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Transcript 

Speaker 1 0:05
Well welcome everybody. And we're glad to have you here today. My name is Bill Stark and I'm one of the cofounders of leader. Gov. based here in Atlanta, Georgia and my partner, Tim Fenbert. And I love investing in local government leaders all around the country is just our joy and our pleasure and our honor to come alongside city, staff and council people and, and county, staff and elected officials in counties across the United States. We work with Clark County out in Las Vegas, Brownsville, Texas, Atlanta, Georgia, Ashland, Ohio, all sorts of cities and counties around the country, and Reiko County in Virginia, Kansas City. So we love serving local governments all around the country. This podcast that we're doing today is part of a series of podcasts that we've been doing for a couple of years. We have a great topic today, which is about accountability. And I want to introduce our guest to you today. Benj Miller- Benj is the founder and CEO of an organization called system and soul. I'm going to get him to explain the name of his organization first, because I think that's kind of a cool name, system and soul. But authenticity, breaking the rules, and creating clarity. These these three ideas are kind of at the core of binges, life and his work, and we're just so glad to have you. On with us today. Binge Welcome. How you doing today?

Speaker 2 1:38
I'm wonderful. And you're not gonna believe this, but I was born in Ashland, Ohio.

Unknown Speaker 1:42
Get out? True story. I don't know why I said that. But Ashlyn is one of our customers.

Unknown Speaker 1:50
There you go. Shout out to Ashland. That's,

Speaker 1 1:53
that's, that's funny. Well, I did want to tell folks a little bit more about your, your, your group and what you do. Binge has founded about 10 Different companies, in his 20 years as an entrepreneur really driven as a deep desire to help small businesses, you know, make make the greatest impact possible in the communities you know, that they serve. And so now, Ben has really dedicated his time and his life to helping other business owners, what we call catalyze growth, or operationalize growth. Through this organization, system and soul, this, there's a framework around this idea of system and soul, and really help organizations help leaders find game changing breakthroughs in the process. And I like that it's all about action. It's about being intentional. And a lot of the folks listening to this podcast, really, you know, I think are drawn to those kinds of ideas banje as an advocate for all the businesses running system, and so he's published a book bench has a book called Renegades breaking rules and finding freedom. And so if you want to get on Amazon and have a book club in your city or county, go buy this book, Renegades break rules find freedom. But Benj does live in the Atlanta area, wife of 24 years and amazing kids. So one last thing, I'll say this at the end of the podcast today, if you want to sign up for his daily leadership email, you can you can, you can find that at a website called the th e v 260 one.com. The number is 261 to 260 one.com. I really encourage you all to do that. I get Benj's email every day, it's like you can read the thing in 35 seconds. And it's just packed with like, you know, just this, these nuggets of wisdom that are just really didn't meant a lot to me, Ben, I really appreciate you being a part of our podcast today. Thanks,

Speaker 2 3:50
I made that email distribution list mainly for myself, there were so many good things that I didn't want to forget. And I wanted to remember and remind myself because I'm not the smartest guy. So I don't always get it the first time. And so that it was helpful for me, the 261 comes from the fact that we have 261 business days. And so just taking all these kinds of ideas, big questions, reminders, tips, and putting them on a calendar and sending them out to remind myself and inviting some other people into the process as well.

Speaker 1 4:23
Yeah, yeah, that's very cool. I would encourage everybody to do and you know, I get a lot of devotionals and daily emails myself and the ones that I can read in 30 seconds or a minute. It's like, oh, yeah, I can handle that. I can do that. Yeah. I don't know. Hey, man, we're talking about this topic of accountability today. And I know this is like core to, to what you do, and it's so important, and yet so often, you know, we just don't quite get there in terms of holding ourselves accountable the people around us and So this topic of accountability is just so critical to success, whether it's in the private sector or in cities and counties, and I just wanted to kind of I guess, to start out Benji, if you could just kind of share your overall perspective on this topic, and and what happens when teams avoid accountability. What have you seen? What have you experienced in this area? Yeah.

