Transcript: Mastering Accountability with Dan Cockerell (EP86)

 

Intro (with music): Welcome to The Culture of Things podcast with Brendan Rogers. This is a podcast where we talk all things, culture, leadership and teamwork across business and sport.

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Brendan: This is my conversation with Dan Cockerell. Dan is a retired 26-year Walt Disney Company VP who now owns Cockerell Consulting Group with his wife Valerie. What’s the least understood and most overlooked leadership skill there is?

It’s accountability. It’s the skill that all leaders find the hardest to master. Often, because they’ve never really been taught. Today, we get down and dirty into the skill of accountability. We understand where expectations fit into the process and we unpack the difference between accountability and micromanagement.

Dan shares the Disney Leadership Accountability Matrix and how this drives high performance leadership across one of the world's most recognised companies. Mastering accountability is the leadership game changer. Get good at it and you’ll move to a leadership level most never achieve.

Check out my three key takeaways after the interview. We love feedback. Let us know what you liked or didn’t like and we’ll keep improving. This is The Culture of Things podcast. I’m Brendan Rogers. Sit back and enjoy my conversation with Dan.

Dan, in your own words, mate, can you define what is accountability?

Dan: Yes, Brendan. Before I define it, I always like to start with what the dictionary says so we can get a good idea. I looked this up before we recorded here. Of course, the first definition is always something like the quality or state of being accountable, which doesn't help us much. What it does say is an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions.

I think there are some overlaps here in terms of what are some other words to use. Courage is definitely something I would use to define accountability—having the courage to be responsible for what you've promised that you're going to say or do, making sure you hold others to be responsible for what they've said they're going to say or do.

Sometimes it's making sure that you are taking responsibility for what your organization has promised to your customers. Holding yourself accountable or a company can hold itself accountable to make sure it follows through on the values or the promise it's made to its clients or customers. A lot of this goes back to responsibility and follow through.

When you start talking about that, you start getting into these ideas of integrity, trust, credibility. These are all connected. It's such a basic building block, I think, of everything in life, whether it's relationships in a marriage, with your kids, your family, your friends, or in a professional sense. Responsibility and courage, for me, come up as two big words I think about. It's like a lot of things.

Sometimes people say, what, I'm not sure what that is. Well, I know it when I see it. I've worked for leaders and organizations that have had high accountability. It's a lot clearer to me that you're walking the walk. You're going to do what you say you're going to do.

We all know people who we know who are highly accountable. We trust what they're going to say. We know that they're going to follow up when we make a promise. We tend to follow through on a more consistent basis when we work with people like that. It's such a basic building block of so many things in life. I think it's a really important one, which is why I think we're talking about that today.

Brendan: You touched on it there in your answer. Let's contrast this a bit. What does good accountability look like, and what does poor accountability look like?

Dan: Something I've learned over the years during my career is there's definitely some building blocks you need to put in there to get to a level where you can have, as you're saying, good accountability. I'd like to define what it is. I may put a couple bad examples or examples of bad accountability. I like to find it, and you can just assume everything opposite of this is bad.

The first thing here is making sure that you understand what the expectations are. You create clarity for whoever you're working with. When I say working with, once again, a lot of what my examples are. This crosses over into your personal life.

My wife is actually working on a book right now. She's almost done. It's going to come out in 2023 called Manage Like A Mother. She has taken all the concepts that mothers have to raise kids, look at that, and compared it to leadership. It's incredible how many there are. Accountability is right up there with raising children that are going to be able to go out and be productive citizens in the world.

Also, obviously, it ties back to a professional environment. Great accountability starts with great expectations, clarity, not being vague about what you want to have. I'll share a couple stories here to illustrate that for you.

When I was working at Disney, multiple times when I was in theme parks, I was responsible. One of my responsibilities was outdoor vending. We sell ice cream, pretzels, soda, whatever, turkey legs. That's a really good one. If you want to find one food item that can feed a small village, you can get a turkey leg at Walt Disney World.

The bottom line is they would call these impulse items. They're things that you didn't plan on getting, but when you see them, you're going to buy them. When it comes to that, outdoor vending was a really important business for us. Not only did it make a lot of money, but these carts are spread out all around the park.

Because they are spread out, often these employees, these cast members get lots of questions from guests. It's really important not only that they're good at selling, but they're also good at being available, and answering questions, and knowing about the park. We would be very clear with our cast members that that was a big part of their role.

My expectation for them was when they were not helping a guest, they weren't selling ice cream or whatever to a guest, they are standing out in front of their cart, because when you're in front of the object, whether it's a cash register or whatever, you're available, you have an open body language, it's just a friendlier experience. I know those friendly experiences add up to a great experience for guests. That was a big expectation of mine.

When I walked through the park, I was always looking for the employees. If they weren't busy interacting with the guests, they'd stand out front making eye contact and greeting guests as they walked by. Everyone knew this. What I figured out was that if I walked up to a cart and the cast member was really nice, greeted me, smiled, and didn't have any clue that they were supposed to be out in front of the cart, that was a training issue. We hadn't set clear expectations for them.

If they were out, they slowly came out from behind the cart as I walked up. I asked them, they said, well, yeah, you know what, I usually shouldn't be out there, I wasn't really thinking about it or I was kind of whatever. That is an accountability issue. They knew what they were supposed to do, they just decided not to do it for whatever reason. Great accountability always starts with clear expectations.

In your business, you really need to think about how you need to get all the way to the nth level of detail. How do you answer the phone in your business? Do you use your name when you answer the phone? Hi, this is Dan. Can I help you? That's a training piece.

Once people know that, they're now trained, they know how to deliver it, and now you need to hold them accountable to make sure they do that consistently every time. That's what great businesses do. They are consistent in how they deliver their service and they're consistent in how they deliver their products. This is a step that we find when we do consulting and work with companies. A lot of them haven't gone to this level of detail to understand what they actually expect from their employees.

Another good one at Disney, we have something we call the decision criteria. We train all our employees. When I say all the employees, I mean from the executives all the way to our frontline employees, how to make decisions. You always think about safety first. You never put safety in jeopardy for yourself, your fellow employees or your customers.

