioning him well to dive deep into the human emotions that drive our behavior in general and at work in particular. He has taught and conducted research in industrial-organizational psychology for more than four decades, and during that time, he has also consulted with a multitude of companies in a wide variety of industries.

Our training, our research, and our combined decades of practice in the workplace position us to share in this book what we have learned about the power of positive accountability. So, let’s begin with a critical question. Does positive accountability work? Does holding people—yourself and others—accountable in a positive way really correlate with more effective teamwork, increased individual productivity, and generally an overall positive culture of high performance? Does using the tools we will outline in this book for establishing and maintaining positive accountability enhance your career? By now you should be able to anticipate our answer!

As organizational scientists, in our role as consultants, we are called to work with clients for myriad reasons, including ineffective leadership (or sometimes enhancement of good leadership), poor teamwork, high accident rates, low productivity, and even major organizational transformation, among others. No matter the pain point, though, a common theme emerges: low employee accountability at various levels in the organization. This challenge of accountability is pervasive, even among organizations aspiring to establish a more positive corporate culture. It is a major issue.

Some leaders—even high-level executives—simply don’t know how to hold employees accountable in ways that are positive and constructive. Some are, themselves, not high-accountability individuals. But holding people accountable—self as well as others—is not automatically a negative activity. It can and should be done positively. That is a central premise of this book. And it is our happy task in this book to show you how and to help you experience the power of positive accountability.

We have worked with some leaders who do accountability so elegantly that individuals and teams want to meet their expectations simply because they don’t want to let these leaders down. Unfortunately, these excellent leaders are rare. We are proud to feature some of them in this book; from our personal consulting experience and based on their reputations as exemplary leaders, we individually interviewed a group of highly regarded leaders in business and in sports. As you will see, while their organizations varied greatly, the approach of the leaders we interviewed was remarkably similar. They all saw establishing and maintaining positive accountability as essential to their organization’s success and to their success as a leader. You will see quotes about accountability from a number of such leaders throughout the book, and fuller transcripts of our interviews appear in the appendix.

Positive culture, a critical underpinning of a true high-performance organization, is currently a much-discussed topic among organizational scientists. The premise is sound, combining a dual focus on people and results. In a high-performance organization, leadership inspires trust and confidence. High levels of teamwork lead to an environment in which employees truly value and care for others, using open and honest communication. Commitment to excellence and full accountability leads to top performance and employee engagement. We will have much more to say about the concept of the high-performance organization in chapter 1. For now, suffice it to say that the contemporary high-performance model uses a variety of common denominator strategies to promote high employee engagement and excellent business results, based on excellent leadership.

More broadly, there is also a major movement in current research and in psychology as a whole known as positive psychology. In earlier theories of psychology, psychologists focused mostly on problems, deficits, and pathology. In other words, they were looking at what was wrong. Today’s positive psychologists focus more on optimism, resilience, and happiness. In a nutshell, they look at what is right, aiming to create and sustain positive cultures. One significant advantage is that identifying and building on the positive has an energizing effect on the people responsible. By building on what we do best—while holding all employees accountable—the positive psychology approach inspires not only short-term action but also long-term, sustainable results. Our approach to establishing accountability is based squarely on positive psychology, which we elaborate on in chapter 2.

It is critically important to note that a culture of positive accountability does not equate to a mentality of anything goes; we accept your behavior no matter what. On the contrary, employee and leader accountability—behaving well and appropriately—is an essential component. Identifying what is best leads to doing more of what is best. For individuals to do more of what is best, they must be accountable. Low accountability—again, a behavioral issue that can be corrected—must be addressed in ways that support and build the positive culture. We expand on the behavioral approach in chapter 3.

Establishing and sustaining accountability is a multistep process that, if implemented properly with positive intent and positive behaviors, yields phenomenal results and, in the process, develops you into a more effective leader. If any of the essential steps are skipped or forgotten, chaos, misunderstanding, and mediocre results will likely ensue. The key is to follow the steps with consistently positive intent, supported by the behaviors of positive psychology!

Based on our research and study as organizational scientists and our experience as organizational consultants, we have identified the five essential steps in a positive accountability process. We call these 5 Actions of Positive Accountability:

1. Anticipate. Think through what needs to be done and communicate clear expectations with your employees and teammates.

2. Assist. Remove barriers and coach your employees to ensure that they have the knowledge, skills, and ability to achieve goals.

3. Appraise. Track and measure results against expectations in a fair and positive manner.

4. Advise. Provide ongoing feedback in a positive and advisory way.

5. Affect. Affect outcomes through administration of consequences, both positive and corrective.

Throughout this book, we will explain each one of the steps in more detail, alert you to common mistakes and misperceptions, and show you how best to implement the steps in the positive accountability process. Chapters 4–6 show how the steps can be applied at the overall organization level, the individual level, and the team level.

The multistep approach is illustrated and manifested daily in the sports world as well as in the business world. For example, imagine you are on a track team, and your coach takes the positive accountability approach. First, your coach will set clear expectations by explaining what he or she anticipates (#1 Anticipate). What are the goals for you and for the team, in practice and in meets? What specifically will you be accountable for? Next, your coach will ensure that you have the proper training and resources (#2 Assist). He or she will coach you through interactive activities, like teaching you specific techniques on the track with the hurdles and explaining the context of your next track meet. Your coach, your leader, will provide whatever you need and