Speaker 2 5:21
It's funny to me, we're having this conversation for two reasons. One, when you first asked me to talk about this, I'm like, oh, that's like, the thing I struggle with not the thing I'm great at. But in struggling through it, you learn a lot more about it. So we can definitely go there. The other thing is, ironically, out of the blue, my phone rang twice this morning, two different CEOs struggling where their culture has lost any culture of accountability and having those conversations. So it's very fresh in my mind right now. So how do I think about it? I think that there's two things that we we miss when we talk about accountability. The first thing is, we've got to tie it to something bigger than performance, we've got to tie it back to why it matters. Why does it matter for this organization? If I'm your manager, why does it Why are you know what you're doing matter for this team for me for supporting the organization. So there's a there's a need there, there's a value you're creating, by hitting these things that we're talking about being accountable to there's, we, we often when we build out org charts for organizations, we we force ourselves to put a mission for every seat, because of this seat doesn't exist than the mission for the seat doesn't happen. So what is the mission, and so often, myself included, we, we take the time to write that mission, but we forget to go back to it over and over and over and say, you know, well, if this if this seat is failing, if if the tasks roles, metrics, and the seat are failing, that's hurting the mission of the seat, which is hurting the mission of the organization. So tying it back to this purpose, and this idea of something greater and how your contribution affects the performance of the overall organization. If we can't tell that story, then we're not setting up anybody for success. The second thing is my whole mentality for accountability is kind of the same as my mentality for how do we lead people? How do we manage people's probably a better, we're right in the gray space between late lead and manage, but we use the acronym car we want, we want people to drive their car, and car stands for clarity, autonomy, and results. And I think the place where we most often go wrong, myself included, learn this the hard way, is in that clarity. It's my job as the leader, my job is the manager to give the person clarity on not just what they're accountable to or accountable for, but what resources do they have? What decision making ability do they have? What budget do they have? And once they have the clarity on all those things, then they have autonomy, but within the autonomy, you then pass on the the responsibility that if there's something you're not sure, and you're not clear on, you've got to come ask me. Because what happens in between clarity and autonomy for most people, is what we call clarity, guilt. And I didn't quite give you everything you need. And you didn't quite know and you didn't even know to come ask what you didn't know. And so how can I really hold you accountable to the results? If I didn't do my job to set you up for success? Oh, yeah, most of the time, when we're struggling with accountability, most of the most of it, we can point back to the leader or manager. And then and then we get to the results part. And if we're clear on what's expected up front, and what they have to work with in between, then we can have clear conversations about the results. And this is where we've got to infuse the humanity into it. Right it. But but there's a conversation and let's have a conversation based in reality. We were we said the target was 10 Where it's seven, Bill, Bill, what happened? Why why do you think that is? Or you know, something going on in your personal life? Did we not give you the resources? You know, what was is there something happened in the market, we need to know your team that we need to know let's work on it together, that first conversation is going to be met with all the love and care and curiosity in the world go in with curiosity. But man if we're having this conversation two or three times, now we're in the next question of leadership. What happens in this organization if you fall below your expectations? And most organizations don't have clarity around that. So we're constantly tiptoeing Can I, you know, he's a high performer in this area, but he struggles in this area. I don't want to upset him. We you know, everybody's walking on tiptoes instead of just having an adult conversation. Bill I'm paying you 100% of your paycheck, I'm getting 80% of the expectation that we both agreed to. Do you want it? Is that better for you? Do you want me to lower the expectation we can let her lower comp? You know, what, what, what would work for you? Or is this not the place? Because we really need this to be a 10? And just have those conversations because culture is what we tolerate at the edges. And if we're in little corners of the organization, if we're tolerating people underperforming our expectation, we're, we're permissioning, the entire organization to be average. Yeah,

Speaker 1 10:35
yeah. Why do we not hold people accountable? Is that the uncomfortableness of that hard conversation? Is it I don't want to push them away? I don't want to say something stupid. What? Any thoughts about sort of psychologically? I mean, we know there's a gap. Yeah. And we weren't clear. We weren't clear. But why don't we have to? Let's go do that.

Speaker 2 10:56
Yeah, I think it's one of three things or some combination. In most cases, it's, it's, I know, I didn't do my job as a leader setting them up for what they needed to set the, the clarity of those expectations. And then just it's uncomfortable conversations, right, like, some people are good at them. You know, if you're a D on the disc, if you're an E on the eighth on the Enneagram. You know, if you're a type A personality, you have no problem having those, potentially making some people frustrated in between. But there's a lot of other people that are great people that are in leadership, and they're not, they're just not naturally wired to have those conversations. So it's entering the danger of those conversations. But when you do that, you're you're it is actually the kindest thing that we can do. Because we're being clear on the expectations, we're being clear that they're underperforming. The last thing you want to do is have to let somebody go, and you haven't given them the clarity along the way of where they were falling short, and what you needed out of them. Adam Grant, who's one of my favorites, he has done a bunch of research on how to have these hard conversations. And I'm gonna butcher this just a little bit, but the principles there, he said, the magic words in these conversations are, I expect a lot about a lot out of you. But it's because you're capable. Hmm. So you're, you're inviting people into a challenge. Instead of a slap on the wrist like, Bill, you've got this, I believe you've got this, I've got your back, you tell me what you need. But I need you to step into this because the organization really needs this. I need this from you. Can you? Are we in this together? Right? So that becomes a lot less scary of a conversation. If we go in with curiosity, and we lead with humanity. It doesn't have to be adversarial. Now, on the other side, what we're afraid of is some people are defensive. And that's a reflection of them and their EQ and their identity and a bunch of other things that we can work on over a long period of time. But ultimately, they're in control of. So it's our job. It's our job to lead the way we should lead regardless of who's on the other side of the table.