Once you've thought about safety, then you use courtesy as the next decision making point. Be nice to people, help them out, be friendly, then you go to show. Make sure that everything looks good, you're delivering, you're putting on the show for your guests, everything's clean, everything's operating the right way, and then lastly, efficiency.

Because we set these clear decision criteria for our employees, we can then hold them accountable on how they make their decisions. We always tell them, hey, when you made that decision, what was the first thing you thought of? If the answer is not safety, let's talk about that. And then that accountability happens.

The accountability could be a reinforcement of the training. The accountability could be, we talked about this last week, this is the second time this has happened, I really want to make sure you understand, we're going to retrain you. The accountability could be, this is the fifth time we've talked about it and you're now going to get a reprimand for this. There are different levels of accountability.

What I think about is you need to do the least action to create the new behavior and get that accountability to where it needs to be. Sometimes the least that's good to change behavior is determinate people, but you need to give them a fair shake along the way, and make sure they know how that's all supposed to go down and what they're supposed to do. I think a lot of leaders try to hold people accountable who haven't been given the right training, haven't had the expectation set, and that's a recipe for disaster.

Clear expectations is number one, and then being really good at correcting behavior. When you're holding someone accountable, you are not judging them as a person. You're judging the behavior, and that's what you want to get to.

Sometimes you're going to have a positive accountability, you're going to give them a handshake, a pat on the back, you're going to give them a thank you card, you're going to give them a bonus, you're going to do something really positive to reinforce that behavior, or you're going to coach them and make sure you reinforce it, but you're going to do it in a way that's very professional and is focused on getting to the mission, whatever your mission is.

Once again, your mission may be raising your kids and holding them accountable for these behaviors, but you can't be scared to have those conversations and constantly reinforce them. Because if you don't, once again, you're not going to get the kinds of results you think you need. Once again, great accountability is crystal clear expectations and consistent follow up to make sure people are held accountable for that.

I've worked for leaders, and I think we all have. They ask you to do something and they never ask about it again. I think that's a dangerous way to lead an organization. I like the idea of trust and follow through, trust and inspect. I'm going to trust you, but I'm going to verify that what I asked you to do is actually getting done. That is accountability, and that's an organizational issue.

Great accountability, also, the leaders who have it are very organized. They know exactly what they've requested. They know what deadlines they've given people. They give clear deadlines. They don't tell people as soon as possible.

They don't tell them at your earliest convenience. They give them a date and a time and agree on that with the person. The accountability goes out dramatically, because once again, you set clear expectations on what you need as a leader.

Brendan: You talk about it so confidently. I have to say even listening to you, it sounds so simple. We know that a lot of leaders out there are very challenged by this skill called accountability. Why is that so?

Dan: I think one is they may be afraid or uncomfortable. They don't want to make people feel uncomfortable. They want to have a good relationship with people. They don't want to say anything that may be contradictory to making people lose their morale. I think that's a misnomer. I think that's a big mistake by leaders. You can't be afraid of this.

When I ran the All-Star Resort, it was a 6000-room hotel. You can imagine housekeeping was a big deal. When you have 6000 rooms, accountability is a big driver of the success of that hotel. As I like to do the math, 1% of 6000 is 60. If you clean your hotel at 99%, which sounds pretty good, you're still going to  have 60 dirty rooms, which is not very good when you have people paying top dollar to come on their dream vacation.

I would talk to the housekeepers about their leadership. I was always interested in how our leaders were doing their jobs. I'd tell them the phrase I love to hear. I knew a leader was doing a really great job because I would consistently hear, my leader is firm and fair. You know what, they are firm about what their expectations are.

Firm meant they hold me accountable, and fair meant they do it in the right way. They know who I am. They don't take things for granted. They have all the facts, firm and fair.

I think a lot of times, leaders are afraid of being firm. Once again, I'll go back to this parenting thing. Usually in a couple, there's one of the parents or both sometimes that are uncomfortable holding their kids accountable, because they say, well, if I do that, I'm too mean and they're not going to love me. You know what, your kids up until they're 18 years old should not love you. You should not be the most favorite person in their life.

I say that sort of tongue in cheek. But the bottom line is if you want to raise kids the right way or get an organization to deliver, you have to have those uncomfortable conversations. If detail is important to you, you need to hold people accountable in detail. The people who don't want to do that will talk themselves out of it and say, well, I don't want to nitpick, this person's job is too hard already. I don't want to have to give them another piece of feedback on something. It looks like it's just me picking on them.

Once again, at the end of the day, if you are going to help them in their careers get better, you have to hold them accountable. Once again, I think a big part of this is fear. People don't feel comfortable doing it. They don't know how to do it. What I've always told my teams for many years is there's a lot of things you may not know how to do. You got to start practicing.

I think we want to do it perfectly the first time. You don't do anything perfectly the first time. You got to practice. The more you provide feedback, the better you get at doing it. Your phrases get better. How you respond to the reactions that come back your way, you get better at that.

Even if you're scared of doing this or you don't feel comfortable, you got to get started and you got to start practicing. If you can do that, like I said, you'll get really good at this. You get good at the things you practice doing. If you can't get your team to deliver the mission of your organization, you're going to have a really hard time as a leader, because you're not going to have any credibility to be able to change their behaviors.

Get rid of that fear and secondly, get organized. Get organized, make sure you're out. If you're not out with your employees, you can't hold them accountable. If you're not observing their performance and if you don't know what's going on, then you can't get involved with that.

Accountability means I'm going to go out. Like I did when I was working at Disney, I'll go walk the park every day, because I want to hold my team accountable to delivering a great experience. I need to be out there with them. If I asked you to give me a report by next Friday, if I don't get it by next Friday at 5:00, someone's calling you to find out where that report is.

If I don't say anything, you're going to say, well, I guess he forgot, maybe next time, and you don't follow through. Once again, it's like kids. They told me to go to bed and they didn't tell me again, so I guess I'll just stay up and see what happens. It becomes a little repetitive.

Once again, get organized, remember what expectations you've set, follow through on them. If you don't like to do that, then once again, don't become a leader. Secondly, start practicing and get more comfortable with this, because you'll get so much better results in your professional career if you can have these difficult conversations.

