simplerich

How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way by Roger Conners and Tom Smith is my most recent non-kindle read book. I say that because this is a prime example of a book that’s better on paper than on a kindle because I was constantly going back to previous pages, underlining, circling, and generally marking up the book. While I’m sure I’ll get used to those things on a kindle, this book’s scars from my reading and writing in it are proof enough that print isn’t dead!

Full Disclosure: I didn’t pay for the copy I’m reviewing here. I was sent an advance copy to review. I don’t believe that impacted my review at all, but thought it would only be honest to mention it to those of you who read me. OK. Disclosure over, on with the review.

As I read the book I had a lot of time in MANY of the chapters when I was thinking to myself, “This is exactly what THAT boss of mine did wrong!” As the evidence started piling up I started worrying that if my employees were to read the book they’d say the exact same thing. I know I’ve found Dilbert comics on their peg-boards that I thought were funny… even after I realized they had to mean I was the pointy-haired boss. I will be getting a copy for managers of mine that I think would read it and take it to heart. I don’t think all of them would… they’re not all the avid reader that I am.

The start of How Did That Happen?, where it talks about the title is a real eye-opener and a game changer for the way people think. If I had to sum up the impact of the book in one line it would be way towards the front of the book where it suggests instead of looking at a problem or break-down of some sort and saying “How did that happen” we should ask “How did I let that happen?” Those two words are so powerful. It addresses where I so often see a breakdown in communication. That sort of personal accountability is, I believe, the hallmark of a good manager. If I find someone who does that automatically instead of blaming their employees, the weather, or the economy I’m thrilled and work hard to get out of their way and help them to be great.

One of the breakdowns that hit home the closest was when a manager will give vague expectations, unclear boundaries of responsibility and authority, and accountability and then be surprised later when expectations aren’t met. Vague goals of “Make more money.” Would certainly fall into that category. Sure… it’s an easy one. But should we make more money or make more profit? I can make more money by marking things down steeply, but that will decrease our profit. I can make more money in the short term by cutting back on merchandise in a store so I’m not spending any more. Without giving clear, concise, and measurable outlines of my expectations my employees will find it hard to not disappoint me. I will be setting them up to fail over and over again by my own carelessness.

I’m one who typically scoffs at acronyms, as annoying mnemonics along the lines of Every Good Boy Does Fine for the piano. But Framing an expectation using the acronym given in How Did That Happen looks about fool proof, even for ingenious fools.

Expectations should be Framable, Obtainable, Repeatable, and Measurable.

Framable as in the expectations fit within the framework, context, business environment and culture of the business.
Obtainable, this one’s obvious and one I’ve been good at following. I once told a new supervisor they should ask for things a little sooner, faster, better than the employees volunteered to do as he was the leader, and should pull them forward, not let them wander wherever they wanted at their own pace, but I cautioned against giving impossible goals that nobody could finish in that time as it set them up to fail. He wanted to help them to exceed their expectations, not to teach them to expect to fail.
Repeatable was the one I had the most trouble “getting” as I read the book. It finally clicked when I quit thinking as in “do it over again” and thought of it as “communicated over again to other people who are working on the project. If the goal or expectation is so numinous and vague that only someone with a degree in macro-economics can get what is being talked about it’s going to be hard to get everybody on board with working towards that goal. Making sure that the goal is something that can be conveyed to everybody involved easily, and in a way they understand is important. It will be hard for them to get invested in a goal they don’t “get.” “We need to increase mom and pop profit store to store year over year by 5 percent” is not meaningful to a lot of front-liners who haven’t a clue what that means but they KNOW that they don’t work for their parents.
Measurable was and is my favorite part as my biggest “Ah Ha!” moment for me. Having a measurable goal makes it so much easier to know where on the progress bar we are towards achieving the expectations. Having delegated parts of a job that is measurable into other measurable parts it makes it easier for me as a manager to find where my bottle neck is and address that with further training, or reassessment of  how even I was at delegating the jobs.

I hate to sound like this was a new concept to me, it wasn’t. But in this context it was put in a way that something inside clicked that I just liked. I’m not a complete convert to acronyms yet, but I don’t hate this one.