Speaker 1 13:01
Yeah, yeah. So so we have these conversations. Hey, Sam, you know, we talked about x and you delivered why? What's going on? That's it. I mean, it could be as simple as that. Right? It doesn't have to be demeaning. It doesn't have to be demoralizing. It doesn't have to be scary. Yeah. Just what's what's going on? What happened? Was I not clear as a leader did I not give you, you know, clarity. And

Speaker 2 13:27
you could learn something about the organization. This, you know, one of my calls that I mentioned this morning, it was like, these proposals were supposed to be done. And there's a lot of revenue tied to them. Where are they? Why aren't they to the client? Yeah, well, compliance has had them for two weeks. Oh, and that's outside your control. And that actually reports somebody else. And now we have an organizational problem, I can go solve that. I can go work on that as your visit Boston leader. So you never know what you're going to uncover. If I went in there and go, you know, you got seven out of 10 proposals out that's not good enough. You've got to do better you got to get out of here. Well, they leave demoralized because they actually have 12. But they couldn't get out of the door because of the bureaucracy or the red tape or whatever. Yeah,

Speaker 1 14:13
yeah. I like this acronym you came up with you meant you mentioned it just a moment ago car. Yeah, clarity. A is for autonomy. R is for results. So getting crystal clear on what you expect from the employee, what the project is, what the parameters are, what the what the what the outcome is, what the goal is, and then giving them giving them the autonomy or I guess empowerment, right to go do it. Like you've given them the rules and guidelines and everything resources. And then once those two things are, but you said something interesting in there, ensuring that they know that they can come back to you and ask a question if they're unclear. Could you elaborate on that just a little bit setting that up? Yeah.

Speaker 2 14:55
It's not we never know what they're wondering what they're questioning. We don't know what but baggage they're bringing in from a past environment or workplace, or like, there was a weird expectation that something happened some way. So I can't expect myself to be perfect. I want to I want to do everything I possibly can to set them up with clarity. But on the other side of that conversation, hey, you're gonna have questions, you're gonna run into everything. I need you to have crystal clarity. So anything you're confused on, you come back and ask me.

Speaker 1 15:24
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. It opens up the door, it doesn't mean you're stupid, doesn't mean you're incapable. It means that we, you know, we're all going to have gaps, and you're, you're welcome to come back and get clarity. And that kind of passes of responsibility on to them, they have a role to play, right? They write, they need to raise their hand if they're uninformed, or not sure. But I like the word autonomy, we use the word empowerment, I like autonomy, because it's, it's like an autonomous vehicle, you know, it's got all the parameters, it's got all the tools, and it can operate on its own, you know, but you're basically empowering them once they're clear, to go do it, and you're not gonna micromanage. I mean, I can look over their shoulder. But at the end of the day, if they fall behind, we have to have those conversations of hey, what's going on? We talked about this where you're not clear with I'm not clear. And those are uncomfortable, because you're right, once we got the first two that, then we can ensure we can get the results we want. You know, most likely,

Speaker 2 16:27
yeah, I had a friend who would say, if I wanted a pet, I would have hired a dog. Right? So in the same way, when we talk about empowering people to drive their car, I don't want to get in the car and drive you around. I didn't hire you to, you know, hold your hand to do the job. I hired you. Because you're probably better at the job than I am. So I have to, you know, to use your word I have to empower you to drive your car.

Speaker 1 16:51
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about holding ourselves accountable? Have you, you know, gets kind of personal then. Right? So we've been talking about me and the employee, I'm the manager, you're the employee. But what about me personally, you know, are there other habits? Or are there questions I need to be asking myself? Should I be asking my team? If they feel like I'm being accountable to them? Is that what does that look like?