Brendan: Dan, how is micromanagement different if it is different to accountability?

Dan: Man, fantastic question. Micromanagement, in my opinion, I'm constantly flying really low telling you how to do your job. I'm constantly making those corrections and how to get there. I think from an accountability standpoint I train you, I set clear expectations, and then I take a step back and I let you do your job. I let you be who you are. I let you find different paths, different ways to get there.

I'll go back to my ice cream cart example, because it's such a simple one for me. If I'm an employee that says, you know what, I don't feel comfortable standing out in front of my cart, because what if I get a question that I don't know the answer to and I'm afraid I'm not going to have the right answer? Well, let me train you on that. Let me give you the materials you need.

This is something that you have or you can put in your pocket. We're going to make sure you have a phone nearby to be able to ask the question if someone asks you something. You give that training over time, and then you teach them how to do it.

If I'm micromanaging, I'm going to be out there at your ice cream cart standing right next to you. When guests walk up, I'll start answering the questions on your behalf, because I want you to show you how it's done. I'm not going to ever give you any runway to do it on your own.

I used to be very clear with my team. I said, when I go out in the park, and I walk around, and I take pictures of things, chips of paint or maybe employee is not interacting at the level they should be, or something that isn't working, or on the other hand, I give you examples of little things that are really positive, all the light bulbs are working, the background music is in play, the area was really clean, you may say, as the vice president of the theme park, why would you be doing that? That seems nitpicky. It seems like micromanaging.

I said, well, micromanaging would be I'd be out here at your side all the time. I'm not out there by your side, but attention to detail is important. Don't confuse attention to detail with micromanaging, because attention to detail is important. Things need to be the way they need to be.

Once again, when I'm out walking hotel rooms to make sure they're clean, I'm not doing it because it's our inspection process, because I can't go walk 6000 rooms. I'm doing it because I want you to understand how important it is to have clean rooms. By being out there looking at rooms and taking my valuable time to do that, I'm hopefully going to relay the message that this is important.

When a housekeeper never sees a general manager show up to look at their room, over time, they may say, maybe my job's not that important. I know if I don't have clean rooms and hotels as a general manager, I'm in big trouble. I'm going to have a lot of problems with my leadership, because one of my big responsibilities is to deliver cleanliness.

Micromanagers don't train their people well. They don't set clear expectations. And they're always checking up on them constantly as opposed to trying to teach them to think independently. Once they can think independently, hold them accountable on the results and hold them accountable on the decisions they make.

Brendan: As an employee and again, you spent 26 years in the Disney environment, how early should we be setting expectations with people to help on this trail of accountability?

Dan: Immediately. When I talked earlier about the decision criteria—safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency—of all the employees at Disney, you learn that on your first day. Before you even get to your work location, before you do anything else, you go through one day of traditions, which is the Disney orientation. You'll learn about why we exist as a company, what our promises to our guests are, what the company is going to deliver, and what your role is.

A big part of that day of orientation is talking about these four decision criteria and then going out and actually observing it in a theme park. All the new employees get to visit the park for a few hours. They look for examples of safety. They look for examples of courtesy and show an efficiency so they can clearly understand that.

These concepts are very clear in their mind on the second day when they show up in their work location. They may not know exactly how to do the job yet, but they know that safety is really important. If something seems unsafe, they should ask the question or they should speak up, because we've already trained them to do that.

It's similar, I think, from a leadership role. When I'd start working with a new team in an executive role or management role, I would spend the first few months really spending lots of time in the operation to get to know everyone, to learn how things are done, to find out what the opportunities were, to find out what was going well, before I started to really make decisions on where I was going to spend my time.

However, within the first week or two, I would sit down with the team and walk them through what I call my operating practices and priorities memo. It's about a six-page memo. It just said, look, these are my operating instructions. I don't know you yet and I don't know the operation yet, but I wanted to make sure you know how I operate. This is what's important to me, and I'd go through.

I'm accessible 24 hours a day, because when you work at Disney, there are guests in your hotel rooms 24 hours a day. If you think you need to call me at 2:00 AM because you want me to help you make a decision, I will never give you a hard time about that. I may talk about next time, now you know how to make that decision or maybe you don't have to call me on something like that. But if you think you need to, you call me, and we'll make that decision together.

Don't worry about weekends, don't worry about that. I won't judge your performance, the fact that you woke me up in the middle of the night. That's part of the job.

I got into what communication looks like. I talked about what development looks like, what follow through looks like. I wanted to make sure I define this very clearly for the team within the first couple of weeks. Once again, they didn't trust me yet. It didn't mean I had a great relationship yet, because I hardly knew them, but they knew exactly what I was all about.

Delivery is everything. People said, well, you just emailed this memo and that was it? I said, no, I would sit down and walk them through it, have them ask questions, and make sure we had a mutual understanding. We would sit down and review that probably about every six months, and then I would ask the team what they expected of me, because expectations and accountability goes two ways.

I told them, I'm going to hold you accountable, but you need to hold me accountable as your leader. Because if I'm not doing my job the best I can, you're not going to be able to do the jobs that you can do really well. We're all in this relationship together. This has to go both ways.

I don't think you should spend very little time making this happen. Sometimes you got to look at the consequences. If I don't give you clear expectations on greeting guests, that's one thing. But if I don't teach you the hand signs on how to operate an attraction, that can result in much worse consequences. These expectations, I can't say enough how important they are to make sure that people are able to do. Accountability, once again, starts with clarity.

Brendan: Mate, can you think of a time in your history of working at Disney, where a cast member that you've led has had an accountability conversation with you? What did that look like?

Dan: As the employer or as the leader?

Brendan: The cast member that was reporting to you, did that ever happen? And if so, what does it look like?

Dan: Absolutely. I had an executive reporting to me at one of my roles at Disney. Communication was something that was a big deal to me, because what I learned is if you have great clarity around how you communicate as a team and how you receive information as a leader, you're going to have all the facts you need to make decisions, and you're going to be able to run your business better.

I had an expectation with my team that every Friday, I wanted a one-page update from each of my general managers. That update would provide three things. What are things that you think I need to know to be able to do my job better? Because I can't know everything that every general manager is doing in their business. There is lots of stuff I don't need to know.