Overall, How Did That Happen? is about accountability, it’s right in the sub-title, and it talks about accountability in way that makes sense and is applicable with real world examples. This brings up one of my stylistic complaints about the book. At the outset of How Did That Happen? the authors point out that they’re going to change the names of people and businesses to protect their identities and they’re going to put their names in quotes whenever the name is changed. Here’s the thing… those quotes get really repetitious and distracting really fast. I get it. In examples about the real world people names and company names are changed. Honestly, you’d be crazy not to for liability reasons. I think most readers assume that’s going to happen. Attributions, quotes, advice and suggestions coming from someone, those are attributed to real people. We understand that. It’s the reason I use names like “Mongo” and “Roy” in my blog. I have no employees by either name. They’re safe names to use, as are “Mega-corp,” and referencing products as “widgets.” We don’t need to put quotes around everything that is changed. Seriously, I got it, and by the end of the book I was seeing sly wink and air-quotes every time I came across it. It really took me out of the book. This is totally a stylistic quibble. The content was really good. I just wish they’d dispensed with the quotes around altered names.

There’s a diagram three-quarters of the way through the book that talks about people who are above the line and below the line with personal accountability. The above the line employee will see a problem, own it, solve it, and do it. That’s obviously the desired approach. The below the line people are depicted with someone with a lot of other options going through their head as they encounter a problem, choices like: Wait and See, not my job, cover your butt, and finger pointing to name a few.

This huge difference in above and below the line employees was highlighted for me personally when I went to work one day recently and found a note in my fax machine from Mongo, a relatively new employee who used to work for a competitor with a very different culture: “Rich, A customer bought a widget and when he came back later he said the box had been empty. I tried to call Manager and Assistant Manager but neither of them answered their phones so I told him I couldn’t help him. He got hostile so I called the police and had him removed.”

I was floored. The police had been called to remove a customer who was upset because we’d done something wrong and Mongo really thought this was a good answer. The cost of the widget in question was around 8 dollars. Obviously there’s room for improvement in this one. I still don’t know what I’m going to do in this situation to fix it. I don’t know if it CAN be fixed. I haven’t got the customer’s name and don’t know how to reach them but I really really want to. There isn’t enough time today for me to apologize for what went wrong there if I can ever find that customer again. But as soon as I read the note in my fax machine the graphic for below the line accountability came to mind. (As an aside the manager was on vacation and the assistant manager called minutes later after leaving doctor’s office, but it was too late it’d already happened. It was the perfect storm of bad timing.)

The take-home from How Did That Happen? is that accountability isn’t a bad word. It’s not the stick part of carrot and stick. Accountability is akin to ownership. I won’t equate it with ownership, because it’s bigger than that. It’s an empowering tool as much as it is a tool that makes us responsible. Accountability as it came across in How Did That Happen? was the perfect marriage of responsibility, authority and drive. I know — that’s a three way marriage, but just go with it would you? Please?

Some management/business books are thin, have fun drawings in them, clever titles, and have the feeling of a fad diet to them. This book is not that kind of reading. It’s not diet, it’s a lifestyle change. I say that in a good way. Those purple cows out there moving fred’s cheese factor are all great books I’m sure, but they all left me feeling a little hollow. Something like Angel Food cake. Yeah, I know I ate something, but it’s later and I can’t remember what it was I ate and I’m hungry again. How Did That Happen? isn’t a beach book and it’s not a read in a day and walk away book.

There was a point in How Did That Happen? where they said feedback was a habit that people quickly fell out of or started with good intentions but didn’t keep up with and I smiled to myself and thought immediately of Rosa Say’s Daily Five. Anybody who is a practitioner of that will take to the feedback discussions in here like a duck to water and will also smile at the idea that they wouldn’t give feedback.

I was pleasantly surprised by How Did That Happen? by Roger Connors and Tom Smith. I’d never heard of them or their other books before now and I find I’m going to have to go back and read The Oz Principle and the only real decision there is whether I’ll read it in kindle or paper edition. If the marking I did in this one is any indication I should get the paper edition. It might be a good time to learn to mark-up a kindle edition of a book though. (I just checked and The Oz Principle is available on the kindle. I’m going to get it that way.)

The Book Review: How Did That Happen by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.