Speaker 2 17:14
Yeah. So I think you're right, that there's questions. And I think it starts in the same place. It's, it's the why, why, you know, I want to lose five pounds, well, everybody wants to lose five pounds. But what you want more is to eat that pizza. So you haven't lost the five pounds. So what you want has to be greater than the thing that you're sacrificing? You know, I am constantly probably in that five pounds heavier than where I want to be right? Well, it's amazing when I've got a couples trip to the beach, and I'm going to show up with my friends how motivated I am to lose those five pounds, right? I can work harder, I can do the habits I want to so the habits aren't enough. Discipline and willpower are exhausting. But if you have a mission that's tied to something bigger, even if it's silly, because hey, I'm going to show up with that guy at the beach. And I want to look better than him. Like, that's silly. But that's some great motivation, right? And so in the same way, you know, when when I'm not hitting my sales goal, it's like it's not about the sales goal. It's, am I am I okay, living off the commission that I'm making now. All I really wanted. I was really hoping for more income this year. Okay, well, why? Well, if I don't do that, then we can't take that trip for my family. Okay, now I'm fired up, let's get to work and get that trip that family? Does that make sense? You've got to tie in something bigger?

Speaker 1 18:42
Yeah, yeah. You know, we did a podcast recently. And it was on the topic of mission and, and purpose of this kind of thing. And the CEO said that, he asks every employee to write down how their job helps complete the mission of the organization. That's

Unknown Speaker 19:03
a

Speaker 1 19:04
thought, oh, my gosh, this is genius. And they have it taped on their wall, and they have it on their computer. So it reminds them that my performance affects the organization. And I feel sometimes so removed from the purpose of the organization because I'm down three or four levels. And so I really, I mean, that was the first thing that you said tying it to was tying it to the mission. I think that's really, but we don't hear that talked about a lot that that's kind of a tough nut to crack. And well,

Speaker 2 19:32
it's just so easy to forget, because we're going to go back to our desk back to our emails back to our to do list in our project management systems in our CRMs. And, you know, we're distracted and we have 45 minutes so it's hard you that's where that like almost taking a minute to center yourself. Maybe it's your drive to work. Maybe it's your first five minutes, but I know the minute I get in front of my computer, I'm in go mode, so I've got to find a way to remember what it's about. Before I get there,

Speaker 1 20:01
yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's good. This has been great, great, great conversation about this idea of accountability. And I know you've seen it. I've seen it a lot when it's missing. When it's not there. Everything gets sloppy, everything gets up hazard. Goals are not met, timeframes start to slip. Morale starts, there's no clarity, there's no excitement, there's no movement. And it just, it's just a bummer. I mean, have you seen organizations like that, that kind of have ultimately live in this culture of lack of accountability?

Speaker 2 20:37
Yeah, absolutely. And it's miserable. And what happens is, is that, over time, you're going to lose your top performers. Because they're going to wear themselves out pulling the weight of the organization and picking it up for other people. And top performers want to play with other top performers, right? They love going to the All Star game. So creating that that sense of, again, one of the conversations I had this morning, it's like, do we want our organization to be average? Or do we want to be exceptional, because if we want to be exceptional, then we have to do exceptional things, we have to do exceptional work. And that's an that's an all skate, like, everybody's got to bring their game to the game. And I think people generally want to be in an environment that's calling them up to be more to do more, to realize what they're capable of what their potential is. And when we talk about developing people, like that's it, like developing them to their greatest potential, their greatest character, their greatest identity, all of those things are the ways that we can use our business to create a better place. Yeah,

Speaker 1 21:44
well, I think that's a great, that is a great way to end the conversation. Do we want to be exceptional? Or do we want to be, you know, average, and if we want to be exceptional, we've got to do exceptional things, we got to look at things and reinforce certain things. Accountability is one of them. And I'm hopeful that this conversation today, you know, as brought maybe a little clarity or insight or just encouragement, you know, to the leaders listening, and so thank you binge for being with us here for a few minutes today. My pleasure. Yeah, yeah, just want to remind everybody one more time before we wrap clothes up. Check out Benj's book. It's called Renegades break rules, find freedom. And it's a leadership book. And it's going to help you sort of grapple with all of these issues we've been talking about today. So I would encourage you to pick that up. If you want to do a book club and your city or county, buy 10 of them and have a book club, signing up for his daily leadership. Email is the 261 dot com the 261.com. And you can sign up and I really appreciate you coming on today and spending some time and you know, helping us just bring a little more color and a little more of perspective to this important topic of accountability. Appreciate it,

Unknown Speaker 23:06
my honor.

Speaker 1 23:08
Yeah, thank you so much for listening and being on the podcast today. If you have any topics you want us to cover, just let us know. We'd love to respond to what some of the needs are out in the marketplace and we hope you have a great day. God bless and take care. Thank you