What I'd ask them is to use their common sense. What are the things you think I need to know to be able to make better decisions and run this park? What are the things you're working on or thinking about that I can help you with that you're going to improve and make better along the way? And lastly, what are some great things you did this week that I don't know about?

I'm giving you permission to brag, because I don't know all the great stuff you're doing either. I want to make sure you get credit for all this great stuff you are doing, so put that in this report. The irony is I'm going to take it at the end of the year and tell you all the great things you did. Who provided that information? You did. It just has to be factual. Just don't exaggerate it.

Every Friday, I'd get that report from everyone. It wasn't a big PowerPoint presentation. It wasn't this big. It was a one-pager. It's much easier to provide a 10-page report than it is a one-page report, because you really have to distill down what the important things are. It was a great way for me to have everyone think critically and be up to speed on what was going on in food and beverage, operations, attractions, engineering, merchandise, and entertainment.

I had one of my general managers consistently miss that deadline. Missed once? I said, look, I really need to get this. He'd hit the deadline for a couple weeks. The next time around, I get it on Monday. It was such a little thing, but I said, look, there's no gray here. This is a really clear expectation, this is something we all agreed to, this is something that's important to me, and he couldn't get organized.

Eventually, I had to terminate him. He had been with a company a long time. He was an executive. He said, I can't believe you're firing me for this. I said, look, I have been crystal clear. There has been no doubt about how to do this.

I've told you, I've given you some tips on how to do this. You didn't even have to do it yourself, you just had to make sure it got done. For some reason, you couldn't pull this together. It turned out there are a lot of other issues happening, but this was the tip of the spear for me that I can measure.

There's a bunch I can't measure. I can't measure how people's attitudes are. I can't measure how committed they are to the job. These are things I can't see, but I can see behaviors. That's why these expectations are so clear.  I could see that behavior, I could see whether it's being demonstrated or not, and I could hold them accountable to that. That's what ended up happening.

They're not always happy endings. Once again, as a leader, you have signed up to help the mission of your department, the mission of your division, the mission of your company. If you aren't held accountable, you're not doing that. If you're not doing that, you're not doing your job.

For me, that was often a motivator to make sure I was holding people accountable. You know what, this isn't comfortable. But if I don't do this, I'm not doing my job. If I'm not doing my job, that's not good for me, it's not good for my family. I better find some courage to step up and make sure I have these tough conversations.

Brendan: How long did the chap worked in Disney before that?

Dan: Decades—24, 25 years.

Brendan: It's just interesting. Do you know the history of that person? Has it been an ongoing thing where he's not been held accountable by previous leaders, but then he's got to your area and you're so good at it, but he couldn't handle the accountability side?

Dan: Yeah. Like I said, those are some other things that's happening. To your point, I've seen that happen. It's really a disservice if you don't hold your teams accountable. Because if you don't hold me accountable, they're going to just believe they're doing a great job. Eventually, they're going to discover when they work for someone, who does hold them accountable, that their bar is really low, and they're going to have to play catch up.

You see that play out. At least an example I use is in the United States in the school systems. Some school systems are really great. From a young age, you get a really great education. You're held accountable to learn, and the test scores by teachers are there.

When you get to those higher levels of education, you're ready. You're ready to go to university. You're ready to deal with that. Some school districts, their standards are lower. When the students get to university level, they really struggle, because they've never really been held accountable to perform. They don't know what great looks like.

Once again, if you're ever afraid to give feedback to someone or hold them accountable, just think to yourself, not only is it my job, but if I don't do this for them. I'm not training them. I'm not making them better.

In a lot of cases, people want to get better. They want to have a better career, they want to be promoted eventually, maybe make more money. If you don't hold them accountable, they're not going to be able to do that, because you're not giving them an opportunity to change that behavior.

Once again, I go back to kids. We told our kids, we don't have expectations for you in life. We want you to be happy, but we're going to hold you accountable to the rules. You stay safe, we're going to have a curfew for you, and there's going to be certain rules around what age you can drive and when you can drive. We're going to set those out, because we want you to have options later in life.

Once again, when you set the bar high for your teams or your family and they live up to that, they'd perform better also. That is something that plays out. If you haven't worked for a great organization, you may not know what great looks like. If you're working in a hotel and if you never stayed in a really nice hotel, it's hard to know what great service looks like if you've never seen it before.

A big responsibility of leaders is to make sure they set the bar at a level that people are striving to get to and then, once again, hold them accountable, because that'll keep driving them higher and higher.

I grew up being an athlete. I could never do as well by myself. I always did better on a team and with a real coach that pushed me than I could by myself. Some people have great discipline. They can push themselves as hard as they want. But I always found, when you have a coach, your bar gets higher, and you try harder if you have the right kind of coach. You got to put yourself in those situations where you're going to have that person pushing you, because this accountability is a really positive thing long-term.

Brendan: We want to unpack the leadership accountability matrix that you used at Disney. But before just going into that, in your opinion, how important is accountability in the leadership tool box?

Dan: For me, it all starts there. There are a lot of overlaps of what you could debate. People have been debating for hundreds of years what the most important leadership traits are. I don't think there's this one that is number one.

This accountability is up there, because accountability, like I said, for me, means courage. Without courage, nothing happens. Without courage, we don't take risks. Without courage, we don't step forward and lead. Without courage, we don't make mistakes, because if you don't have courage, you're never going to put yourself in a situation where you can fail. I think it's a really big one.

The problem with it, here's what I always saw. I'll give you two examples. When I was working in the different jobs I was in in 19 different jobs over that time period at Disney, in the moment, a lot of times, I'd hear people talk about a leader and say, yup, they're firm and fair, but you really got to get the job done. They are very detail-oriented.

They will hold you accountable. You have to make sure you get things in on time. They don't mess around. It was kind of almost like a negative thing. Later, when that person would leave or that employee would transfer to another area, they would look back and say, that was one of the best leaders I've ever had.

I learned so much from them because they got into detail. They taught me how to be really good at what I did. They made sure I knew how to do the job. When I didn't do it well, they were the first ones to give me that tough love and sit me down. I hated those conversations, but it really made me get better as a person. It made me really get that grit to be able to perform.

When you're a leader who holds people accountable, you never get that credit in the moment. It's always later. It comes up as you are a great leader, but they don't give you that credit. The same with kids. They don't tell you when they're five. Thank you for holding me accountable to teach me skills to deal with others professionally so I can be really good in my life.

No. It's like when they're 25, they write you a letter, hey, I realize now all the things you did, all the things you held me accountable to, now I understand why. Now I see what the benefit of that is. The hard thing about a leader is, what you're doing today, people aren't going to realize how great it is till much later, so just have faith. You're doing the right thing.

Brendan: Tell us about the leadership accountability matrix. Give us some context first of how this was embedded and how it was utilized in the Disney organization.

Dan: Sure. Back in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a change happening. For many years, companies, accountability, if you talk to a leader about accountability, it was about, do you get the results? Do you deliver? Do you hit your budgets? Do you manage your labor hours? Do you hit your sales numbers?

It was really about, if you do that you're a great leader. As culture changed, people started to realize, I don't want to work in a place that's just about that. I want to be human. It was a very tough environment, and no one really cared about how you got things done. They didn't care about whether you liked working there or not. They said, you're hired here, you're lucky to have a job working here, and that's the way things are.

Employees started to realize, first of all, I don't want to work in a place like that. Employers started to realize, if you start to get people's compliance versus their commitment, you're not going to get all the value out of employees, because you can lead with compliance. I'm going to make you comply, because I'm going to put rules in place. I'm going to put measurement systems in place to make sure that I'm holding you accountable for everything you do, versus explaining to you why it's so important to do a great job, and get you committed to the job, and wanting to do better.

That's always the best way and leadership. If you can get your teams to want to perform because they understand their mission, they understand how important they are. Disney recognized this and started a major change which said, moving forward, we are still going to expect you to deliver the results. However, we're also going to hold you accountable on how you deliver the results. There are going to be certain behaviors that are going to become unacceptable and certain behaviors that you need to use to get those results.

Like everything in life, you can put lots of things on a four quadrant matrix. We had leaders who were not getting results and we had leaders who were getting really great results, because they'd run through a wall. They would just leave dead bodies by the side of the road. Whatever it took to get the mission, they didn't care, they were going to get it done.

On the other axis, you had leaders who weren't getting results, but they were really nice leaders. People loved working for them. They connected, they had great relationship skills, and people like working with them. Then you had other leaders, like there is in every organization. They didn't have good personal skills.

They didn't get to know their people. They weren't interested in getting to know their people. They didn't have a good way about them. They didn't build relationships. They just didn't know how to have that one on one.

We started to train everyone. We said, okay, you're in one of these boxes. Either today, you're not getting the results and you're not treating people right. You have to change tomorrow, because there's no place for you in this organization. Some of you are getting the results today. We've been asking to get the results for years, and you're doing that, but we need you to change the way you're doing that.

We're going to hold you accountable to how you talk to people. We're going to put a 360 degree survey in place. That had never been done at Disney before the early 90s. That wasn't a thing. People had no idea what their direct reports thought about them. They had no idea what their peers thought about them.

We did that survey. That's an accountability tool. We're going to measure the attitudes of your employees and how they think you're leading them. There were a lot of tears shed and a lot of worries, because people didn't realize or they realized, but had never been held accountable to treating people with respect.

We had other leaders, they were great leaders. They were treating people the right way, but they just didn't have the business savvy. They didn't have the courage to hold people accountable. They had an opportunity also to get their performance up. This didn't happen overnight. This happened over a few years.

The promised land, the place you want to be is, I get results, I get it in a respectful way, and I get it in a way that treats people the right way. It's done in a way that's human. I build relationships over time, I get people to be committed to their jobs, and I'm able to get results. Doing both of those things is really hard, because you've been in jobs before. Hey, I don't care how you do this, just make sure you hit your budget this month. It's like, wow, you're just inviting me to have bad behaviors or do something that may not even be honest, because that's all you care about.

Sometimes they'd say, look, I wasn't able to get to the target because I wasn't going to have my team work 80 hours a week. That's where you start to have those conversations. I think that accountability matrix, accountability model, it's a great way to think about things. Are you getting the results that you expect? And are you holding yourself and your teams accountable to the behaviors that they're using to get those results?

Doing one is, I'm not going to say easy, but you can do one. Doing both is really hard, but that's what great organizations do. They're able to get both of those results.

Brendan: You gave a little bit of insight around where somebody may be focused on the results and really good at getting results, but the team doesn't really like them so much or they're disrespectful to people, maybe. 

What is the coaching session? What does the movement look like? What does the action look like from a leader to move someone from actually being pretty good with people, and they've got a high level of respect as a person in the character, but they're not achieving the results?

Dan: All these, I think, when you start looking at them, there are assessments. There's feedback you can get. Once again, if I'm going to give people clarity and clear expectations, I have to tell them what they need to improve upon.

If I have a leader who is out there, I talk to their team. We love our leader, he or she is always out there with us, gives us feedback, but I'm seeing that their room cleanliness scores are lower than their peer group or I'm seeing that they're not delivering the revenue numbers that they need to be delivering, I start to dig in and figure out what that looks like. It's because then the day, maybe they're not holding their teams accountable to deliver the results they need to get.

For example, in food and beverage, in a fast food restaurant at Disney or any food and beverage location that serves fast food, efficiency and speed is really important. People want good food. But in fast food, you don't want a gourmet meal. You say you want hot food hot and cold food cold, and you want to get out of there fast, that's why you went there. If you wanted a gourmet meal, you wouldn't have gone to a fast food restaurant.

Some of the leaders would say, well, look, your transactions per hour during your lunch rush are below what the averages of the other fast food locations. How are you going to improve that? If they said, well, I tell the cast members, the employees to go faster, but I can't make them go faster, you know what, you can start to train them. You can start to find out who the ones who do this faster.

You can start talking to your management team to be out there during lunch, and making sure you're coaching the employees and looking at how they're doing these transactions, and give them feedback on their performance. You can get one of your leaders because this becomes their full time job, to make sure that the transaction speed gets to where it needs to be. You need to get the tools to get that done, but you also have to hold them accountable to make sure they get there. It becomes these observable behaviors.

Sometimes what I found a lot of times is just lack of business acumen. I grew up in this business. I never really got formally trained on how to do some of this, so I don't know what reports have to print out. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. Okay, well, if you have inventory problems and food and beverage, your cost of sales problems, I can give you a list of 30 things you can go start looking at tomorrow in your business to make sure that you're hitting your cost of sales.

Are you portioning too much fries? If you're selling French fries and you're giving 10 ounces, are you portioning it with 12 ounces? That's how you're losing out on those two ounces of your food costs. Is there theft happening in your organization? Do you have the right processes in place? Do you spend time with the inventory team and make sure that the counts are going correctly?

They may just not be spending the time to get in those details, because either they're not organized, it doesn't interest them, or they don't know how to do it. You can give them that training. Sometimes the accountability comes, well, I just don't feel comfortable telling that manager that they're not doing their job.

A leader is usually not going to tell you that, but you can tell when they just don't feel comfortable. That's when you have to say, look, I'm going to train you on how to give feedback, and then I'm going to expect you to start doing that very quickly here. Because if you can't hold your team accountable, that's going to be a big problem for me, because there are results we need to get.

Sometimes it was an intellectual, technical knowledge issue. Sometimes it was just an attitude issue. Sometimes you promote the wrong person. Maybe they didn't belong in that role. By holding them accountable, you'd figure that out. It didn't mean you're going to get rid of them, it meant maybe you move them to a job that was going to be more in line with their personality and their skill set.

Brendan: Mate, when we load this episode on YouTube, we will actually have the leadership accountability matrix pop up on the screen. Just for complete clarity sake, do you just want to really summarize each section of the quadrant?

Dan: Okay. There you go. Good. If you look at the accountability matrix here, on the X-axis or the horizontal axis, it results. Getting low results, poor results, or on the right-hand side, really great results, whatever that is. Customer service scores, transaction times, labor hours—whatever you're measuring in your business that's important for you to run a successful business is on that axis.

On the vertical axis, the Y-axis, is leadership behaviors. At the bottom, you don't get to know your team, you don't build relationships with them, you don't set clear expectations for them. You don't know what's going on in your operation. You don't listen for continuous improvement opportunities. I go through a laundry list of really leadership behaviors.

If you're on the bottom there, you're not doing any of that. If you're on the top, you're probably doing that pretty well. You're pretty motivational, you know your team, you're inspirational, you're giving them feedback on a regular basis, you're recognizing them when it's appropriate, and you're doing that so that's the top of that.

This bottom left-hand quadrant, once again, this is not a good place to be. You're not getting results short-term and long-term, you're not demonstrating the right leadership behaviors to keep your business running. You need some immediate changes in both of these quadrants. You need to figure out how you're going to be more effective and run your business, and then you also have to go get some leadership training to make sure you're going to be more effective leading a team or leading your employees.

If you go to the top left-hand box here, you're a great leader. You're interacting with your team. They enjoy working with you. You give them probably too much positive recognition and not a whole bunch of critical feedback. But overall, you're doing well. If you do a leadership survey, they're going to tell you that you're doing really well in that, but you're not getting the results.

You're not out there everyday pushing the team. Maybe you're not measuring their performance the way you should be. You got to figure out, you know, we'd like to talk about KPIs, their key performance indicators. You may need to talk to your team and yourself about, what are the numbers I'm going to measure myself on?

Am I reducing accidents in my location? Am I hitting my cost of sales numbers for food and beverage or merchandise? Am I managing my labor hours the right way? Am I getting great guest scores or customer service scores? You have to figure out how to deliver that, but you're going to have to tweak your leadership behavior, but you need to be more intentful on what you're looking for.

The bottom right-hand quadrant, you are probably Attila the Hun. We will get the results, you will deliver the results. You can do this short-term, but eventually, people are going to leave your organization. They're not going to stick around. They're going to go work for somebody else who respects them.

Short-term, you can put pressure on people. But if you put pressure on people all the time and don't care about anything else, except results, you're going to fail as a leader. Especially in today's market,  people don't want to put up for that anymore.

My wife and I, Valerie and I have three 20-year-olds. They certainly wouldn't put up with being treated disrespectfully because they can go get 10 other jobs. Really, if you're in this box, you really have to think about, are you valuing your team? And get some leadership training.

Once again, that upper right-hand quadrant, that's where you want to be. You're delivering the right leadership behaviors. Maybe you're making mistakes sometimes, but you're trying to get better. You're trying to learn how to get better, lead better, and teach your employees. You're holding them accountable and in a very positive way. You're giving them feedback, you're recognizing them when it's appropriate, you're making them feel valuable and listened to and you're getting great results.

Over time, if you have a great leadership style, you will get sustainable results also without having to strike fear into people. That's where you want to be, but it doesn't happen overnight. That's where, overtime, you have to find the right employees who are going to be able to perform at a high level, but also the ones that you're going to be able to have a professional relationship with. Once again, if you can do both those things, you're going to have much more fun at work, get much better results, and get it in a way that people are really going to appreciate you.

Brendan: Mate, from your own experience, let's say that 26 years in Disney, have you ever thought about a trait in a leader that may help them be better at accountability than a leader who struggles with accountability?

Dan: I think something I've found over time is this idea of self-awareness. Being self-aware, knowing how you're being perceived by others, understanding your feelings, understanding what your hot buttons are, and being able to control how you respond to those things. Because when you're self-aware, first of all, you're more vulnerable because you've accepted your shortcomings. You know what they are, and you try to manage them the right way. You know what your strengths are, and you try to play to those.

When you're vulnerable, it's much easier to learn, get better, and improve. Because if you're not vulnerable, you won't take any feedback and you'll never change. That's one of the important keys to life, I think. You have to learn and keep changing, because you don't know everything. The people who are self-aware, they know they don't know everything. They're always looking for ways to make improvements along the way.

The leaders who say, look, this is how I've always done it and it's always worked, so I'm not looking to make any changes, those are the ones who are going to get in trouble, because it happens slowly, and all of a sudden, one day, they can't lead organizations. Or technology gets so complicated, they don't keep up with their technical skills, and soon, they're really struggling in those jobs.

I think that self-awareness piece opens up so many doors to self-improvement. That self-improvement, once you know what you need to improve upon, you can go work on it. It may be technical, it may be more of a soft skill. But for me, that leads the way. Because if you really ask yourself, am I good at holding people accountable?

If you're self-aware, you're going to know if you are. You're going to know maybe if you're too tough on people. You're certainly going to learn if you're too soft and you kind of shy away from those conversations.

Once you understand that and you can tell yourself the truth about that, then you're willing to go learn and get better. That's what we consider a growth mindset. You approach things you're not good at, and you try to get better at them. You're not afraid of failure. You're not afraid of people seeing that you're struggling with something, but you should go try to improve it anyway.

Here's the irony. As a leader, everyone knows what you're not good at. Every day, you're in the spotlight. They know what you handle well and what you don't handle well. Everyone knows it anyway, so why not take responsibility for it, go ahead and make improvements, and get better?

Brendan: Mate, you're one of those people also who, through your time at Disney, like you said, you had 19 roles. I think you started off as a car park attendant and moved yourself through to Vice President of the Magic Kingdom. There's a lot of learning that would have happened through that journey, and we still learn every day, hopefully. When did this leadership accountability matrix move from a learning thing to a real thing and that impact? You identified the impact of a matrix like this.

Dan: Yeah. I think I always understood how important this was. Growing up, this is kind of the style my parents had. They held me accountable, but they were very supportive and really pushed me, but gave me some tough love. I had such a great opportunity to grow up in a house like that, with a family like that. I started to recognize the importance of connecting with people on a relationship, human level, and still understand.

Sometimes that relationship is going to be something we have to do together to reach a goal, especially in sports. Playing sports when I was growing up, it taught me a lot about leadership and a lot about how to have those conversations with some of my teammates, even if they're my friends, to be able to give tough feedback on how they need to perform better, become more of a team player, or whatever that feedback was.

As I progressed in my career, where I started to really see it was as I moved up to some of the more senior levels. When I got to be a senior manager, eventually I became a general manager. Especially at the VP level, I realized that if I did not figure out how to do this, I was going to fail. I needed to reach out. I needed to make sure everyone clearly knew what they needed to do, because of the responsibilities.

I had too many things to do. I couldn't be on top of everything all the time. Leaders, really, one of the tough things they go through is at one point, they have to start letting go of things. There are things they just have to hire the right person and trust that that person is going to do their job. It doesn't mean they're not going to hold them accountable, but you can't know everything.

That's when I really started realizing I had to focus on getting a great team around me and then making sure that I was doing everything to support that team. When you get to sometimes hire higher levels, you realize more and more, it's not about you anymore. It's about the organization. It's about how you enable all the leaders on your team to get their jobs done. Because by default, if they do a great job, you get the credit. If they don't do their jobs, you are held accountable for that.

I think, slowly over time, that really hit me. I would let someone's performance slide, because they're always been a great performer. I would be slow to kind of jump to start giving them feedback, and that was never good. It never ended well.

When I said something was wrong, something was wrong. You just got to make sure you're willing to have those conversations early and often. Sometimes if you're off base, if you're getting the wrong signals, maybe you misread the situation, you'll get corrected. The person will say, you know, that's not an issue, but I can see why you thought it was, but we're fine, and you move forward.

Once again, you're not going to be perfect. You're going to make mistakes sometimes. But as long as you're having those conversations in a respectful way, your team will allow you to make those mistakes for the benefit of the organization.

Brendan: Dan, my personal view is you've done a fantastic job in unpacking accountability and expectations, and then referring to the model, and stuff like that. But is there anything on that side of things that you want me to unpack anymore or a question that you want to sort of throw in that you want to answer related to it before we start to close up?

Dan: Yeah. Maybe you mention, I've heard you before talk about your three buckets. Can you talk about that and how that kind of relates to accountability?

Brendan: Okay, awesome. Dan, I've heard you in some of your talks speak about the three buckets. How does that relate to accountability?

Dan: You always hear people, what are your goals? What are your goals in life? I can never answer that question. But as I got further into my career at Disney, I really started to think about it. I don't always know what my goals are, but I should know what my priorities are. You could argue they're the same, but at the end of the day, I really got it down and I call them my three buckets.

There are three things that I think about every single day that I hold myself accountable to. I always ask the audience, I say, what do you think the three most important things in my life are starting with the most important thing? Actually, almost every single time, unless they've heard me speak before, well, your family. Your family is the most important thing, your kids. I say, they're not the most important thing to me.

There's this gasp, it's like, who's this guy? I said, look, they're on my list, believe me. My first priority, taking care of myself first. The whole first part of my book is talking about leading self. You have to take care of yourself first.

You have to hold yourself accountable first to being healthy. You have to hold yourself accountable to getting enough sleep. You need to hold yourself accountable to being organized. All the things that you need to do for yourself, in my mind, have to come first. Because if you don't take care of yourself, first, you can't take care of your family, you can't be a great leader in your organization, and everything else is going to suffer.

You need to be selfish to make sure you take care of yourself, whether that's exercise, your diet. Your diet and your exercise reflect on your energy level. When you have a better energy level, you're more patient with your kids, you're more patient with your spouse, you're more patient in your organization. You can think more clearly, you handle stress better, you're more resilient.

There are so many reasons you should take care of yourself first, then friends and family come next. What am I doing to take care of my friends and family? Third is my career. What am I doing to take care of my career?

I have, I call it my little virtual scorecard that I use every day, to rate how I perform today, how did I do today? On any given day, if I got out for a morning run, I'd check the box. You took care of yourself today. Good job. Did you call your mom? When I got into an argument with my wife, was I open-minded and was I able to take the feedback the right way?

One of my kids texted me, because they needed something so I returned the call really quickly. Am I checking in with my family? We know what those responsibilities look like. They're not just general, they're very specific.

What I learned about marriage is not about romance, it's about, did you take out the trash? Did you empty the dishwasher? Pulling your weight. I think we all get feedback all the time on how we're doing in our jobs. We have scorecards at work. We get feedback from our customers. There's no lack of feedback there. That's what I do.

Every day, I look at myself. Did I take care of myself today? What do I do for my family and what do I do for my career? It's usually one out of every three day. If I can get two out of three day, that's a great day. Three out of three hardly ever happens, because it's hard to deliver on all these responsibilities.

I think about juggling. You're juggling these balls and you can't let one hit the ground. Just make sure you're juggling one ball. During Christmas at Disney, I hardly saw my family. I was working crazy hours, because that's what it's like at Disney. I did a terrible job as a father and as a spouse during Christmas. But then other times of the year, I had to make sure I was doing that well, because I had to fill in that gap.

I would just ask everyone out there, and they may not be three, they may be two, they may be five, but what are the priorities in your life? What are the behaviors or the actions you're going to take to make sure you're delivering on those things? And then most importantly, are you going to hold yourself accountable to make sure you're doing those things? That accountability happens every single day.

I got up yesterday morning and I looked around, I'm like, I can have some coffee, do some emails, and enjoy the morning or I can have some coffee and go for my run, and I failed. I'm like, I need to get some work done. I really didn't, but I really didn't feel like running. I got a zero yesterday.

Hopefully, today, I'm going to be a little more disciplined. Once again, you can let yourself fail, but as long as you know what you're trying to achieve, I think you'll be in a much better position to reach your goals.

Brendan: Mate, given you're traveling in France at the moment, it's probably around 04:00 AM, maybe a little bit after, what's your report card look like for today?

Dan: Yeah, the report card for today. I'm going to get a whole bunch of work done today. I don't have anything on my schedule for the rest of the day, so I think I'm going to be pretty productive when it comes to getting ahead on some of the work I have to get done.

My wife has told me she wants to do a hike this afternoon, so I think I'm in for that because she wants to do that. I think I'm going to do pretty well in that category today. If this interview went well and we get some good feedback, maybe that'll be a three out of three day. Maybe one of those events that don't happen often, they're going to come. We'll see.

Brendan: I think you've done fantastically well, mate. I'm more worried about your sleep. Sleep is so important to looking after yourself. You might get maybe a half mark.

Dan: There you go. I may get a little negative point today in my sleep.

Brendan: Possibly, mate, but I'm sure you'll catch up. A hike will be good. Mate, can you share, to wrap this up, who or what has had the greatest impact on your own leadership journey?

Dan: I think one of the obvious answers, well, maybe not obvious, but like I said, I was very lucky to grow up in a very healthy family environment. As I get older, I realize not everyone has had that benefit. My parents have been married for over 50 years. I'd love to tell you I have some therapy to do because of my relationship with my mom or my dad. But as far as I know, I don't have any hang ups. Everything's good.

They've been an incredible influence on me, guiding me, not telling me where to go, but giving me feedback and giving me consequences, and explaining the consequences of my decisions, which has been great. I think the second person is my wife, Valerie.

My mom remembers when we first started dating. We've been married 29 years and we first started dating. I'd never dated anyone for more than a few months. All of a sudden I was moving to France to open Disneyland Paris and there was this lady, Valerie, I was talking about. My mom's like, oh, this is different.

She asked me, she goes, what is it about her? You've never had a long-term relationship with anyone. What is it about Valerie? I said, she makes things happen. That's what I loved about her.

She was action-oriented. She made stuff happen. She took initiative and would say, hey, we're going here tomorrow, we're doing this, and I really enjoyed that. It got me accountable to get things more done in life. Clearly, they've been a huge influence on me.

I think the other thing, and this is I think everyone can take away, I've had hundreds of other people in my life that had a huge influence on me. Every time I meet someone, I look for, okay, what are the good things about this person? What can I learn, what can I take away, take a little piece of them and put it myself, and maybe emulate what they do, emulate how they behave, emulate how they think?

I've had bosses, employees throughout my whole career that have been role models for me, because everyone is great at something. Once again, if you can be an observer and take those things away, you can let a lot of people impact who you are as a person. That helps you change also as you move through your life.

Brendan: Dan, thank you today for unpacking this very important leadership skill of accountability, relating it to your own experiences and stories, and sharing the leadership accountability matrix from the Disney organization as well. I really appreciate that. Also, a massive thank you to you and Valerie, your wife, who also worked in Disney for a long time, for bringing so much magic to so many people's lives, adults, children alike, and bringing magic to our kingdom. Mate, thanks very much for being a fantastic guest on The Culture of Things podcast.

Dan: Thanks, Brendan. I appreciate it.

Brendan: Accountability starts with being clear on your expectations. Without this, it’s impossible to follow through on accountability. How can you hold anyone accountable to a behavior or task if they weren’t clear on what was expected?

Accountability is one of the most critical skills you can develop as a leader. And to get good at it, you have to practice continuously. Like everything in leadership, it starts with you. What daily actions are you keeping yourself accountable to? 

These were my 3 key takeaways from my conversation with Dan. 

My first key takeaway, leaders choose accountability over popularity. Leadership isn’t a popularity contest. It’s about helping your team achieve results. You need to be firm about your expectations and fair in the way you treat people. Choosing accountability over popularity is true leadership.

My second key takeaway, leaders do Gemba walks. Gemba is a Japanese term meaning “the real place.” Leaders will take time every day to go and see the real workplace, ask questions, build relationships, and find opportunities for improvement. Leaders know the value of going to the Gemba.

My third key takeaway, leaders choose commitment over compliance. Compliance will get results, but it’s fear of leadership. If you explain why something’s important, build relationships, and ask questions to seek input, you’ll get commitment. This will achieve long-term results and is why true leaders choose commitment over compliance.

In summary, my three key takeaways were: leaders choose accountability over popularity, leaders do Gemba walks, leaders choose commitment over compliance.

What were your key takeaways from the interview? Let me know at thecultureofthings.com, on YouTube or via our socials.

Thanks for joining me. Remember, the best outcome is on the other side of a genuine conversation.

Outtro (music): Thank you for listening to The Culture of Things podcast with Brendan Rogers. Please visit thecultureofleadership.com to access the show notes. If you love The Culture of Things podcast, please subscribe, rate and give a review on Apple podcasts and remember a healthy culture is your competitive advantage.